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Live Paint & Image Trace

Lesson 10 from: Adobe Illustrator CC: The Complete Guide

Jason Hoppe

Live Paint & Image Trace

Lesson 10 from: Adobe Illustrator CC: The Complete Guide

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

10. Live Paint & Image Trace

Why reinvent the wheel when you can be resourceful? Some projects may require the use of existing images or photos; learn how to import and edit them in Illustrator with live paint and image trace.
Next Lesson: Symbols & Patterns

Lesson Info

Live Paint & Image Trace

Welcome back, folks. Now, for our next fun lesson. Live Paint and Image Trace and working with images. It may not seem like it all goes together, but there's actually some really cool things about using Live Paint and being able to take images that you've sketched, photographs you've taken, cleaned up and brought into Illustrator, and then being able to color. Now, everything that we've done up until this point has been building shapes and we haven't really gotten into color yet, we're saving that for later because it's a good one. We wanna go in and use this Live Paint method, which is something, if you've never used Live Paint before, when I first used it, I was like, okay, you know, where are you gonna use this? Then I realized, oh my gosh, this is like totally awesome and amazing. So, what does Live Paint do? Well, Live Paint is one of those things that allows you to take any artwork that you've created and be able to fill these shapes with color. Now, these shapes don't need to be...

actual real closed shapes. That's the cool thing with Live Paint. Everything that we've done in Illustrator so far is, if you create an open shape and you try to fill up with color, if I take a curve like this and I go ahead and I try to fill it with color, it creates this kind of weird effect where, you know, you have this stroke on one side and it fills it and draws a basically an invisible line from point to point. Well, if I'm going in and I've done some really quick sketching, maybe I have a tablet, or I've gone in and traced something, then I wanna start filling it with color, well, Illustrator is like well, you gotta make sure all your shapes are closed, and it's like okay, I didn't sketch with this in mind, keeping everything closed here. So, what I've done is I've done just a really quick sketch right here where I've just taken lines, that's all. And I would love to go ahead and fill all these shapes with colors right here. And, you know, I've done this, just this really quick sketch. And if I were going to go ahead and fill this with color, based on what I know now, I would have to go in and be like oh, my gosh, do I have to create and draw a shape under there and put it behind there and fill it with a color? And it's like, well yeah, if you don't know Live Paint, yeah, that's exactly what you'd have to do because I can't just select this and say, hey, fill it with a color, it's like there, make it all blue. And it's like, it doesn't do it 'cause it doesn't recognize any shapes here and it's like, well, that's not what I want. But, Live Paint will allow you to do this. Now, this is kinda cool because it takes what we see as shapes. We look at this and we see this as a rectangle and this is a rectangle here but, we now know enough about Illustrator that it's not really a rectangle because I'd have to be able to click on it and see the attributes of the rectangle and it doesn't exist. Well, Live Paint actually makes those exist. So, here's how it works. When I select my sketch here that I've done, and I'm gonna go into the Object menu and I want to turn this into a Live Paint Object. So I'm gonna go under Live Paint and I'm gonna choose Make. This turns it into a Live Paint Object, and we get a little pull handles, but they look little snowflakes in there. And this is a Live Paint Object and the only thing that we can do with a Live Paint Object is fill those areas or actually apply color to the strokes. Now, because these overlap, Live Paint treats this as a line segment, this is a separate line segment, this one, too, and any closed shape. Now, closed shape. This treats this as a closed shape, this is closed, but this isn't, which means I couldn't go in here and fill. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use my Live Paint Tool, which is gonna be under the Shape Builder, a shortcut for that is K. And when I call up my Live Paint Tool, this actually gives me this little preview. It's quite a complex little tool right here. But I would like to now go in and treat these filled shapes as areas, and you can see with a Live Paint Bucket tool when I hover over them, it does treat them as closed areas. What you're seeing with those three little squares up there is really your Fill Panel right here. This is your entire Swatch Panel and if we can run through all of this, we could go over here and simply select a color from our Swatch Panel, then go over here, and then click on that, and then go ahead and click on a different color here, and then come back here and do it. But that takes too much time. Our Swatch Panel is right there above our paint bucket. It's waiting for us. We use our right arrow and this allows us to walk through our entire Swatch Panel here. And as we go all the way through, all the way down to the end, we've got some gradients, we've got some patterns here. And it just cycles back from the very beginning. So, I can use my arrows and cycle through this and just grab all these different things from my Swatch Panel. Now you'll notice, when I get to these areas I can't do anything because they are not closed. And that's like, you know? I should've been a little bit more careful with my sketching. Yeah. But you don't have to. Because we're in Live Paint mode, let's go into our Object menu under Live Paint and let's deal with our Gap Options. This is made specifically because, when we don't go ahead and we don't consciously connect those lines together which, when we're sketching that's not our main goal, I'm gonna choose the GaP Options here and I can go ahead and choose Gap Detection. And I can go ahead and we can paint the stops at the small gaps or the medium gaps or the large gaps here. And you can see, when I get the large gaps, it will start to go ahead and it will create kind of a little invisible fence next to there. And I can also go and do custom ones where I can go across in any really big openings, it will just draw a line across there. Now, it doesn't draw a real line. It doesn't complete the path. I could actually say, hey if I'm gonna do this, actually draw a line across here. In this case I don't want to because it's gonna modify my artwork, but here it's just like, hey put up this little invisible fence here with the gaps. So when I do that now, and I go through, these areas will now be treated completely closed unlike before, and I can now go in and I can fill these little areas here. And I can go ahead and create this very cool patchwork, you know, go in and fill this whole thing in. Now this was going in and doing my actual fill structure right here. Well, when I go over my paths here nothing happens and your like, oh okay why doesn't it do anything over my paths? Well, the paths don't go ahead and get activated until you hold down your shift key. And then the Live Paint Bucket tool turns into the Live Paint Brush tool. Now I can still use my left or right bracket, or left or right arrows to cycle through but I need to have my shift key held down permanently in order to remain in the Live Paint Brush tool. Then you see that each one of these line segments is its own unique line segment, okay? It's not just a single line. Yes, that's how it started off, but that's not how it is now because using, very much like using the divide function in the pathfinder, this is actually going in and this is allowing me to choose these colors and put them in here at each segment. So, it's kinda cool. Now, there's my artwork and that's like, wow okay, this would've taken a long time if I had gone in and tried to do this. Now, I'm in Live Paint mode and the only thing I can do in Live Paint mode is paint. I cannot adjust these shapes, I cannot break this apart. When I'm done with this, and I wanna use this, I can leave it just the same and print it and be just fine, but I couldn't manipulate this at all in terms of editing the shapes. If I wanted to, I'd have to go back under the Object menu under Live Paint, do not choose Release, Release is gonna undo everything that you've done, and it's gonna bring you right back to the beginning. It's like, no I don't wanna release this and set it free, I want to expand it, and we talked about expand, expand is taking what it is that you see and turning into actual shape so that the shapes go ahead and resemble what we see. So I'm gonna choose expand, and it expands everything. Little snowflakes are gone from my pole handles. And now if I ungroup this, basically I have two sets of groups here. In fact, let's just look at the Layers panel so you can understand this a little bit better. I've got two sets of groups, let me make this Panel Options larger here so we can see what's going on. I've got two sets of groups here. I've got all of my lines, and I have all of my fills as two separate groups. So if I ungroup once, it will then break my lines apart from my shapes, and I could then go in and I could treat all my lines as a group, which my lines are also grouped together too, I'd have to ungroup those, but I have my group of all my patchwork quilt as well. So I can ungroup those, and then I could manipulate each one of those shapes separately. So, it's kind of an interesting way to go in and take artwork that could be very sketchy or very hand drawn and break it apart. Yep. By the way, you don't need to fill it with color in order to do this, you can turn into Live Paint and then you could expand it when you were done and just get the shapes later. But it's kind of a really cool effect. And you're like, mm how would I use this? Well, we're gonna show you because, this may not have been a total practical example but we're gonna show you an example that's cool. This right here. I used my nifty little rotate command, and I rotated all these around to kinda create this really cool shape. Did I go in and draw all these sections? No. It's just literally one circle rotated all around the center ten times, and I'm gonna turn this into a Live Paint object. Grab everything here, Object, Live Paint, Make. I don't have to worry about Gap Options because they were all closed shapes anyway. They weren't open lines so there are no gaps. I'm gonna take my Live Paint Bucket tool, and now I'm gonna go in, but here is what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to go ahead and apply gradients to these. This is all in my Fill panel by the way, or my Swatch panel. I've got some gradients in there as well. And I can go in here and I can fill all these with gradients to kind of create this really interesting effect. And it's like, no way. It's like, yeah. These are all separate shapes. Click on every single one and I can't, you know, I can't mess it up because I can't accidentally click on an edge right there. And there it is, and it's like, oh my gosh that's amazing. If I ever tried to create this really cool sculpted flower there's no way I'd be able to do it. Well, no there isn't because you tried to go in and trace each one of those shapes and tried to figure out how to apply the whole thing. Mm, don't bother. Now, once I go under my object menu, I can go under Live Paint, I can go under Expand, and it breaks it all apart here. Again, when I go into my Group section right here, I can see how this works, there's my group. And then I have all of my paths here, which I can turn off and I get all of these and it's like, okay this is amazing. Yeah, it's all Live Paint, and it's like, wow. I get these really cool dark and light bands going through here and all this stuff and its like, yeah. So all of the sudden it goes from this, which was kinda like okay that's nice and artistic, to okay, you know, I've seen logos like this before. Mm, yeah. So, pretty awesome. We're gonna come back to this because we're gonna kinda bridge the gap here between going and doing Live Paint and going in and taking an image and using image trace to go in and go ahead and take something that we've created, either a photograph or something we've done in Photoshop, and go ahead and turn this into vector. So, I went ahead and I created this really cool mandala in Photoshop which has the absolutely awesome effect where you can go ahead and you can do mirror images while you're painting. Now I didn't, I only painted one and it does this. Look it up, it's super super fun to do. What I did is I just went into Illustrator and I just chose open and I opened a Photoshop file right in Illustrator. You can actually see, this is a Photoshop document right here, okay? Now I can't go in and do anything with this because it's an image. I can't Live Paint it. I can't go in and edit the shapes here. What I need to do is, I need to turn this into an actual vector piece of artwork. Which is why I go under the Window menu and I'm gonna choose Image Trace. I wanna trace this image. And when I go in and I trace this image, I need have this image selected or my image trace will not show up. Now, in the Image Trace menu I have some very basic options. Make sure you click on the preview here so you can see what's going on all the time. I've got some very basic presets here. Now these presets are fine, it's a great place to start. And, obviously this is not a high quality photo, I'm not doing this with colors. This is literally a black and white logo, so I'm gonna start from that default right here, Black and White Logo. And it's gonna go ahead, and you're like, okay it looks like this, I think this is working here. And I'm gonna set my threshold here. And my threshold is going to basically be exposure. When we're talking with a black and white image, you can see if I do less threshold I'm going to get kind of thinner lines, I'm going to lose some of the detail because I'm over exposing, think of it that way. If I set the threshold very high all my lines are gonna get very thick and it may fill in the detail. One thing I have to warn you though is if you have a very large or high-res image here this uses a lot of memory, and every adjustment that you make, it has to run through process. So you will see little progress bars going on here, and sometimes your like, uh oh did I break this? Because the progress bar seem to take a lot. There's a lot going on in here. So from a, just a very basic black and white standpoint here I can set the threshold back and forth, basically overexposing or underexposing therefore affecting the weight of my line and the overall detail. Under the Advanced sections here, I wanna go ahead and I may wanna have a little bit more control. This is fairly smooth, but you can tell this is hand drawn. Now, with my paths here, I can have very low path fidelity, which is going to not really pay that close attention to the paths. And you can see, now I've got really bad thicks and thins and I've lost my shapes. Very high path fidelity is going to make sure that it's going to be very very very close to the original artwork. I can go ahead and adjust my corners as well. So they will go ahead and pay more attention to the corners, or less attention to the corners or more attention to the corners here. The more attention to the corners try to smooth them out okay? So, it's not like it's giving you more corners, it's just smoothing them out. And Noise is something that's interesting, we're not gonna see much noise here. But noise is something, if we have like any texture from a paper or any grainy detail that we want to go ahead and we want to include or want to exclude. So here, we don't really have anything whatsoever. We're gonna show you that on the next image. Now, one of the things I do wanna do is I want to Ignore White. This is one of the things that people do when they do the Image Trace and then everything that's white actually gets traced as a shape as well. I don't want those things as being white because I would get a big white bounding box and everything inside here would be white. I just want it to be just my overall rendering. So I'm gonna click on the Ignore White. And then what do I do? There's no place that says, okay go ahead and do that. The Trace button is grayed out. You're like, okay how does that work? And you're like, oh my gosh, you know how does this work? It's like, oh my gosh. There's no cheese grater here to go ahead and click on with the Image Trace panel. There's nothing that says, okay make this happen. And so, what do you do? This is still an image. It's not been converted to artwork. And you'll look everywhere. Well, here it is. Over in the Properties panel under the Quick Actions, the only thing that makes this work is Expand. And you're like, how would I ever know that? And, oh my gosh, look at that. Go over the Expand and it says, convert tracing objects to path. Don't you think they'd put that someplace where it'd be like, right there for you? No. Nope. You have to know exactly what it is that you're doing. And we talked about Expand. Expand is gonna take what we see here and expand it into what we want. Now we've got our actual vector artwork. Our Image Trace panel goes completely gray because it's no longer an image. And now I've got my content that I can now go in and I can now use and work this way. And it's like, awesome, this is great. Now this is vector, okay? So now I could go in with my Direct Selection tool, I could see all my points in here, I could zoom in, I could edit all these things, sure. All of this stuff is easily done. Now, if I take my content here, And I go under Object, Live Paint and I choose Make, there it is, it's awesome. I go and I get my Live Paint Bucket tool, and I see black is my color and I start using my left right arrows, and I'm like why can't I go through my colors? And I go to my Fill panel, it's completely empty. And it's like, what? Why are there no colors? Here is the thing. This is a really weird thing in Illustrator. It comes back down to, when you open a photo up in Illustrator, you lose all of your colors in your Color panel. And it's like, really? Yeah. So I can under the File menu, choose open, and I can open something here and open it up, all my colors in my Color panel will go away. All of them. So, what I could do is I could take all my artwork here and I could copy it, start a new document, and paste all of my converted artwork back in and take this, and there is my converted artwork right there. Pasting everything back in. There it is, great. And now, with my pasted artwork, I had pasted this right in here, now because it was in, already in Live Paint mode it comes in as a Live Paint object, but I also have all of my colors here available for me in my Swatch panel. But here's the crazy thing, I get my Paint Bucket tool and I still don't have colors in here. So there's one more step that I have to do. Because this image was black and white when I brought it in, it is stuck in black and white mode. So I can't go searching through all my colors, and you're like, well I've got all my colors in here, I already solved that problem, I now have my color Swatch panel but I can get it through the Paint Bucket tool? No. Go under the Window menu, go under color, and you can see that it's all black and white. Go to your cheese grater and convert it to RGB or CMYK so you get your full color palette readily available. Then, and only then, will the Paint Bucket tool actually show up with everything that you want. You're like, seriously? Yeah. I mean, try to figure that one out on your own. This is kinda weird. So now I can go through and I can pick my colors. And then, because I've got lots of points inside here what's happening is, I'm seeing all these points so it's a little bit hard to see what it is that I'm actually painting with okay? But I can now go through and I can fill all these shapes. You'll notice in here, when I zoom in, that this shape isn't closed so this is a perfect example of why I would go into my Live Paint and my Gap Options here and I would set my small gaps here so I could go in, I'm actually gonna do Custom here, and I'm gonna fill in my small gaps. So in the areas where I can go ahead and do my gaps. It's kinda weird because it gets close here so it starts to fill these in as well, but this is how I can go ahead and fill those gaps so that I don't have those broken points. So, with this I could've just gone in and filled these closed shapes in Illustrator, but these open shapes right here I would probably go into my Live Paint and close the gaps up there. So kind of a really interesting thing of trying to go in and do my image trace and get to this as well. So, when you want to go in and you wanna do image trace, one of the best things to do is to go in, and don't go under File, Open and open the file, go under File and go under Place and navigate to your document and place your file into your Illustrator file. And the reason why is because, if you open it like I did here I have nothing in my Swatch panel. So I'm gonna close out of this, and I'm going to create a new document. And then I'm going to adjust my art board here, and then I'm going to go under the File menu and choose Place. I'm gonna grab my image and I'm going to place it in here, and when I do that I now have my full array of color. Now I can do black and white images, I can do gray scale and I can do color in terms of image trace here. And this makes it really nice to be able to work with. Keep in mind that really high resolution images are going to severely slow down the processing power when you use Image Trace. One of the new features that they've added here in Illustrator is being able to crop an image in Illustrator. We could never do this before. If I wanted to crop an image, I would have to draw a box, copy my image, do the Draw Inside mode, paste it inside there and that was my crop. But now they've actually allowed you to crop images. If you select your placed image and, by the way, the difference between a placed image and a non-placed image, a placed image is gonna have an X through it, that way you know it hasn't been opened but it's just been placed. Still looks the same, still works the same, it's just that you no longer have to fight your disappearing Swatch panels when you open an image in Illustrator. To crop an image, we're gonna go over to our Properties panel and we have the ability to edit our originals. It's gonna open right back up in Photoshop, I could mask this out. I also can crop this image. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to crop this image. And when I do crop this image, what it does is it actually chops off the image inside of Illustrator leaving me just with this. I can't go back and un-crop what I've done later, I'd have to go back and replace this file with a new one. When I'm done I can simply click Apply over in my Properties panel and its now cropped it, okay? And you'll notice here, there is no un-crop going through here, so. I might now wanna trace this image, so I'm gonna go back to my Image Trace panel. And here, if I keep it in White and Black mode here, I need to click on my preview to see, I do it in black and white and it's like oh, that's really cool okay. So here's where I can go ahead and adjust my threshold, keeping in mind that my threshold is very much like my exposure, okay? So I can force it more toward the highlights or the shadows and get some really cool interesting effects. If I do gray scale in my color mode, then this is going to give me different shades of gray right here. And then the more or less is the number of shades of gray. Of course I just happened to have 50 shades of gray. So if I do less here, we can get very stair stepped, very artistic looking kind of flat color here, so there is like four shades of gray. And every movement that you make, you can get, it takes processing power every time you move and do this. So this could be a very stylized version, or we could have 100 shades of gray which will literally render it to look virtually like an image. Now, why would I wanna do something like this to an image, rather than to artwork? Well, the cool thing with doing this to an image is if you have a very small image you can then make this any size. I've done this for trade shows where somebody has gone and has got a picture that's like an 8x10 and we need it 80 feet long. So we go ahead and we render it this way, and then we print it on huge vinyl and they put it way in the distance and it looks really good because we're rendering this all in vector. So, different ways to do shades of gray here. I'm gonna cut this down here so the rendering happens a whole lot quicker for us, right here. So the path is going to go ahead and be the path fidelity. Do I really want it to be very close to the original there, so I get all the good detail in? Or do I not care and I'm going to get extremely poor quality tracing of this and lots of bizarre funky angles? I mean, you can see all the craziness right there. If that's the style that you want, great, but this is the low quality, high quality paths. The corners are gonna be paying attention to more of the detail here, less of the detail. And then the noise is how much detail you want to include or don't want to include. If I go ahead and set the noise very high that is going to take away a lot of the fine detail. If you look here, there isn't much detail. If you want a lot of detail, we're gonna dump the noise down to one and this is going to then go in and pay a lot of attention to all the noise and we're gonna pick up the detail of this. So I could render this just this way and this is going to then render into tens of thousands of basic vector shapes. They're all gonna be just shapes filled with gray. If I would like to go in and I would like to use color, I can use a limited color palette here and limit it, just limits it to 30 different colors, which can be very interesting. I can go ahead and I can take this way down to say like, six colors, and it's going to create a very dramatic effect here based on, on these colors. And it's like, oh you know, that could be really cool, yeah. And you've seen this before. You've seen this in ads, you've seen this in artwork how this is done, absolutely. Well here the noise is definitely going to really come into play because if I cut back the noise here, what it's gonna do is it's going to seemingly kinda smooth things out and give flatter areas of color. If I go ahead and use my path fidelity as well, it's going to leave me with less little jagged edges here, but a lot more sloppier, straighter lines on this as well. So there's just, all these cool things that we can do, you know, kinda leave some of the detail. It's just, really quite spectacular. If I wanted to do the full tone, so this was going to be rendered as close as possible to the original photograph, I'm gonna use the full tone with all the colors. It's definitely gonna use a lot of processing power to do this. It's gonna come in, and there it is. And you're like, wait a second, that looks just like the picture. Yeah, exactly okay? This looks just like the picture, but this is the trace. I mean, I'm gonna go in and set the paths to high, it's gonna take a little bit of rendering here, but you're like, okay I can't tell that that's not the picture. You're right, but it's all a vector. Once we expand the whole thing you won't believe this. You're like, yeah that looks just like the photograph. Uh huh. I'm gonna expand this right here, and it's gonna go through and expand the whole thing. Look at that, okay? That's all vector shapes. Yeah, it looks just like the photograph. It does. But it's been rendered with all these shapes here, in fact I'm gonna go into outline mode here and you can see it's literally like a puzzle, right there. That is the entire thing rendered in all those shapes. And from a distance it's like, I can't tell that that's not the photograph. It's like, yeah. Print this really big, and because this is a vector it's infinitely scalable, so could actually take an image and convert it into something that looks very much like it, it's like, okay that's awesome. So, one other thing that I want to show you, I'm gonna create a new document here and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to put a sketch in here. So I'm gonna go under File, Place, and I'm gonna grab this hand that was done, and I'm going to click and drag and place it inside the file here. So this is a really quick sketch that was done, took a picture of and then put into Photoshop. Scanned into Photoshop and then I saved it as a Photoshop file. And I'd like to turn this into vector artwork, so I can then go ahead and fill this in if I want. So I'm gonna click on my Image Trace, and there is my shape, it takes a second for it to wake up. And it tells us, ooh you know, this image is kinda high res, it's gonna slow things down. It's like yep, I know, we talked about it. There it is. Okay, so it's a really cool rendering. Here's where you can kinda see the noise taking place in this. If I go ahead and ramp up the noise here, you're gonna notice that a lot of the small little details disappear. A low noise level means that you're going to go ahead and have lots of little bits and pieces right there, lots of details. The path, being very high, you're gonna get very close to the original renderings of each and every pencil mark in there, very low it's gonna be a whole lot sloppier. The corners here, you're not gonna notice much difference between here. You know, it's gonna give us a little bit more sharp little crispity crunchity edges here. Less is gonna go ahead and just kinda knock the detail back, can't really see. The threshold here, when it's black and white, is simply going to go ahead and just kinda beef up the weight of the lines, or kinda thin the lines out. So it's kind of like a, little bit of an exposure kinda thing. We've got a couple other cool things here. This is just, we're under like, normal Black and White Logo here. If I do sketched art as a preset here, it kinda sets certain things to look like sketched art. Other things like silhouette, as we go through does a pretty good job. Line art, this is kinda fun. It's a little bit different, but it literally converts everything to lines, you're like, wow, okay that looks just like kinda weird stuff. Same with technical drawing, it just gives all these little dots and bits and pieces here. And the threshold can then be adjusted so that you get more or less here. There's just a lot of experimentation that you can do with each and every one of your images. So I'll probably drive that down to less here and see what it goes ahead and does. Eh. So, going back in Black and White Logo works really good with this. Once I like this, I'm gonna ignore the white so that any areas that are filled in here will not be white blocks, they will just simply be empty. And I choose Expand. Now, this I where Live Paint could work really good, where I could come in and do this. And I see a lot of open areas, so if I select my content here, Object, Live Paint and I choose Make, then I can go through here using my Live Paint bucket, and again I'm stuck with, with only black as the color, I've gotta go under my Window menu under Color and turn this over from black only to CMYK or RGB. Once I do that, then I get my full color panel, and now I can go in, and I can fill these particular areas. Now, the areas that are not closed I can't fill, because that's part of the problem with having these gaps in here. So if I select all this content, then I can go under the Object menu under my Live Paint, and I can do my Gap Options to start to fill in all these areas; small, medium, large gaps as we go through to start to fill those areas in. So now, if I really wanted to go ahead and pick lighter or darker shades and tones of colors, I could then go in here and I could easily take this with my paint bucket tool, and now I could go in and I could fill these colors with lighter or darker shades here if I was going in and wanting to create artwork that way and be able to fill that in. So, it's kind of cool. I can go in and I can also fill these paths as well, because that's, they are shapes in this particular case. But here is where I can take sketched art, convert it using Image Trace, and then go in and use my Live Paint tool and then of course, when I'm done, I could expand this whole thing and now I've got my artwork separate from my painted areas, and then I can manipulate those shape areas a little bit more. So, Live Paint and Image Trace, kind of interesting, kind of fun. Definitely a lot of experimentation on what it is that you get, but you can go through and do artwork, you can do fully rendered photographs right here. You can do stuff that you've done in Photoshop as well. And you can do really cool shapes like this, or basic patchwork, whatever it is it's all part of Live Trace and, or Image Trace and Live Paint. Cool stuff. So, stick around for more stuff. We got more good stuff coming up here in the next video.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Gradients Tutorial
Layers Tutorial
Infographic - Watering Can Tutorial
Symbols Tutorials

Ratings and Reviews

Eric
 

What an amazing course! I am a working professional and have cobbled together most of my knowledge of Illustrator from working through different projects. I wish I would have taken this course sooner! There's so many tips and tricks that Jason teaches that would have saved me at least 20% of my time. I feel like a more well-rounded Illustrator user now after this and I'm excited to use all these skills in my upcoming projects. Thanks, Jason!

Sheldon Carvalho
 

All the info was super. Super easy to follow. And great to start learning. Illustrator. One thing I could see that needed adding was little projects after every class. Get something new created and then learn how it was made with the tools that were discussed. But there should be another class for sure.

Tomas Verver
 

Like most of Jason's courses they are professional high quality courses. From beginner to expert. The course is packed full with the latest tips to improve your Illustrator Workflow. There are some nice examples included so you can watch the video's, do the exercises and build experiences in the program quickly.

Student Work

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