3.3 Creating the Line Art

Hey, all. Welcome back to Vector Portraits for Beginners on tuts+. My name is Sharon Millin, and in this lesson we're going to look at creating line art. The style of line art that we're going to be creating is called Chunky Line Art. The line art itself isn't uniform and it creates more organic natural look to the art, line art. It looks a lot more aesthetically pleasing but you'll see that as you'll go along. I'm going to compare traditional line art with this chunky style to see why the extra bit of effort actually brings an effective result. I'm just gonna draw a heart here in Illustrator. And then I'm gonna trace along the inside of the heart. Select both shapes. And then go to Pathfinder Minus Front. I'm gonna compare this Chunky Line Art Style Heart to a Uniform Lined Normal Heart. By lining them side by side, the black chunky heart has a non-uniform line. The magenta uniform one has a ten point stroke weight. If you align them you can truly see the difference. Don't you think that the black heart looks as if it's got a lot more character, it looks more organic. This is the style that we're gonna be going with for this tutorial. Before you start, duplicate all your base shapes. I would do this regardless of how confident you are in creating a portrait. Because once you've saved, you can't really go back. It's always good to have backup shapes. I'm then going to select all of the shapes and I'm going to remove the stroke and set the filter black. I'm going to go into Outline Mode. I'm gonna drill into the layer of shapes, and I'm gonna locate the hair shapes. I'm just gonna lock and hide these for now because they're not necessary. I'm gonna do the same with the nails, the eyes, and the lips. I'm gonna focus on the larger shapes here. This is the face shape, the neck and chest, the jacket, and the hand and arm. I'm going to be applying the Chunky Line Art style to these shapes. [BLANK_AUDIO] I'm gonna start in the face at first. Take your time, and draw within the shape. Then once you're done, select both shapes, then go to Pathfinder Minus Front, and there you go, that's our first shape completed. You will know that you've done this correctly if you have a look in the Layers panel, the shape turns from a path to a compound path. I'm going to move on and continue to do the neck and chest shape. Now this is a bit of an unusual shape, as the majority of its boundaries are actually hidden by other shapes. The top of the neck is covered by the face, and the sides of the shape are covered by the jacket. So as long as you draw enough of the shape, that the actual flesh is visible, you don't need to worry about how tidy this shape is. Of course, you will need to make sure that the lines are tidy on the neck as this is where the boundaries are most visible. And then I'm going to move on to do the jacket. Remember once you're done to select both shapes and make sure they're a compound path. I'm gonna move over to the hand and arm shape. And once that is done, all your major shapes now have the chunky line art style. It is a little time consuming but it is worth it. As you can see, parts of these shapes overlap each other. We don't want this to happen. So let's get familiar with the Shape Builder tool. If you select all of your shapes, the four major line art shapes, while holding down Alt, click on any of the unrequired shapes. So we're talking about around the hand, around the jacket neck area. What you'll be left with is only the visible line art shapes that you require for this project. We'll then unhide one of the shapes for the hair and use the Shape Builder tool in the same way just to remove that shape that's overlapping onto the forehead. Let's go on to add the additional details to the portrait. This is done in three different styles. The first being the Chunky Line Art style that we've just went over. The second, I'm going to be using our wonderful brushes that we've made earlier on. First I'm gonna be using the Tapered Triangle brush. I'm going to be using this on the hands to divide the fingers. Now as you can see, the beginning of the brush creates an awkward shape. So I want to modify this so it doesn't create an awkward shape. I'll do this by selecting it, and going to Object Expand. And modifying the nodes around the beginning of the brush. One it's all lined up, we can go on with the rest of the line art. I'm gonna be using the original tapered brush for the nose and the nostrils. This is also then gonna be used for the smaller creases on the hands and the jacket. I'm going to add a stitch detailing on the jacket. In order to do that I'm gonna draw a normal line and then go into the Stroke panel and click Dash. Within that you can specify how big you want the dashes and the gaps in between. This creates a nice subtle detailing. And that's our line art complete. Next time on Vector Portraits for Beginners, we're going to be looking at creating the line art for the mouth. Thanks for listening.