Day 5

Objectives

General Objectives

  • Students will be able to paint drawings
  • Students will understand and be able to use image trace

Specific Objectives

  • Painting
    • Students will be able to trace and color a drawing using the blob brush tool
    • Students will be able to cut and edit shapes with the eraser and knife tools
  • Image trace
    • Students will be able to image trace a raster image
    • Students will be able to fill in a line drawing with live paint
    • Students will be able to expand the appearance of a drawing, live trace object, or live paint group

Practice files: https://files.learnsoftware.org/illustrator/

Outline

Intro/Hook [completed class files or something else you have created with painting or image trace tools]

Painting

  • Blob brush tool
    • Works like the brush tool, except the strokes are turned into shapes
    • Example Question: How is the blob brush different from the brush?
    • Example Question: (while using koi fish blob brush.ai) How should we organize our layers to keep the color underneath the outline?
  • Eraser and knife tools
    • Eraser tool: click and drag to erase parts of the image
    • Knife tool: cuts image along freehand path you draw

Image trace

  • Image trace
    • What image trace does
    • Different options (high fidelity, black and white logo, silhouette, etc.)
    • Example Question: Why might someone want to create vector versions of their raster images?
  • Live paint
    • Object > Live Paint > Make
    • Live paint bucket tool
  • Expand appearance
    • Expands object into more shapes that make up its appearance
    • Example Question: Why is expanding appearance useful?
    • Example Question: Which menu is expand appearance under again?

Conclusion

  • Recap
    • Painting
    • Image Trace
  • Next time
    • Text Effects

Example Activities

Koi fish

Lock this image in Illustrator, and create new layers above it, then use the blob brush to paint over the outlines with black. Create another new layer between those two, and use the blob brush to fill in the color of the fish with orange. Use the eraser tool to trim spots where you painted outside the lines, and add shadows and highlights either by cutting the shape apart with the knife tool and adjusting the color of some parts, or by drawing shapes on top with some of the day 4 tools and making them a mostly-transparent black or white.  For an extra challenge, use these tools to make the fish some pattern of orange, yellow, white, and black instead of solid orange.

Image trace and live paint fruit drawing

Have students download the live trace file, then they can live trace it (the default setting is for line drawings, and will work wonderfully), hit expand, then select Object > Live paint > Make to create a live paint group. Paint the fruit using colors from your default swatches, or find a swatch library with good colors.

If students run into problems because of gaps, have them select Object > Live paint > Gap options (or the gap options icon in the control panel) to open the gap options dialog box, and change the options until Illustrator will detect the large gap. Then they can live paint successfully.

Once you are done live painting, be sure to select Object > expand to return the live paint group to being regular objects, so you can keep editing them with the normal tools.

Trace your own photo

Students can easily learn about a number of the options in the image trace panel by live tracing an image of their own, such as one of their social media profile pictures. Have them download the image and place it in Illustrator, then use the image trace panel to vectorize it. Set different amounts of colors, or play with the other settings on the panel, and see how each affects the result. This is also a good way to let students see a wide variety of images and get a feel for which types of images will trace well and which won’t.

If there is time, students can also explore the recolor artwork options (found under Edit > Edit colors > Recolor artwork) to further stylize their traced image. This requires that the image trace be expanded first.