Minimal vector portraits
YOUR STYLE AND THEMES are a huge part of your work and can eventually become your design language. However, you may not want to limit yourself to one specific style and, besides, it’s fun to find a new look and theme and play around with it. Illustrator is a great platform to design new ideas and to practice working on different styles. One of the most popular art styles you can create in Illustrator is flat vector artwork, which is something we touched on in our previous tutorials. This time, we focus on turning portrait pictures into flat vector artwork.
There are plenty of ways to use this technique. You can create images for yourself, such as a quirky profile picture for your design work or web page, or you could do it in a business way and create Illustrator images for customers. It could also be used as a gift idea and is endlessly customizable, it’s a great way to spruce up a picture. Using the techniques in this tutorial, you can put this to the test and try it with other images, including landscape shots. –SAM LEWIS
1 GETTING STARTED
As always, we need to be organized throughout a project. This means keeping everything neat and tidy, ensuring that all the separate layers and items are where they need to be and are named appropriately.
>> Open up Illustrator and click ‘create new’. For this project, we have decided to go with an RGB color space, but this is up to you—remember, though, use RGB for digital, and CMYK for print. Using the presets along the top, we select the poster workspace under the Art & Illustration tab. We also change the raster effects from 72dpi to 300dpi.
>> Once this is done, we can really start to get into this project. The first thing we need is a reference image. For this tutorial, it helps if the image is straight on, especially as we’re just practicing our techniques at first. Further down the line, we’ll be able to experiment with different angles and subjects.
>> We head to one of our favorite license-free image sites, Unsplash( https://unsplash.com) to browse for a suitable image. Once we have selected an image, we place it into our Illustrator document, crop it to size, and turn the opacity down [ Image A].
Then we rename this layer as ‘reference’ and create a new layer called ‘art’, this is what we will be drawing on.
2 FACE TO FACE
The first area of the image we will be focusing on is the face. We will be creating this symmetrically by tracing over one side first then reflecting it to create the full face.
>> To find the centerline of the face, we need to bring a rule into the middle. Pressing ‘CTRL’ + ‘R’ will give a ruler border to the artboard. Then, simply click and drag from the side to bring a guide line out.
>> Once we have established the center, we need to use the pen tool. This is found in the left side tool panel, or with the shortcut ‘P’. Then what you need to do is draw an outline of the face as seen above [ Image B].
>> The next tool we need to use is the reflect tool ‘O’. We click on the center guideline that was created earlier to set the reflection point. Next, we click on the shape created, and hold ‘SHIFT + ALT’ whilst, at the same time, dragging the reflected copy of the shape. Then, make sure both sides of the shape are selected and open up the properties tab. In this tab, under the pathfinder options, click the ‘unite’ button to create one shape, then choose a skin color with another stroke.