One technique to try in logo design is to trace over a photo so in this example
we're going to trace over a photo. Here's the, you see it here, here's the original photo.
I just took it on a lake and then the final result is just a pretty simple
logo and you'll notice it's not an exact trace because we need to simplify it. You do want
to stylize it but you also want to keep it simple otherwise it's just going to be a very busy
logo. So I'm going to go to File, New and hit OK, zoom in here and then
just go to File, Place and I'm going to use the same photo from earlier, this swan here.
Click and let go. It's a little bit large, it doesn't fit on our artboard here, so if you do want to
fit it on the artboard, we can resize it. So just click and drag the corner there,
hold SHIFT to maintain the original proportion,
and if you zoomed in, remember, you can do CTRL on the PC or command on the MAC
and plus or minus, when you zoom in and zoom out. Alright. So we have our image here and I
have layers. If you don't have that we do need to do that for these tracing
exercises. So just go to Window and go to Layers and make sure that's checked. I also have
Pathfinder up and then the Tools panel of course. I'm actually going to bring up
the color. I do have a color, it's just not on screen. We pull it up here so you can see it.
There we go. We need to just draw these, really just three areas right in the
background. So four shapes unless we create a couple of shapes here and combine them in
the Pathfinder. So for this I'm going to create a new layer. I like to just have a
new layer for every single element just to keep it simple. So go ahead and choose the Pen
tool for this example I'm going to set the Fill to None and then the Stroke to something
that we can see, 1 point is fine. I don't want to fill because as you draw,
it would start to cover up some of the area and it would be difficult to trace over here.
So, for this one, I'm just going to trace over the body here so click and let go, click and let go
Then I've got to curve it so click and drag ,using the pen tool here.
I need to reset that angle so I'm going to click that again, like that. I'm trying to use as few points
as possible, and this will just come straight over here, and this back area here.
I'm going to create one like so, reset that angle. Create another one, I'm actually going to bring
it over here a little bit. It's not an exact trace, right. And I'm going to make one
more right over here and bring this back up here, click and drag. I just need to reset that angle.
Something like that. It doesn't matter that it goes across there because this is going to be below the other
elements like the beak and that area there. If any of you are biologists,
I don't know what that is called but you would know and this is the eye here. So we can go ahead and
fill this in if we want. So I'm going to flip that so there's no stroke and a fill and this will
be white for this example. Set the Fill to white So it's going to look like that and we can always adjust
it later of course. So I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to toggle the
visibility of that layer that we just created because I want to actually be
able to see this beak here. I'm going to zoom in and set the Fill and the Stroke to None again
and see the beak here, just click that there. Make sure you have the Pen tool selected.
Reset that angle here and we want to keep it simple so you don't want to get
every single little detail and curve and all that, something like that. And this
one, choose some kind of wondrous color, that's good, then I'm going to toggle the
visibility of that by clicking the icon on the Layers panel, and I'm going to create a fourth
layer here and set the Fill and Stroke to None I'm going to combine it with the eye here so make
it a little bit larger like so. Something basic here and I can fill this with black
and if we still need to adjust it, I need to move this over a little bit. You can do
that with the white Direct Selection tool, you can move that over, and we'll see if we need to
do that in a second, so I have that there, I'm going to bring back the beak.
It's below this one which is good and then the body there.
CTRL or Command minus to zoom out, hit the icon of the photo but of course we can't
see it because it's white. So what you can do is create a new layer and draw out a
rectangle for a background. I'm going to make it some other color, so that look pretty good.
If yours aren't perfectly aligned up, you can zoom in. Like right here, if you think
that's too 'blocky', you can move it around, you can adjust the anchor points
and of course the curves on either side of the anchor points. So I'll move that up a little bit,
something like that. So if you wanted it just to be flush along there, same thing here,
bring, and if you find, you know, you want to just toggle some of those, you can do that.
So I'll do something like this. Click right there, over a little bit, then you can toggle this back.
A quick tip. Remember if we want to select, say like we're on this layer here, and we
want to select something below it. Like right now I'm on, let's say I'm on this one
but I really want to select the black area, alright. You can just click over here,
Indicate Selected Arc. So you click and you add the color tool box over there. That
means you're selecting it so you don't have to move things temporarily or do
Object, Arrange, Send Backwards and Forwards just to be able to select something.
So hopefully you've learned a lot and
got some ideas for using a photo. If the photo is yours you're fine as far as
copyright goes. If the photo, now this is not attorney advice, if the photo is someone
else's and you trace over and it's still easily recognizable, you know, you
think, oh, that looks just like that photo that I saw, you can run into problems
with copyright. So I would just say even if it is derivative, it just depends on
where you are and what those laws are. So I'd say if you do draw over some other photo,
then make it so different that the first person would'nt confuse the two. OK.
So once you trace over photo like this, if you find it too busy, you can go
back and revisit it. This is the one we just did this, this is the one I did earlier.
Either way. I actually like the angle a little bit better on the beak here in this example.
It is a bit crooked though. So you can go back of course and rotate and adjust and make
things simpler or combine this technique with some of the other techniques we have
been doing like free-form drawing on the side or using negative space, pathfinder.
So have fun and practice that. Just use different photos for inspiration whether
it be a natural setting like a forest or animal like this or if it's even
something that is a manufacturer or some kind of cityscape.
I'll see in the next lesson.