EASY Character Illustration in Adobe Illustrator! …

In this tutorial, I walk you through a beginner’s approach to creating a simple vector character illustration inside of Adobe Illustrator …

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today I will teach you the most ridiculously easy beginner’s method for creating an illustrated character from any photo using Adobe Illustrator and as my gift to you I will include a free download of my Adobe Illustrator file with the finished product in the description below because I know that some of you find it helpful to dig through that okay so let’s Dive Right In first things first you want to find a reference image and I have to make a disclaimer here if you are creating artwork for commercial use meaning that you are hoping to sell your art you’re doing it for a client or customer you will want to make sure that you absolutely have the rights to your reference image so your options are either to take the photo yourself or find a royalty-free image the one I’m using is from a site called unsplash which is free but I’m also a big fan of adobe stock I get a lot of my reference images from there I’m just telling you this because I do not want you to get sued and a second disclaimer this one is for the tracing police out there this tutorial is for beginners I believe that tracing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to get comfortable with digital art I never suggest that someone build their whole illustration practice around this method that I’m about to share in fact I am a huge believer that in order to succeed as an illustrator you need to find your own unique style think of this tutorial as training wheels it’s going to build up your confidence and teach you how to ride your tricycle but you ultimately want to learn how to ride a bike properly with the big kids but that’s a topic for another video today I’m here for the beginners all right back to it so as I mentioned I use unsplash to find my reference photo and now you want to open up Adobe Illustrator and place the image you chose cool now in the properties panel I’m just going to resize my artboard to 1080 pixels by 1920 pixels if you ever can’t find a particular panel just go up to window and you’ll find it in there now you want to place your image onto your artboard and in your layers panel lock it create a new layer over the top and this is where you’re going to create your shape layers now you may be tempted to go in and Trace every single little tiny element perfectly and call it a day but this is absolutely not the look we’re going for instead you want to focus on creating simple minimal shapes so you can use the shape tool with the fill turned on side note you can toggle between the fill and stroke here so using your shapes you can start to block out some simple forms just as I’m doing here but the main tool that you will be using for this is the pen tool and I know a lot of people get frustrated with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator but trust me on this once you get the hang of it it will become your best friend so for the facial features you’ll see that I’m using the pen tool with just the stroke selected to create simple smooth lines just like this pushing the line weight up or down to create the desired forms in your stroke settings you can choose to have your Strokes be round or Square cap I’m sticking to square for this piece but pick whatever you like the look of now in addition to your lines you also want to use the pen tool to create all the rest of your shapes so with your fill selected start blocking out the basic shapes of your character remember we’re not going for that Trace look don’t outline every curve contour and detail with a million anchor points anchor points are these little control points by the way instead aim to limit yourself to as few anchor points as you can really relying on your anchor handles which are these things here to tweak and refine your shape a tool that will also come in super handy in this process is the smooth tool which just to demonstrate here can help smooth out and simplify any Jagged or uneven lines or points that you may have accidentally created I am always using this tool to help keep my form super smooth and clean now I have a confession when it comes to a simple piece like this I usually don’t worry about layers at all so what I usually do let’s say for example I’m drawing the neck here and I’m just going to make it a different color here for just a second I know that I want it to sit behind the head so I’m going to go to object arrange and here I have the selection of how I would want to reorder it so I’d select Center back to make this process faster you can also use the command function command and the back or forward square bracket on the Mac the reason why I personally like to do this is because I think it’s faster and easier but if you like your layers all tidy and clean by all means go for it in the free project download in the description I actually cleaned up labeled and nested all the layers just to make it easier to know what’s going on in there okay so once you have all your main content in there you can turn off your reference image and now something that I like to do is to start resizing and tweaking different parts of your composition so for example for my characters I usually like the look of a slightly smaller head a longer neck I’ll tweak the facial features I like to make the eyes a little bigger and I may also tweak the positioning and length of the arms just slightly until it’s looking good now I have to say my tweaks here are pretty minimal but feel free to experiment and go crazy with your exaggeration here if you like so to make your illustration pop a little you can also choose to add some Shadow to your shapes which you can do by just simply creating shapes that are slightly darker over the top but if you want to be a lot more precise you can do this by also using the draw inside functionality to do this select the shape you want to draw inside of and in your tools panel select this little icon here if you don’t see that in your panel just be sure to add it by selecting these three dots here and make sure that all of these at the bottom are selected Now using a slightly darker color you can now create your shadows super simple for this piece I also decided to add in a bit of a background shape just to help ground and frame my composition a little so the character didn’t look like she was floating off into space there was not really much of a Rhyme or Reason to this so just feel free to do whatever you think looks good here now if you want to learn how you can add grainy shading in Adobe Illustrator like this be sure to subscribe and let me know in the comments I am happy to drop a separate tutorial if enough of you are interested and asking for it now if you plan on trying or have already tried this tutorial tag me on Instagram Tick Tock or shorts I’ll link all my socials in the description I am beyond excited to see what you create nothing makes me happier than when people show me what they created as a result of watching my tutorials now one last time not to be dramatic but you need to be subscribed I’m going to be dropping so many incredible beginner focused tutorials to help you level up in your illustration practice this year so hit subscribe right now your future self will thank you for it alright bye for now

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Quick and economical illustration – Click Here.