From the course: Drawing Simplified Maps in Illustrator

Importing a sketch - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Drawing Simplified Maps in Illustrator

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Importing a sketch

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- [Instructor] Okay, so in this chapter, we're going to be building a simplified map, using some of the skills we have already and developing techniques from those. And that all starts, of course, with a new document and a sketch. So let's go ahead and create that document. So here in Illustrator, I'm going to choose Create New on the left here or File, New from that menu and then I'm going to go to the Art & Illustration tab, down to View All Presets and I'm going to choose A4 just here. Now, when I do that, I'm going to make sure that it is in landscape orientation and I'm going to set the raster effects resolution to 300 ppi here because some effects, such as glows, for example, and shadows, they actually create images in the background. So we'll keep that kind of high just there and also, I'm working in millimeters because in this part of the world that's what we use. Don't worry if you would rather use inches. You can change it, it won't really matter. Just remember that when you do add some measurements that I will give in a couple of places, just to add mm on the end and it'll convert those across to inches for you. So once we've done that, hit Create and our new document will be created like so and we can go straight ahead and add in the sketch. So Shift + Command + P or Shift + Control + P would be the shortcut to place. But you could also go to the File menu and choose Place and then navigate out to the exercise files, if you have them. If not, just use anything of your own or just free draw it however you want. So this is the one I'm going to use. mapSketch just here. And I'm simply going to click on the artboard like so and with this one single element selected, what I should be able to do is align this to the artboard in the center in both ways. Now, if you're not seeing that option, then you'll be able to choose align to artboard there from the dropdown but it should be with just one element active. And if you don't have the control strip active, you can always use the Properties panel just here as well. All right, let's work on the layer now. So if we go to the Layers panel here and double click to the side of Layer 1, just to the right-hand side there, and we'll call this Sketch. We're then going to click on the word Template to enable that option. And what this will do is will dim that image to 50% and also lock the layer for us. If we hit OK, there you go. Our layer is now sitting there as a drawing template. We can then go ahead and add a new layer by clicking on the small plus at the bottom of the panel. And we can double click on its name and we'll call this one Roads like so. And then you can save this document so you're ready for the next movie.

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