Illustrator: Sketching

You might have figured out by now that I use AI for most of my 2D rendering these days. But what about sketching? I admit that I don’t use it all the time, but increasingly frequently I’m finding that sketching in Illustrator can actually be extremely effective for very fast, clean, EDITABLE, scalable thumbnails. Here are a few of my tricks.

First of all, make sure that you’ve disabled thumbnail generation in the layers palette. Thumbnails bog down your machine when you’re trying to create lots of geometry very quickly (like when you’re sketching).

I have a custom brush I call “ballpoint” to do basic linework. On all of my brushes I usually make them about 50-75% opacity on ‘multiply’ mode. This way the lines get darker when the cross each other, much like a real marker. This effect is much more apparent with fatter brushes.

I’ve got another brush I call “sharpie”. Just punch up the outlines.

Then I group my linework so it’s easy to lock.

Lock your linework, then create a rough shape to fill it in with the pen tool. This can be very sloppy. Put it beneath the linework so it’s visible.

Here’s where we start getting fancy. Create another shape overlapping the first one.

N

Move it to the back of the first object, then go to object>clipping mask>make. This is the secret to working fast in AI!

You may notice that the first shape now clips the second shape, but loses its fill. In the layers palette, expand the newly clipped group and select the clipping mask. Change it to your base color (red in this case).

Now here’s the magic. Double-click on your clipping group, and Illustrator will draw a gray box around it. This signifies that you are now “inside” the nested group. This means you can draw however you like, and your art will be clipped by the original path. So lets try it.

With the gray box still outlining your clipping group, draw another shape. Don’t bother staying inside the outline: your clipping mask is automatically doing it!

Go crazy! Draw whatever you like inside the clipping mask, it will all stay within your clipping mask. You can do even more crazy things if you nest clipping masks WITHIN clipping masks. Enjoy!

about adam: Adam O'Hern is an industrial design consultant specializing in visual brand languages, and has designed products ranging from laptops to power tools, classroom toys to bathroom fixtures, and robots to lint rollers. He has published with 3DWorld Magazine, CGTuts+, and Luxology, and works with Josh Mings of SolidSmack.com on EngineerVsDesigner.com.