How to Artwork Photographic Elements in Illustrator

Tutorial time, I'm one of those guys that doesn't completely know my way around all the programs that I use but I still get calls from time to time from fellow practitioners and in the hope that this may help some of you out including some of the art students I know who do occasionally visit this blog here's a take on how to handle photographic elements in Illustrator, which is my program of choice for much of the work that I undertake and is how I create the artworks for the ongoing epic that is Cloud 109.

So here's a look at how I went about creating some of the elements that are currently hanging on the wall of the room where Gina spends much of her time when she's accessing the cyberworld of Cloud 109. The idea is to make the real world elements as convincing as possible when the three lead characters, Cary, Gina and Rabby appear as themselves rather than their fancy and various avatars. Gina at this stage of the story is trying to contact Cary and Rabby, but Cary's phone is off - familiar scenario, but she's going to try and access him via 'facefriendz'. I needed to make her environment a reflection of her character, out of all the three characters Gina is undoubtedly the coolest and savviest, wheelchair or not. Her room and most importantly her dresser, where she has her Ibook propped open has to hint at a life beyond what the reader may see in the pages we present to them. All characters to have any kind of conviction in a work of fiction have to contribute themselves to the plot but nevertheless exist independently of what the reader encounters and not act as mere cyphers, this is every bit as important in the artwork as in the writing. You should really care about your characters and obsess just a little bit about their lives beyond what the reader gets to see and ask yourself what makes them tick.

Part of what makes Gina tick is her undoubted Goth chic, her tastes in music, fashion and the the kind of rock n' roll iconography that would appeal to such a girl. Not beyond the bounds of possibility that she'd be into The New York Dolls and Mr Johnny Thunders, who comic afficionados may know, took his moniker from the character "Johnny Thunder" a western comic drawn by the phenomenally talented Alex Toth and written by Robert Kanigher (who you'll doubtless recall as editor from hell of D.C's war comics).

So a Johnny Thunders poster adorning the wall behind that rather nice mirror would be in order. The image of Thunders as rock n roll martyr being the one to go with as opposed to one of the one's towards the end of his life when the ravages of a serious heroin addiction were all too plain to see.

So step one you snaffle up your source image and import it into Photoshop adjusting the contrast and increasing the pixel count if necessary so as to preserve as much information as possible before subjecting it to conversion from bitmap to vector later on. You can have both Illustrator and Photoshop which you will need for this exercise running concurrently via Adobe Bridge. Now you open up the image that you will be dropping your poster into. You then use the Photoshop distort tool, which is a function nigh on impossible to replicate in Illustrator - hence us using Photoshop and twiddle the thing around until you've got it working in perspective. You then drag the perspectified Johnny into a new image in Photoshop and you save it.

Right now hop over to Illustrator and open up your image with Gina, dresser, wall etc and now open up the perspectified Johnny image. Select with the selection tool (top left hand side of toolbox - yup - you've got it!) and then drag down from Object and choose Live Trace - Make and Convert to Live Paint.

Bingo you've got Johnny all raring to go as a nifty looking vector. Keeping the image selected then go into the transparency toolbox should be on your right hand side and choose - Multiply, which will get rid of that nasty white surround which isn't going to look at all good on your artwork. You can then further adjust the transparency by fiddling with the opacity slider. When you're satisfied with the results create another layer underneath and make a base colour for the poster.

Then create a layer in the image of Gina with dresser and going back to your Johnny image, select all the layers that you have created and drag them onto your host image and carefully position just behind that mirror.

Mission accomplished and tomorrow I'll see what else we can surprise you with.