Freehand Drawing In Illustrator. 7 Steps To Follow

In this tutorial, we will take a closer look at the possibilities of the freehand drawing in Illustrator. We will learn how to draw naturally and loosely. If you ever wanted to make a quick digital drawing in Illustrator but had no idea where to start, this guide is for you! You will learn how to set up your workspace in Illustrator, how to use the Pen Tool to draw (even if you “can’t” draw), and how to harness the power of keyboard shortcuts.

Freehand drawing in Illustrator

Follow these steps to learn how to drawing freehand in illustrator:

Step 1: Set up the document

First of all, we are going to need create a new illustrator documentWe prefer to work with multiple art boards and distribute our work across them to avoid clutter. In this case, we would start our work with a square document with the following settings:

We will use this art board for drawing and use another identically sized art board for the final illustration. We would also use separate art boards for different color versions, which we will show at the end of this tutorial.

The easiest way to work with work tables is to use the Workbench tool and the Artboard panel. Once the Artboard tool is selected, you just need to hold down the key Alt/Option and drag to duplicate an Artboard.

There is an option located right in the options bar at the top, which is called Move/Copy artwork with artboard. If you have this enabled, your artwork will be copied along with your artboard. There are a couple of useful keyboard shortcuts when working with artboards:

• Fit selected artboard to screen: Command/Control-0
• Fit all artboards to screen: Command/Control-Alt/Option-0

Maybe you may be interested: How to Create Shapes in Illustrator – Complete Guide

Step 2: Sketching

Sketching is a useful part of the illustration workflow, where you can freely experiment and search for shapes and composition. At this initial stage, you are not limited to anything, you just need to play around and quickly draw various versions of the object or character you plan to illustrate.

Don't spend too much time detailing your sketches and correcting your line work, as you should do that in the next stage. For drawing, it's best to use the Pencil toolYou can edit its options by double-clicking its icon in the toolbar. These are the settings we prefer to work with for drawing:

Step 3: Setting up the Blob Brush Tool

Once you have a clear idea of ​​what you want to draw, you can easily switch to a different tool. To make a freehand drawing in Illustrator, we prefer to use the Smudge brushThis is an especially useful tool if you have a pressure-sensitive Pen Tablet or Pen Display.

We prefer to work with a Wacom Intuos, but it's not the only way; you can also work well with a Wacom Bamboo. As with the Pen tool, you can access the options by double-clicking the icon located on the tool in the toolbar. These are the settings we recommend using:

Please note that we have the option enabled Merge with selection only. This is going to be important in the next step. If you want to take full advantage of your tablet's pressure sensitivity, all you need to do is choose Pressure for the parameter Size and configure the Variation as high or close to the Size value.

This setting will give you great control over your lines and help you achieve a much more natural and organic drawing style. Don't worry if you only have a mouse, as you can still achieve great results without pressure sensitivity.

Step 4: Draw with the Blob Brush Tool

Once you start your freehand drawing in Illustrator with the Smudge brush, you don't have to worry about overlapping lines as you can always get rid of them easily with the tool Shape Creator. Let us give you an example. Let's draw this sample pair of lines. Now we'd like to clean them up a bit:

To start cleaning, select all the lines and then choose the tool Shape creator (Shift-M). If you hold down the key Alt/Option and you draw over the overlapping parts, you can quickly remove them while keeping all the other lines.

You can continue the freehand drawing in Illustrator without deleting these unnecessary bits and only delete them once you have everything in place.

Step 5: Color your drawing

This is probably the most fun part of freehand drawing in Illustrator, as the program has a great feature that makes adding color to your line art very easy and fairly quick. This tool is called Live Paint Bucket Tool. Like the Shape Builder tool, you also need to select everything first and then you can click on any area of ​​your created artwork to turn it into a Live Paint Group.

Once this special group is created, you can simply fill each part with different colors. By pressing the right and left arrows, you can quickly switch between colors from your Swatches panel. It is recommended to choose a color palette before this step to keep a nice and consistent tonal theme. We used the following colors for our illustration:

Step 6: Add highlights and shadows

Once you have your colors in place in your freehand drawing in Illustrator, you can start adding more depth to your illustration by adding shadows and highlights. For highlights, you can simply use a glossier version of the same shade you used on each part, and for shadows you can do the same by using a more somber version of the base tones.

Step 7: Recolor

If you decide to change any of the colors you used, simply select them all and click the icon recolor the illustration at the top of the options bar. Using this feature is fairly straightforward and can effectively alter any of the hues used in your artwork. As an example, here's how to change the pink to green in our artwork:

And this is how the cake looks after recoloring it:

Well done for your hard work with freehand drawing in Illustrator and hopefully this tutorial will help you create your own cool illustrations with the use of simple tools.

You may want to know: How to Combine or Merge Shapes in Illustrator – Complete Guide

Keyboard shortcuts

Our freehand drawing in Illustrator isn't a masterpiece, but it gets the idea across, and hopefully you're now more comfortable with freehand drawing in Illustrator. As a takeaway, here's a rundown of some of the keyboard shortcuts to make your life easier for editing:

• A = Direct selection tool; use to click on anchor points to edit them.
• P = Tool Pel; use to add or remove anchor points.
• Q = Tool Bow; use it to quickly select multiple anchor points
• V = Selection tool; default cursor for when you want to move shapes

FAQs

Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions from new users regarding freehand drawing in Illustrator:

Can you draw in Illustrator?

You can draw lines, shapes, and illustrations freely and with ten drawing layers and one photo layer. And when you return to your desk, connectivity Creative Cloud makes it easy to apply the finishing touches, whether in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Which tool allows you to draw most freely in Illustrator?

The tool Pencil, which can be found by clicking the tool Brush which is right there on the toolbar. It is usually used for creating more free-form paths; it is similar to the experience of drawing on paper using a pencil.

How do I convert hand drawing to digital in Illustrator?

These are the steps to follow:

• Step 1: scan or take a photo of your work.
• Step 2: open your photo in Photoshop.
• Step 3: drop your adjusted artwork into Illustrator.
• Step 4: Convert your artwork into vector using Image Trace.
• Step 5: expand and ungroup your letters and make final adjustments.

What is freehand digital illustration?

Freehand drawing in Illustrator is created in the same way that artists use pen and ink to create a traditional illustration. Artists who create digital art use a stylus or tablet pen to give your imagination a concrete form. Freehand digital illustration is used for storyboarding, animation, recreation, among other things.

Is it better to draw freehand in Photoshop or Illustrator?

Photoshop is easier to draw, Illustrator is easier to edit and make changes later. Illustrator, being a vector-based program, has a learning curve. You will need to learn how to use the tool Feather and other tools for drawing circles and curves. You'll need to use different techniques than the Brush tool in Photoshop.

Can you draw in Adobe?

With the help of online services of Adobe Acrobat, you can draw directly on a PDF to visually mark your edits. Freehand drawing on a PDF is the perfect way to clearly show what content you want to move or remove entirely.

What is the Hand Tool in Illustrator?

The Hand Tool (H) moves the Illustrator artboard within the artwork window. The Print Tile Tool adjusts the page grid to control where the artwork appears on the printed page.

How do I make my own illustrations?

Here is the step-by-step guide for illustrations that designers should follow to create amazing illustrations:

• Step 1: Get inspired.
• Step 2: organize your ideas.
• Step 3: Make sketches.
• Step 4: Complete the drawing.
• Step 5: refine your idea.
• Step 6: Make it stand out.
• Step 7: Think about details, depth and framing.

How do I convert sketch to Illustrator?

You can also import your sketch directly into Illustrator. To use a sketch as a template, open your Illustrator document and simply place the image as you would any photo. Put it on its own layer so you can toggle visibility on and off to check progress.

How to make a pencil sketch in Illustrator?

Choose Effect > Stylize > Scribble. Create a sketch using the Scribble effect. Select the object or group (or point to a layer in the Layers panel). To apply the effect to a specific object attribute, such as a stroke or fill, select the object and then select the attribute in the Layers panel. Appearance.

What are the different illustration styles?

Block illustration, charcoal illustration, ink illustration, woodcut illustration, watercolor, pencil illustration, collage illustration and acrylic illustration.

Do you have to draw an illustration?

In short, illustration is a visualization made by an artist. It is a drawing (or painting, collage, engraving, photo, etc.) that explains something. Illustration does not have to be drawn. A photo in an encyclopedia is also an illustration, because it explains what is written.

What media do illustrators use?

Illustration media, 3D/CGI rendering, digital media, line drawing, painting, pen and ink, pencil, crayon, watercolor and gouache.

Is Illustrator harder than Photoshop?

Illustrator is difficult to master and is a graphics program that we would use less frequently than Photoshop. Although the basics of Illustrator can be mastered very quickly, you will almost certainly use Photoshop more than Illustrator, especially if you are interested in web design and image manipulation.

Should I learn Photoshop or Illustrator first?

Depending on the need You choose one. But if you plan to learn both as part of graphic design software, learning Photoshop first will be helpful as a beginner. Once you do the basics, image processing, and get used to it, the next step will be Adobe Illustrator as a pure graphic tool.

Take a look at: Illustrator Looks Like Lines: Correcting Lines In Illustrator Patterns

Final thoughts

There you go, you now know how to work with freehand drawing in Illustrator. Ultimately, the best way to learn how to use Illustrator (or any tool) is to just dive in and keep looking around. Google every question you have (we can answer many of them here; go to our website and you'll find plenty of tutorials). It's okay if you feel uncomfortable with it or if it takes you a while to learn it. It happens to everyone! So good luck with your design.