Vector Portaits Tutorial

So those are basic rules of vector drawing. To show just what all that means, and what it can produce, lets have a quick walk through for creating an image. In this case we are going to take a photograph, and using it as a guide, create fills that match with the general areas of colour.

		Here is the source picture I’m going to use, of my friend, Disco Stu, on a night out. The general idea of this style I'm going to apply to this picture is to pick out general, similar areas of colour, and turn the normal gradient quality of the photograph into a few blocks of single colour.
	This is something like what the final result should be. As you can see, it looks quite arty, but because it is a trace over the original image, it actually doesn’t take that much drawing ability to produce. That’s not to say it is easy, and you will need practice, time and patience to learn how to pick the correct areas of colour, and correct arrangement of layers. But the end result is quick to relatively quick to make, looks cool and creates a nice small (in file size) and adaptable image useful in bio pictures, desktop patterns and generally impressing your mates.
		Before you begin, its good practice to play around with newspaper or magazine photographs and a biro, dividing the areas of colour up using the lines. This should help you get to grips with where it is best to build up each different colour object. Its also a good idea to make sure you have a good photo, as the final image will only be as good as the original allows. High contrast, few colours, and a distinctive image will help create the most impact in your piece.

First of all, take a good long look at your image. Where are the major blocks of colour? For backgrounds its best to keep them as simple as possible, so as not to clutter up the image, so I will ignore anything that isn’t Stu. That leaves four major areas, his hands, his face and his shirt. Behind that I will just leave it black. So lets treat these areas of colour individually.

Import the picture into Illustrator or Photoshop, or whatever you are using, place it in a layer of its own, and lock it so it can’t move. Now you're ready to trace over it with paths.

The way to work through a picture like this is to start with the block of major colour at the bottom, and place the smaller areas of highlights, shadow, and detail above. So let us start by tracing the major block of pink that makes up the hand.

Anchor points are placed at every major corner or change in shape on the hands outline, and then adjusted so the curve traces around it snugly. It doesn’t have to be perfect here, and finer detail can be ignored.

If you’re working in Illustrator like I am here, it may automatically try to fill in the shape your drawing, obscuring the picture below. Change the fill of the shape to blank (represented by a red line through a white box in the colour picker) so you can see what’s going on below.

Once you are satisfied, fill the shape a pinkish colour, and you will see you now have an amorphous pink blob. Lovely. At its most basic like this you can barely even make out what its meant to be, and in order to create the illusion of shape you will need to create new objects for the highlights and shadows. This will creating shading, and help show the 3D form of the object in the picture.

On this hand, there is a lot of white, as it’s been right up close to the flash when the picture was taken. So I’ve gone right around this large block of near white skin with the pen tool, and made another object. This is where you will need to develop a good eye for the colours of the picture, as there might not be a fine division between the highlight and the body colour.

Make the first object you made blank again, so you can see the photograph behind. Then trace around, as best you can, the white highlighted parts of the hand. In some places it is easy, but in others there is not clear distinction so you will have to play around until it looks right. No real tricks here, beyond fiddling till it works. Go around all the highlights on the object like this.

When you give the objects their proper fills again, the highlighted object should actually have some form, and look a bit more like what it’s supposed to be.

On the hand I'm drawing, I wanted the thumb to look distinct from the rest of the hand, so I cut and pasted the anchor points from the original object, to make a new object with a slightly different shade.

I then went onto the next hand and repeated the process.

After adding the highlights, the next step is adding major areas of shadow. There’s not much shadow on Stu’s hand, but what little there is needs to be divided up in the same way as the highlights. Note that here is where object arrangement becomes important. The shadow needs to go underneath the highlights. And where it does, you don’t need to add any detail, as it will be covered by the objects above it.

Moving onto the face, the process is repeated. However, this is where you need to be aware of the importance of the small details. On Stu’s hair, for example, the position of every hair strand is not important. I shaped his fringe to give the general idea of the shape of his hairline, but beyond that further detail is not needed, as no one will ever notice it. The same applies to the ears. However, when moving onto his face, you have to remember the importance of details. The human brain has a dedicated area designed to study human faces, evolved for recognising others and communication. And as any artist who’s ever done a portrait knows, the face is therefore the hardest thing to draw. Even a slight adjustment of an eyebrow or lip can change the appearance or expression of a face, and it doesn’t take much to make a face appear distorted or inhuman. So when you are tracing areas around the eyes and mouth, take extra care and pay particular attention to detail.
	For the rest of the face I made sure I added the lines and dimples that make up expression, even when they weren’t terribly distinct areas of colour. This means the final face has more than just one colour for highlights, one for shadows, and one for the main body. It has about six to make sure the distinctions between the lips, eyebrows and lines on the face were clear. Trying to keep the number of different colours to the minimum is a good idea, for creating a simple looking image, but you have to balance this with displaying enough of the detail from the photo. This is why high contrast photos, with strong shadows and highlights, can work best, as you may only need one or two different shades to pick up all the details.

The eyes were created separatly in a layer of their own, at the "front" of the image. Again, eyes are very expressive, and care has to be taken to get them right, in order to
	For the hair I just placed an object of brown below the main face object. The top of the head blends with the black of the background in the photo, and so I didn’t need to add any more distinction to it. The same went for the shirt, in which only a few small highlights of blue were visible.

Getting to a final image that your happy with can take some time, and is often a matter of having the confidence to pursue the image to the end. But as you can see, the results can be pretty effective.

Getting the colours in Illustrator can be tricky, as you can’t sample colours from the traced picture directly. So you will have to estimate the colours you want to choose by eye. But this is not much of a problem, as it is the different tones, rather than colours that show the detail. You can even put in false colours, to create different artistic effects.

In Photoshop, it is easier to get the colours you want, by using the eyedropper tool set to give a 3x3 average, and sampling directly from the photo. But handling the different layers can be tricky. Each path will need to be filled into a separate layer, and the layers ordered correctly. But ultimately the effects will be the same.

Using paths is not the only way to create an image like this however. You can simply use the airbrush and layers in Photoshop, to create a similar, but less smooth, looking picture. The finished result will look more artistic, but will be less clean and requires a good drawing hand (and probably a drawing tablet) to produce.

Also, you can use Photoshop filters such as “median” to do it for you, but they are less precise.