Digital Doodles

Okay, so after spending a good majority of my evenings this week working with Illustrator and my Wacom, I've come to the conclusion that I... hate it. No, hate is a strong word. I just feel a huge block trying to work on the computer. It's strange, because when I design, I need to work on the computer, but doodling/drawing/sketching, I just need to do it on paper, at least for now.

So, I've finally worked out a technique I'm comfortable with -- doodling on paper, then importing into Adobe Illustrator. Surprisingly, as long as the lines I drew were nice and solid, I was able to do a Live Trace in the program and add color.

And, guess how I imported it?? With my iPhone! (Hallelujah! Halllllelujah!) Quick and Easy!

I took a photo in good lighting with my phone then adjusted the levels with the Afterlight app -- The settings I used in Afterlight: Clarity first to bring out the black lines, then Brightness to lighten up the paper, then Contrast to bring out both the highlights and shadows. That order worked best.

Then I just emailed the file to myself, copied the image and pasted it into an Illustrator doc. I used Image Trace to turn it into a scalable vector image. I'm not opposed to tracing the images by hand using the pen tool or brush tool with my Wacom tablet, but I was happy for this quick fix now. Here are the settings I used:

Open the Image Trace Window to adjust settings.
I used default values, except for:
Threshold: 200
Paths: 90%
Corners: 90%
Noise: 25px

I'm assuming I'll need to use different values for different images, depending on the level of detail drawn, but I think this is a good starting point.

Once the trace is done, Object > Expand will reveal the paths around your image. You can select the shapes and color them or use the Live Paint feature to make it a little faster.

I'm really happy with how clean the final product is and can't wait to digitize some of my new doodles and zentangles!