Tutorial Time!!!!

I LOVE tutorials, don't you?! Especially when they come with LOTS of pictures! So when my friend, DeMo, suggested I post a vector art tutorial on my blog I thought it was a great idea! My techniques are not closely guarded secrets—I strongly object to designers keeping design secrets from one another! The vector illustrations I create are actually quite simple and only require patience and the ability to squint your eyes! Now, prepare yourself for the longest post my blog has ever seen. Are you ready, class? Let's dive in!





















Ok, this is the image we will be working with. It is one girl that is part of a larger photo. I do my work in Illustrator CS2. These images show you the original photo, and the finished vector art.

First, open the photo in Illustrator. Select the photo, and in the Transparency palette bring the opacity down to about 60-80%. This will make your paths easier to see when you draw on top of the photo, and also help hide the unimportant details so they don't distract you. Lock the photo layer, and create a new layer to start the drawing!

Set your stroke to black and your fill to empty. Set the stroke weight to .25. Using the Pen Tool, begin outlining the perimeter of her face. Now start squinting to see where the main shadows and highlights are in the face. Trace each shadow/highlight. At the very least a face will have 4 degrees of color. The darkest shades are always around the eyes and under the nose. The lightest is always on the tip of the nose. As you're drawing, keep in mind the layer order that you are creating. Trace large areas of color first, and the smallest areas of color last. Ignore the boundaries of hair, eyes, and smile for now.

My advice: Know your Pen Tool!!! This tool is frustrating for beginners, but with enough practice you can master its subtleties. Modifier keys are essential to use with the Pen Tool, and pressing space bar while drawing a point will allow you to reposition its placement.






Once you're satisfied with the job you've done of scribbling all over her face, begin coloring the paths. (Open the "Skintones" color palette for a good place to start.) Reposition the path layers as necessary to make sure none of them get lost underneath the others. After the skin of the face is complete, go through the same process to draw other areas of skin, like hands.











Occasionally you may want to hide the photo layer to see your progress and make sure you're not leaving any gaping holes between paths. (I always think they look kinda freaky/cool at this point without any eyes or mouth!)








Now let's temporarily hide the skin layer(s) so we can draw the eyes and mouth. Same process as before. (Be sure to zoom in close for this, don't try to do it from far away!) I usually use the circle tool to draw the pupil because it can look funny if it's not a perfect circle. Btw, did you know that in photos people's eyes and teeth are grey/yellow and not white? Shocker! Let's do them a favor and color them white anyways. It also helps to add a little circle of white reflection in their eyes. Instant depth.


Before we move on, I want to explain a technique I use a lot. I've zoomed in on the mouth to show you that when I draw the lips, they start out as only one or two paths, all the same color. This screenshot shows how I selected the lower lip on the left, then used the Knife Tool to cut through it. Now it is two separate paths that can be colored independently. In the smile on the right I cut and colored the bottom lip once, and the top lip twice. I use the Knife tool a lot to help me break up the colors in a solid path.

After the skin, eyes, and smile, it's time for the hair! Hair like this can be quite intimidating because we see so many little lines and streaks and shade differences. Remember to just be patient and to squint your eyes! Squinting will help you drown out the details and see the big picture. After the hair is finished, continue on to draw the clothes. I think clothes are fun because they have VERY distinct shadows in the fold lines—but that makes it easy to overlook the highlights. Always draw both shadows & highlights because illustrations will look flat if you have one without the other. (All these elements are drawn the same way: everything in a black .25 stroke and filled with color after all shadows & highlights are traced.)

Finally, when we turn on all the layers and reorder them correctly, we have a beautiful finished vector illustration! (See finished vector at the top of the post!)

Below is a screenshot of what my layers palette looks like after finishing all the elements. In this particular project I was doing a group photo, so each person had their own layer and all the elements—skin, hair, clothes, etc—were grouped inside the layers. But if you're only doing one person, it makes more sense to give all the elements their own layers.



That completes my tutorial! Let me know if you have questions about anything I didn't cover, if you have suggestions for other tutorials, or if you think this was incredibly long-winded and never want to see me post another tutorial again—all comments welcome!

Vicariously Me

Sometimes instead of actually going outside to read my Bible, I just draw a picture of myself doing it. (with one continuous line)

Cats

This morning we had a visitor in our back yard! At the time Avee and Bryan were both gone from the house, so I let Suki outside to mingle with our guest. It was fun to watch them interact, both curious and hesitant about the other. But eventually I stopped watching the show and put on my running shoes to go for a jog. As I left the house I met Bryan and Avee just getting home. I told Bryan about the visitor & Suki and recommended he go look at them.

When my jogging was done, this is what I came home to find:


Funny, I'd forgotten how most cats PURR when you pet them and ENJOY being held. Watch out, Suki. Your days may be numbered!

Three Years in Three Days

I'm not an extremely fit person, but I try to jog a mile or two every few days. (It makes me feel a little less guilty about all the delicious homemade cookies and breads that I eat.) Since the rainy weather was not conducive to an outside jog today, I drove to my little Gym to tread the mill for a bit. (Does anybody know how a treadmill got its name?) When I arrived at the Gym I was slightly annoyed to discover it was closed because of the SWINE FLU and would reopen after it was "sanitized" sometime this week. Yeah. Swine flu. There has not been one case of swine flu in our entire state, and after the Gym is sanitized and they let people start using it again, will it really be any safer than it was before the big clean?? So stupid.

Moving on…

I cannot let this week pass without announcing to the world that on Wednesday Bryan and I will FINALLY get to spend an anniversary together!! In fact it will take all my effort not to mention this in every facebook status for the next three days. We don't have any big plans for the special day because saving for a down payment on a house has us on a tight budget. We're thinking a nice restaurant and a sunset walk on the beach. Any other low-cost celebration ideas??

Sara K, the CRUSHER!!!

Ok, crushes are for more than just teenage girls, orange soda, and pro wrestling, right? I crush on people and things all the time! So here I have compiled a short list of what I've been crushing on lately. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Bite-sized Heath bars. Bryan picked out a big bag of these to sneak into the movie theater last week (I picked out strawberry Twizzlers) and I was shocked at how truly satisfying chocolate-covered toffee really is. Who knew?
• My new Facebook profile pic. I spent about thirty minutes doing some fine Photoshop work on an average picture of me to make it outstanding. I love the final result. Totally crushing on it.
• My husband. Nature is cruel at this time of the month.
• A hand-made heart pendant I recently bought from Etsy.com. I've been on the lookout for the perfect red heart necklace for a long time now—not too junior high, not too formal, not too red, not too expensive—and I'm so happy that I finally found the perfect pendant! Love it!• Kris Allen. SOOO proud of my Arkansas boy on American Idol!! I don't think he'll win, but I love that he's representing our publicity-challenged state so well!
• Yard sales. (I think I pretty much covered this one in my last post!)
• My grandmother's antique wedding ring. I've been in love with this little piece of jewelry all my life, and even wanted to use it for my own wedding ring. That didn't work out though, and for a long time it stayed tucked away in a safe place because I thought it would be tacky to wear a wedding set on each hand—but this week I changed my mind! Now it's out of hiding, on my right hand, and not tacky at all!
• Seagulls. I guess I've just been spending a lot more time outside and noticing them lately. They're such fun birds! I love how they always sound like they're laughing; it never ceases to make me smile!
• Pandora radio online. How does anybody ever get work done without Pandora?? Their steady stream of songs that are just to my liking helped me get through two weeks (and counting) of tracing photos in Illustrator. Couldn't have done it without ya, Pandora!
• My sister's new blog! It's all about how cute my little niece and nephew are, and Stefanie has an entertaining style of documenting their cuteness! There's a link to it on right of this page called "Borkerts the Sister".

Seven Dollar Saturday

This morning I was wide awake at 6:30am. NOT a good way to start the only day of the week that you get to sleep in.

UNlessss... there are 46 yard sales in your area! So I made some coffee, kissed my sleeping husband, and went out armed with the $7 left over from yesterday's X-Men matinee. (Why do so many theaters still only accept cash???)

I didn't go to all 46 yard sales—it's PCS season which means lots of Marines are changing duty stations and wanting to sell their stuff before the move—I only went to six. Is that a lot? Well I didn't buy anything at the first two, but in the following four I offered, haggled, and conceded all $7 on the following ten items: a shirt from Maurices, a shirt from Express, khakis from Abercrombie, USMC travel mug, Starbucks mug, trendy necklace, cute picture frame, cushy keyboard wrist pad, a new dog toy for Avee, and a pool stick (with case & chalk). Can we say SCORE??!! Yeah, I totally pwned those yard sales this morning. Kinda makes it worth having a 6:30 internal alarm.

This is completely unrelated to everything you just read, but I have to mention something that Bryan just said to me as he was watching the Kentucky derby pre-show: "I have a feeling that if we lived anywhere near Kentucky you'd want to go to the derby just so you could get dressed up and wear a big hat." :) My husband knows me so well!

Mmmm!

I love popcorn! Oh yes I do—especially the lightly buttered variety! Mmm! I just now put an Orville bag in the microwave and thought how lucky I am to work from home and make popcorn for lunch! When I worked at DS I had popcorn for lunch a few brave times, but there was always the chance that one kernel would burn and fill the entire building with that distinct burnt popcorn smell. And even if I was lucky enough not to burn any kernels in the finnicky office microwaves, it would still fill the entire building with that distinct (non-burnt) popcorn smell. Either way, I always tried to sneak out of the breakroom with my bag of buttery popped goodness before anyone could identify me as the culprit. Then I would quickly scarf it down at my desk, making sure the only evidence left behind was my exquisitely satisified countenance.

So while there are many nice things about working from home as a freelance designer, one of the best is being able to have popcorn for lunch without annoying your coworkers!

Right now I'm working on two things, a logo for a small make-up/hair product company, and a set of seven illustrations commissioned by a non-profit organization. Maybe when I'm done I will post an image of the logo and a link to the illustrations!

Updates

My latest illustration, The Golfer, is now available for purchase on iStock.

I also updated my portfolio web site with some more recent work in the categories of Logo Design, Print Design, and Web Design.

And I'm officially on the market! Let me know if you hear of any design jobs in NW Arkansas because I'm ready to apply!!

Announcement from My Soapbox

I have some quick advice for mothers of any age. Here it is: Don't talk about your labor stories. Avoid the topic completely in any social setting. Thank you.

EDIT: This post originally elaborated on the details of why this conversation topic is inappropriate and sometimes offensive, but after some thought I decided it was best to remove those details. :)

The Ozarks and The Crystal Coast

I reaaalllyy want to buy a house in NW Arkansas! (And you can tell I mean it by the way that I duplicated letters in the word "really" to make it look so emphatic.) And I CAN'T WAIT to get a design job in NW Arkansas! (Capital letters... you get the idea.)

But as much as I'm anticipating that house hunt and job search, I've already started putting the brakes on my eagerness to leave this puny little NC town. I think I'm really going to miss this place. Bryan and I have a good life here. We live in a wonderful community, we have great friends, our jobs let us spend a lot of time together (when he's not in another country), and we're only 20 minutes from the beach. Moving back to NW Arkansas is our dream, but I'm trying to savor these last few months in North Carolina because I know that a part of me will miss it when we leave.