Creating A Funky Looking Vector Sheep
by Jaymz
For those of you who know me from P2L, you probably know that my Twodded blog frequently features a cartoon sheep. This was my first vector, and I'm going to pass the information on to you. This is a fairly basic tutorial using Adobe Illustrator.
This will be our end result:
Step One
Create a new document. I made mine 400x250 so that there would be enough room to work with, but so that I could post the final product here without too much resizing. If you plan on printing your artwork, choose CMYK Color otherwise choose RBG Color.
Step Two
Choose a color other than white for now, so that we can see the basic shapes we are creating.
Select the ellipse tool.
Click anywhere on the document, and set the size to 50px by 50px.
Step Three
Use the selection tool to select our circle. We will be duplicating it to create the wool of the sheep.
Step 4
Copy and paste the circle using CTRL+C and CTRL+V. Move the duplicate beside the original, overlapping slightly. Continue doing this until you have something that looks like:
Be sure to fill in any whitespace in the middle with more ellipses.
Step 5
Click the square to the right of the current layer in the layers pallette to select all shapes in the current layer.
Step 6
Click to the "Pathfinder" tab (beside Layers) and click the "merge" button.
You should now have something that looks like this:
Step 7
Now that our wool is merged, we can go ahead and turn it white, and add a nice black stroke to complete the cartoon look.
While we're at it, let's rename the layer "Wool" to keep things organized.
Step 8
Create a new layer, and drag it below our Wool layer. Your layers pallette should look like this:
Use the paintbrush tool
To draw the head. It may take a couple tries to get it to look right, but generally the head can be lumpy and still look fine.
Step 9
Use the brush tool to create some quick details, such as the facial features, legs, and a tail.
Obviously this was a quick representation, but with some modification of the anchor points, you can easily smoothen the lines and create a better quality image, such as this one. I will probably take some time to fix his face and edit this post later
Registered Members in (members & premier members groups only) can find the ai file in our downloads database :: Here ::
