Subtitles of the Movie

Typically artists don't like to trace things. We find that it's considered cheating. But that's not the case in Adobe Illustrator. What a lot of artists, including myself, like to do is sketch their artwork on paper, bring that into Illustrator and then use the Pen Tool or the other tools to then create vector artwork, as you see here. During the course of this tutorial and in the project at the end, we're going to make great use of doing just that and I'm going to provide you guys a pencil sketch of the project that we're going to trace. Now, when you look at your layers here and in the case of this illustration, you'd be quite surprised to find this many layers for something that looks so simple. But as I mentioned before, let me go ahead and hide some of this stuff, you will start off with pretty much basic nothingness. So you'll have a pencil sketch, or you have something that you'll eventually trace over. Now, I already deleted the sketch earlier which is why it's not here. But what you would do is you would bring in your sketch and then you would trace a part of it and put it on its own layer. And you would trace another part. So as you can see here, I have different parts of the mask and I put the shadow separately and I put all of the major pieces of the artwork on their own layers. Now, some people like to work with far less layers, but I like to have a lot of control. I put my highlights on a layer by itself, I put shadows on their own layer, I'll put these little, squiggly lines here that you see on the neck area on their own line as well. And another great reason why you want to trace your artwork in Illustrator is so that you can then export it as a Photoshop document with all of your layers intact. That means you can bring your artwork into Photoshop and then add things like blurs lens flares, glows and all kinds of great things. So the two applications really do work hand in hand. So once again, tracing is going to be a critical component in some of the tutorials that we do. So don't be alarmed. I will talk you step by step how we're going to do this. Primarily we will use the Pen Tool and what I'm going to do as well is I'm going to lock all these guys here and create a layer at the very top just to give you a quick demonstration as to how you would trace. So once again, don't worry if you don't know how to use the Pen Tool. I'll talk about it in the upcoming section. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off the fill, grab my Pen Tool and I'm going to just trace just outside of this area here so we can see what it will look like, so I can make believe this is a pencil sketch and I would follow the sketch and try to determine where I put the next lines and I can drag like so and then what I can do is trace this artwork to match the sketch or what I like to do sometimes is while I'm working I'll even improvise. Let me go ahead and just turn that off very quickly and show you this line here. So this is an example of how you can create a very, very crisp line by tracing over artwork that you bring in. You can trace over artwork, photographs or whatever you want to. There are even some automated tracing tools inside of the application that we'll talk about in the upcoming lessons as well.