This is is a tutorial for Adobe Illustrator, requested by fellow troll blogger Turtles.  As a failed attempt to make a minimalist travel poster, I found myself creating a new assignment as a way to test the waters with a new program.  I haven’t even begun to realize the potential of illustrator, but I believe this is a start.

The folder

1. Illustrator is an orange little folder, akin to the blue folder for Photoshop.

Adobe Illustrator is a vector editing software.  Images are made up of points lines and polygons rather than equal sized individual cells holding one piece of information.  The advantage of vector is you can upload drawings and digitize them in smooth, crisp ways.  There is a lot of potential in illustrator for creative design.

2.  Once upon you will see an interface very similar to Photoshop or other editing programs.  Go to File -> Open and throw in any image you want.  I’m going to use the featured image on the design assignment.

Illustrator interface

3.  Take a minute to look around a familiarize yourself with the interface.  On the left are most of the standard image editing tools.  On the right is an updated layering tool that let’s you look at swatches of colors, place layers in specialize ways, etc.  I highly suggest going to Edit -> Keyboard shortcuts to see what tools are available that might not be in the primary toolbar.

4. Now the most critical thing you will notice is you can’t edit the image.  All you can do is move it around.  The interesting thing about canvas is the image is a separate layer from the canvas behind it, and so anything you do at this time is to the blank canvas.  So how do you edit?

If you click the image with the selector, you will see the most important feature: Live Trace.

The Magic Key

Live trace is this wonderful feature that let’s you trace a raster image into points, lines and polygons in a number of formats.  If you click the dropdown arrow you will see some of the features.  Try a few, and hit back after you’ve used one to revert to the original and try again.

Here are some examples:

Standard live trace output

Hand drawn sketch option

Grayscale

There are a lot of options.  Some crazy and bizarre like hand drawn sketch.  Other’s like Grayscale are useful because they break the image into a few easily identifiable colors and preserve the majority of the image.  So how do I go about coloring the image?

To start, you must now hit the Live Paint button at the top before you can start editing the image.

Must click before painting

Now that you have clicked live paint you can go anywhere you want with the image.

5.  Clicking Live Paint will turn your image into something like this:

Image turned into polygons

Now if you hit the key “K” on your keyboard, the paint bucket will come up as the tool you are using.  As you drag the paint bucket over your image, the polygon you are hovering over will become outlined in red.  If you click it, the polygon will be filled in with the color you are using.

6.  Here is the most important and useful bit of information here that makes this process lightning fast.  As I found out after I individually dropped my paint bucket into each polygon, I learned that you can fill every polygon of that color in the image with two clicks.

To do this, hold your paint bucket over an polygon and double click it.  The result will be every polygon filling with that same color.

Double clicking the hands turned Jim Groom into a troll

7.  In this manner, I can revamp the whole image in less than a minute.  So by picking random colors out of the swatches on the right, I made this image in 30 seconds:

A fast touchup

8.  Now I’m not very happy with the image.  I don’t like the colors  I want something fresh.  Something more kulerful.  Okay, okay.  So go to Kuler.  And now you will have a bunch of swatches you can download.

Unfortunately, the only drawback is you will have to register.  But once registered, Kuler can guide you in having a great color scheme for any sort of project and the swatches can be used in GIMP, Photoshop, or any other photo editing program.

9.  So you pick a swatch.  I chose Ping Pong and downloaded onto my desktop

A cute swatch

To use the swatch go back into Illustrator and look in the top left for a ? mark or the button next to Live Paint Group and click it:

Clicking the ? mark brought down this window

Next, click the double folders in the bottom left of the window to bring up:

Click the Other Library option at the bottom

From there you can navigate to your swatch and a window will put up with your swatches which you can click and use after pressing K to bring up your paint bucket.

Ping Pong swatch

10.  Part of the fun of this assignment is once you get the process down you can experiment with many different things from colors to images to live trace sketching.  There’s a great deal of potential dependent on so many factors.  The ease of it gives you access to do so much.

My only question is if anyone knows a way to smooth the polygons out once finished.  Anyways, here’s some crazy examples (looking good isn’t always the goal)

An Unholy Creation

Teal troubles

Decay

High Fidelity Struggles

Anyways. That’s all.  Farewell.

Update: I’ve quickly found I’m not alone.  For more, look at this tutorial by Mbranson at CUNY on taking an image out of photoshop and actually manipulating the live trace tool to create a desirable trace output.