In this lesson, I want to show you how to illustrate a person in Adobe Illustrator. So to begin, let's reference the file, and I've got this photo here, so I'll go to File, Place, and I will select this image, and I want this as a template, and we'll hit Place. Now we want to make it a little bit larger here, so to do that, let's go to Layers, and let's unlock the layer, hit the Alt, and the Shift key to enlarge the photo. Let's go ahead and lock that again, and this layer, we're going to just call it Strokes, okay. So we're going to use the curvature tool for this, and what I want to start with is just getting the lines themselves and not worrying about the thickness or the variability of the line yet. So I want to keep it at one point, and so for the fill, we'll just turn that off. All right, so what I want to do is just start in certain areas and just kind of walk my way around. So I'm just going to double click here, and I'm just finding points. I'm double clicking to get to a line like so. All right, now hit the Escape key, and then we can bend these here to get these around like so, and hit the Escape key, okay. So let's zoom in a bit here, and then I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm going to come here and around and double click here, here, and then I'll make these adjustments. Escape key, and I will just continue to make shapes and double clicking. And then if I want to round that it's out, we can do that, or we can try rounding it here and adding points, and I'll do this through the entire illustration. And there might be areas where they kind of overlap here, and we'll just overlap these for now. So I'll just continue to work my way down. If you're having a hard time selecting just select off of it, it will move some points like so. And here if you grab a point, you can snap these to the corners and then just re-bin these out. And here if I want to connect this, I would start here and move that out, then drag this and snap it to that point and drag that and snap it to that point. And we have this little section right here. So I want to just click on this and to that. And then let's add one more. I'll make it a little bit longer so it's easier to connect. And then with this, I will actually come up to this point, double click it, and then move that back in position. And we have another one here. So we just select this anchor point, let's drag that down. Hit the escape key, select that anchor point, and move it to lock it. And it's a little bit high, so I'm just going to bring this down a bit, like so. Try to get as few anchor points as possible. We'll do the bottom of the nose and the mouth. And here where this is going to be a solid shape, it's better to just kind of come over this and click there. And we'll do another one there and click there. Now we'll do the rest of the body. So that's looking pretty good. And what I need to do next is add the pupils here. So I'll just use the ellipse tool and we'll make sure that we keep the stroke that's consistent. And I'm going to go to the middle, alt and shift and bring it up. We can nudge it around here. And we want to keep the same eyeball size. So we'll take this shape with the black arrow tool and click the alt to duplicate that shape. We'll move that over and put it in there like so. Okay, so we have a lot of these overlapping shapes. And what we're going to do is use a shape builder tool to merge these and little things like this, like right here. So with the curvature tool. So maybe through here. So if I click on here and click here, then I drag that and snap it to that point. And so we want to make sure that we have everything sort of closed and passed. So this one too, I'm going to close this path here. So I can select this one and let me just drag that across like so. And see, I want this shape to be another one. So I could take this one here and come across this way. It didn't just attach that like so. That's better. And I don't think I need a line for this. So and this is coming a little bit off here. I need to come back in here and just kind of continue to tweak these shapes a bit here. Simplifying this just a bit. Okay, so once we have that, we're going to use the shape builder tool. We'll select everything here and things that we want to cut off. We just subtract. So we'll use the shape builder tool and then we'll just subtract these shapes. So there's one we want to subtract. We want to subtract that one and subtract that. That. That. And just work your way around to make sure that all the overlapping shapes have been removed. So here on the eyes, you'll just want to subtract these shapes here. And this one and that one. And finally, we want to do one more here for the iris reflections. I just do one of those, move that around and duplicate that. And we just have a few more here. So just some of these here. So with the shape builder tool, alt and subtract those shapes here. Don't need this one. And I don't need this one. Let's hide the background and let's just look at the strokes and make sure that they're all working this one more stroke that's probably through here that didn't get. So I'll add that. Okay, so with that, I will use a black arrow tool and think about how I might want to subtract this. Okay, so we have this now. And the last thing we're going to do is just vary the weight of the brush stroke to give it more of a brush painterly look. So we'll use the width tool for that. And we'll just start to add variable line weights, not to get too thick. We'll just add some of these points here and zoom in. And I will just work my way around the drawing to get some interesting line widths. Okay, so just going through this and doing a few more line width tools. Just work your way around and make sure that you got good consistency of line weight all the way through. Now on the hair, it might not matter, it's quite so much because this is going to be filled in black. So you may not see this all the way. And I'm going to turn this off and check. And that looks pretty good. I'm going to put one more little line right here. Then in the next video, we will add our fills, highlights, and shadows. Thanks for watching.
