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Drawing into logo into business card
Hello, I’m attempting to convert a drawing I did into a logo for a business card but I’d like to edit the sketch a bit first in Illustrator (which I am a n00b at).
I know with Live Trace, it’ll turn it into a vector image and smooth out the lineage. But I’d also like to straighten out the B and the R and move them closer to the rest of the drawing and darken the wisps at the end of the braid.
Which tools should I use? and should I do some editing in Photoshop first?
Thank you so much in advance for your help! I must get these business cards ordered by the end of the day.
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2 Replies
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Hi there, okay, don’t use the auto-trace in illustrator. It’s not well executed and really only works well with mostly finished art. Your logo, thus far, is a bit rough. Instead, make a new (blank) image in Illustrator at the current size in inches, go to File >> Place and put your rough braids logo on the page. Now, look for the layer you put the image on in the Layers palette. Double-click the layer and, in the dialog box, choose Template and click okay. This locks the layer so no changes can happen, reduces the opacity and make sit easier to trace. Now, create a new layer and start tracing. Illustrator isn’t really that hard to use. Once you get the hang of it, it’s as easy as photoshop. I prefer to trace my own work, usually.
Consider: using a font for the lettering, grab some other art on braids as references to make that execution smoother, what about making the letters out of braids?
Let us know how it works out!
Save early. Save often.
Jonathan Ziegler
http://www.electrictiger.com
520-360-8293 -
I’ll second Jonathan on not using Illustrator’s trace, and his method for setting a BG to be traced (I use a different method, but whatever works 🙂 ).
Where I will suggest something different, though is with the braid.
Illustrator has a quite powerful feature allowing us to create our own custom brushes to be applied to paths, and your braid is a perfect application for that feature. So, I did a quick Google search: “illustrator braid brush” and found a nice tutorial: https://makeitcg.com/create-braid-brush-adobe-illustrator/681/
Once you have the brush made (and you don’t need the corner tile for this piece of artwork) just use the pen tool, draw a path similar to your braid, then apply the brush to the path.
This will give you a powerful tool if you need to adjust the shape of the curve later, or as Jonathan suggested, making the letters out of a braid.
Finally, for the strands at the end. Just use a few curves from the pen tool with simple lines.
Sorry that none of this is automatic.
Steve Crook, Jr.
http://www.stevecrookjr.meI am a simple creative professional that can get my Adobe suite and a few other creative tools to do what I want. Barely. 🙂
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