This tutorial describes how I turn a cartoon pencil sketch into a finished color cartoon logo. This is the process I use in getting a design from paper to disk. There are many ways to create digital vector cartoon art, this is just one of those ways. The first thing to do is decide what you are going to draw. For this demonstration I have chosen to draw a funny cartoon cow. Before I start sketching I research the Internet, books and many other sources looking for design inspiration. I also make sure I have good picture examples so I can make a cow look like a cow. The tools I use for my sketching process are very simple and inexpensive. I use cheap disposable mechanical pencils to draw with (7mm lead) and everyday copy paper to draw on. I place a small light box on top of my drawing table and draw on the light box. I draw lightly at first to get the shape of my subject sketched out. I then erase and redraw many times on each part of the design until I am 100% happy. The cow's hand in the first picture shows that I erased and redrew the hand multiple times. I loosely sketch all parts of the character beginning with the head. I darken the design by retracing over it several times as I become happy with the look. The first full pencil sketch is the final rough for this design.Scanning comes next. I scan the pencil design using an Epson Stylus Photo RX620 scanner/printer, nothing fancy. I scan at 300 dpi., 24 bit color and save the image as a .TIFF file. I use a Mac G5 with dual 2.0 processors for all of my computer work. Once scanned, I open the design in Adobe Photoshop CS2 where I begin to clean it up. I lighten, erase and thicken lines to get the design exactly as I want it. This is basically how I ink my designs the inkless way! It sure comes in handy when you make a mistake, just undo and the mistake is gone!I convert the design to grayscale. When finished the design is black and white and as clean as possible. All lines are smooth and there are almost no jagged edges. This is the final drawing and looks exactly like it has been inked.The next step is to convert my bitmap image into a vector art image. I now use Adobe Illustrator CS2 which has it's own built in auto tracing program. I open a new file and place the finished Tiff file. I use the comic art setting in Live Trace to create my vector image. Hit expand and it's done. I ungroup the image and delete the white square background around the outside of the image. At this point each part of the cartoon cow vector image can be highlighted and color can be added with the click of a mouse. I sometimes make last minute changes at this stage. Notice that I changed the flowers on the cow and I also added a thicker outline around the cow to make it stand out more and repositioned the tail slightly.Once the cartoon image is vectored and colored I am ready to turn it into a logo. I scroll through hundreds of fonts picking any that I feel might work for the design and the client. I then take those fonts and create the logotype using each font face. I throw out any that I do not like. I look for fun, cartoony and unique lettering. When I have a typestyle that I really like I normally try to change the font in a way to make it unique to that client. I may stretch a letter, curve the words or combine two different fonts.If a background is needed I create it in Illustrator. I create circles, squares, fades and other effects until I have one I am happy with. Circles are the most popular shape for logos.This is a bogus cartoon logo design I created for a t-shirt company. I used a circle with cow spots for the background and used two different fonts. The top font was curved following the circle path using the tools in Illustrator.I now have a vector art design saved as an .AI file. I usually keep this as my original raw file. I also create a vector .EPS file in which I convert the text to curves to avoid any font conflicts with possible printers. I then actually reopen the design in Illustrator and make any last minute color changes and might add a little shading to the design. This cartoon cow was created as a possible t-shirt design for a very well known t-shirt company. The design was not purchased but was later sold to an up and coming search engine website.
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