Illustration Colour Development Adobe Illustrator

The scanned illustration was brought into Adobe Illustrator and a live trace was applied to vectorise each drawn line. The live colour tool was then applied to add the required colours to each section of the illustration.










Gradients were applied to the arrows first as these are the largest part of the illustration and because a two colour blend was required in some cases. This proved quite difficult and required a number of tweaks before colour layout was finalised.










Colour was then applied to the rest of the illustration and the outer tracing lines were either removed or coloured as well to be included in the design. Some tracing lines that weren't quite straight or had been altered when the file was vectorised were then tweaked and straightened out using the select and modify line tool.











It was then decided to amend the eye direction in the illustration. To ensure it successfully fitted with the piece the eye was altered to face outwards, like other elements of the design, rather than face-on like it was previously. This created a smooth flow to the overall illustration. The eye was then traced and coloured like the rest of the piece.











Paths were then created for the song lyrics to be placed upon using the freehand line tool. With my tablet PC I was able to construct these text paths by drawing on my screen. The lyrics of the song were then entered along these flowing paths to give a sense of direction to the piece.











The final element was adding the various ages mentioned throughout the song around the perimeter of the illustration this was done using the text tool and the fonts were already decided from previous design & sketch work. The inclusion of the ages easily allows the user to recognise a flow to the piece as they will start off with the lowest age and work their way through the layout.

The last thing to do was select the whole documents and convert the text and fonts used to outlines so they would become drawing items rather than text and ensure no font restrictions could be applied to them if the document was opened elsewhere.




















The final illustration was then taken in Adobe Photoshop and placed on a previously scanned cardboard texture background ready for printing onto the final record sleeve piece.