Illustrator Mascot design Tutorial.
The making of Gloopix, from start to finish!!!.
Step 0.- Search for Inspirational reference images.
( Images obtain from Google ).
Ok we first need to have some inspiration to create our cute good looking mascot, what I did was to look for famous characters with a clean and also cute aspect, also I wanted to make a kind of simple character I mean for example I was not intented to look for realistic characters nor comics, etc. I was more in search for Manga-mascot characters or alike, at least this time, well these are the images I found which gave me the inspiration for Gloopix.:
1.- Tokidoki cactus pup
2.- The ewoks.
3.- Mario Bros in his takooni suite.
Step 1.- Sketching Process.
On this step you will give yourself the freedom of drawing whatever comes to your mind you can leave it incomplete if you want to and then jump to another thing, combine both, etc. In this step everything is permitted I would say that the only aspect to take care of in our case is to have in mind our references and the style of our new creation which is cartoon - manga, for example dont make realistic human faces or muscles, etc.
Here are is our winner sketch for Gloopix.
Step 2.- Clean up and Refine character lines.
The purpose of the refining line process is to clean up our messy sketch and have a cleaner version of the character without noisy lines that are not ment to be part of it, this way is easier to follow those lines in the vectorization process.
On this process you might want to make a bigger version of your sketch so you can see more clear every line and every part of the character making the refining process a little easier, now if your skecth is big enough you might want to skip the enlargement part, but as mine is kind of small I would prefer to do it.
To make the sketch larger you may need a Scanner with reduction and enlargement capabilities, and if you dont have one you can pay less than a dollar for this service at any local copy - print center office.
Once it is enlarged to a A4 size we are ready to start refining lines, for this step we need translucid paper or tracing paper, we put the tracing paper above our enlarged sketch and secure it with masking tape on the corners and finally start redrawing all the lines of our character.
Step 2-b (Optional).- Skipping Refining character lines ( photoshop aproach ).
If you find the enlargement part not practical or time consuming you may want to skip that step and directly scan your raw character sketch at a 300 dpi, and place the scanned image into photoshop for some little image adjustments to remove noisy lines and or pencil stains. So you need to open your Photoshop application, create a new document, then go to File>Open, and look for the sketching file then go to Image>Adjustments>Levels and adjust the levels of grey, black and white to remove as much pencil stains as you can.
The screen above shows the values of black, grey and white that worked for my sketch, yours may vary acording on your sketch and how dirty it is.
Once you are done adjusting the levels, save your new sketch in your computer, we are going to use it later in the vectorization process.
Step #3 bellow is connected after Step#2 ( Refining & enlargement of the skecth ).
Step 3 .- Scaning your refined sketch.
Depending of the make or model of your scanner you could see many different interfaces, with different options but any scaner interface should have for sure the Scan Button and a Option ¨Drop Down menu¨ to choose the resolution of the image, in our case we will scan our refined sketch at a 300 dpi resolution.
Step 4.- Vectorization process ( Building Vectors )
In this process we will start vectorizing our character to do this we need to go to our Illustrator aplication and open it, create a new document, save it as..... lets say ¨Gloopix.ai¨ , then go to file> place and browse for your scanned jpg file.
Once the scanned image is placed in our Illustrator document we need to resize it so it fits in the working area, we do this by positioning the cursor on one of the corners and pressing shift at the same time while we drag the corner to the center of the image.
At this moment we are ready to start building our vector lines, in this case I´m going to make every part of the character and create several layers (one for each part of our mascot) we do this mainly beacuse we dont want to select, change or delete by mistake other parts of the mascot as we continue further in the vectorization process, the advantage of using layers in Illustrator is that we can lock them to prevent unwanted modifications.
The components of the character that I´m going to vectorize separately are: The ears, eyebrowns, eyes, ckeeks,nose, eye thooth - fangs, whiskers, arms, legs, belly and feet.
Note: There might be other aproaches on how to vectorize a paper character in this case I´m following this method that turns out to work for me, but definetely this is not the only method, it also depends of the kind or style of illustration you are aproaching to.
We mainly use the pen tool trough the whole vectorization process, Here is how to use it.
Step 4.- Light source, shadows and bright areas.
We have pretty much a 80% of our character the next 20 % is as important or more than what has already been done, adding bright areas and shadows will make our character to have volume changing the actual flat look of it, and will give it the bright-cute overlook that this character needs.
And we are ready to create our shadows, bellow is shown a shadow shape for the left arm, ( character´s right arm ) , we are using the pathfinder - divide method.
