Trick for redrawing hand drawn images in Adobe Illustrator CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to show you how to do this. Put in a drawn image in the background, fade it out, lock it, make a new layer like this all instamatically with one of the Illustrator features, because what I tend to do is, say this drawing here, I draw it in my notebook I take a photo with my phone just because I'm better with drawing often with the pen, than in Illustrator directly, then I just redraw it in Illustrator, but I want to stick it on its own layer that I can redraw over the top, maybe wash it out a little bit. All right, let's go see how to do that in Illustrator. 

First up, we're going to make a new document. We're going to go to 'File', 'New'. We are going to go to 'Print' and you can use either A4 or US Letter, depending on where you are. I'm going to use 'Letter', and I'm going to go 'Portrait'. The big thing to just make sure you are using kind of the new dialog box that Illustrator comes with, is down the bottom here, there's this one called Advanced Options, and by default, anything under the Print Tab wants to be CMYK. Web, you'll see over here, wants to be RGB, and the resolution needs to be 72. So that's just something you need to be aware of when you are picking from these defaults. I use Print mainly because I like the shape of-- I'm used to this shape, US Letter, or A4. I'm used to this shape, so I just want to start with that. even though it might be going for Digital, or going out to Web. 

So you just got to make sure, whenever you change it go into here, and say actually I want to make sure it's RGB if I want it to be RGB. Now just so you know, if you are kind of not really clued up about RGB versus CMYK it's best to use RGB to get started with because CMYK is a limited color range. Doesn't have the really strong greens, or Madonna pinks, the real kind of fluorescent colors. So it's best to work in RGB, and maybe switch it up to CMYK later on. It becomes a little bit more washed out but starting with RGB is generally how I work. 

The other thing is, when you pick Web you probably want to switch it up to maybe 300ppi to get the resolution really high. You can change this later on, no big deal, but it's just something to be aware of when you are playing around with a new document window. Let's click 'Create', doesn't really matter as long as it's in RGB. 

The next thing we're going to do is put that kind of washed out drawing. I do my drawings in my book, take a photo with my phone, then just kind of jam it on a page, put it on its own layers, wash it out, make a new layer, and draw on top of that. So that is big drama, takes a little while, so there's an easy shortcut to do it. So if we go to 'File', 'Place', in your 'Exercise Files' there's one called 'Curvature Tool'; find that one. Down the bottom here - you probably can't see it - click on 'Options'. Just click on this one that says 'Template'. This does all he work for us. Let's click 'Place'. So brings in our file, you'll see, in our Layers Panel-- so you might be on Properties, switch to 'Layers'. It's created a layer, it's locked it. It's faded this out for us, and created a new layer that we can draw on. All just super quick and easy. 

When you've drawn it, you can turn this off because you probably don't want it to go to print. So that's just a really quick little getting started trick. All right, let's get into the next video where we start drawing these guys using some of the new tools in Illustrator. All right, I'll see you there.