Being able to show a potential client what you can do is great, but you need to demonstrate to them how your work can be used on a commercial level. In today’s tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a happy, dancing girl illustration and then incorporate it into a magazine style article design.
I’m going to be using stock purchased from the new Envato marketplace PhotoDune and modifying it through to vectoring our dancing girl. We’ll make her a bit more glamorous along the way and then onto adding her into a magazine layout.
You can find the images I’ve used in this tutorial from here and here.
Step 1
I’m going to be using two stock images. I wanted a full body reference, however the one I chose had the model not looking at the camera. So from the same set of photo stock, I picked another image, which I am going to use Photoshop to modify.
Using the Lasso Tool (L) with a 5px Feather, I drew around the head area. When moving a face and neck to another image, remember to select around the chest area. This is because of how the neck muscles behave.
Once selected, I Copy (Command + C) and Paste (Command + V) the head onto my full body stock image.
Step 2
Using the Move Tool (V), I rotate and rescale the head to fit the body.
To test whether you’ve positioned and scaled it correctly, you can drop the Opacity of the layer to compare where the forehead and chin are on the underlying image. This will give you a good reference point to decide whether you’ve made the head too large or too small.
Step 3
Take note of elements from the reference image that seem a bit off, for instance if you look at the straps for the dress there seems to be something not correct there. On further inspection, the strap on the right is distorted more than it should, so when it comes to vectoring this I’m going to modify it.
Elements such as skin tone (it slightly differs in the face and body), can be easily resolved in the vectoring stage.
Crop the image (C) and then Save for Web & Devices with about an 800px width.
Step 4
Create a New document in Illustrator and then File > Place the stock image on the canvas. Rename the layer folder to “Reference” and lock the folder.
Create a New Layer and rename it to “BG”. Use the Rectangle Tool (M) to draw a white filled rectangle over the canvas and reduce the Opacity to 30%. Once done, lock the folder.
Create a New Layer and rename it to “Bases”.
Step 5
Using the Pen Tool (P) begin drawing the skin base for the model. I’ve used a skin tone color of C=10, M=35, Y=45, K=0. I’ve also made each of the shapes into a Compound Path (Command + 8). As you can see from the bases the distortion of the strap is even more obvious.
