Illustrator Tutorial: Create a Vector Logo from a Rough Sketch

what I want to show you today is how to take a little thumbnail sketch like this it was drawn with a mechanical pencil and bring it into the computer and turn it into a clean vector logo graphic in Adobe Illustrator so transferred a snapshot of this little wave sketch into my computer and you can put it into illustrator with a file place command and the other thing I want to do is I want to turn the opacity of it down to around 30% that way we can still see it but we can also draw over it and it's not going to get in the way and I'm also going to hit command - or control - to lock it that way it won't get in the way when we're working on it and I want to use a black stroke and we'll first start out blocking out this shape with the circle and I'm going to try like a 40-point stroke and that looks pretty good so far and what we want to do now is use our pen tool to start drawing out these curves now when you're using your pen tool you're going to want to use the least number of points possible and it'll just make your logo a lot easier to work on if you can do it with a few number of points for instance if you're if you get little kinks in your curves they're a lot easier to work out if you don't have a lot of points and your drawing and the other thing we can do is we can add on to this curve here and I want this curve here to kind of meld in with the circle and again let's just move these points around till it starts to look nice and smooth and I think that's starting to look pretty good you know like I was saying if this if this curve had a lot more points on it it would be way harder to get smooth the other thing we can do is because a lot of this design is circular we can use the ellipse tool to sort of define some of these curves and we can go in here with our scissors tool and just cut out the parts we don't want and that way we're getting really nice perfect curves so you get where I'm going here and eventually we get to drawing like this and it's still all paths so what we want to do here is we want to convert this to fills so let's go to object expand click OK and you'll see how illustrator has added some points in here we want to get rid of some of these extra points so that again the logos a lot easier to work with so what we want to do here is let's use our delete Anchor Point tool in old versions of Illustrator if you deleted anchor points it would flatten out your curves but now if you hold the shift key down you can delete some of these extra anchor points and it'll retain the nice curvature of your paths but you'll see sometimes even if you do that and you delete the wrong ones it'll flatten things out so if you do that just undo it and delete the other ones so that's starting to look pretty good now the other thing we want to do let's look at the final logo I've got it over here you'll see how there's a lot of thick to thin areas and this is what makes the drawing look a little more interesting so to get that with this we'll go in here with our direct selection tool the white arrow tool and we can select some of these paths and just kind of move things over a little bit and that way we get a lot of nice tapering now we want some of the the thick areas to be where there would be shadows so you know in this wave if you the light is coming down from the top and underneath the lip of the wave would be the dark part so that's where we want the thick areas of the wave we want the thin areas to be kind of like where the highlights would be like the top of this wave right here so we could you know thin this part out and we want all these little places to taper out so we'll fin that out too and like I was saying you know if this if this curve had 20 points on it it'd be really hard to work with oh let me show you one more thing so a lot of people use a tool called the width tool let me show you this really quick so if we were to use the width tool we can accomplish what we were just doing so you can go a fictive thin like this the problem with the width tool I found is if you go object expand appearance it adds a ton of points so that's gonna make things a lot harder to work with you know I guess you could go in there if you wanted to use a width tool you could use your delete Anchor Point tool hold the shift key down but you know that's a lot of work getting rid of all these extra points so you know I just like to do it the other way where you don't have to delete all these extra points this is looking pretty good so the next thing I want to show you is I want to round out some of these corners so let's select this whole thing and in our Pathfinder window we just want to hit the Uniting that makes everything one big compound path now we can go to our direct selection tool and you'll see these little these little dots here and what that is is they allow you to round out corners so you can do them individually or sometimes you can do them all at once the problem is if if one of the corners is kind of limited you'll only be able to drag out all of them to the degree that that one limiting one is stopping you and I think for instance this is stopping right here because of this point so it's not gonna drag it's not gonna round out that corner beyond that point so if you find something like that you can go in with your dually Anchor Point tool again hold the shift key and just get rid of those those points that are really close to the corners so again what's going here let's round these out and you'll see how this one's less limited but I want to go in here individually and round out some of these and the ones that are kind of in these thick shaded areas I want to round out more because that's gonna add just kind of a nice shadow like heavy black look to it and also these tapering areas right here I just want to round these out as much as they'll round out and down here round these out to a pretty good degree tail so there you go that's how to turn a rough sketch into a clean vector graphic

Channel: TheVectorLab

Views: 2,192,315

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Id: qSkhaLNKdX0

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020