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Importing a Sketch and Embedding Images

2:59 with Ashley Burke

Import a sketch and embed it, then use that as the basis for drawing your shapes.

List of Illustrator Default Keyboard Shortcuts

  • 0:00

    In this video, we're going to be importing our sketch and embedding images.

  • 0:06

    We're gonna be starting our logo design.

  • 0:09

    Our logo is going to be for a fictitious company called Pencil and Co.

  • 0:14

    So let's go ahead and create a new document.

  • 0:17

    File, New.

  • 0:19

    And make sure that your profile is set to Web.

  • 0:23

    I'm going to make my width 1080 and 1920.

  • 0:28

    It can be anything you want basically, I mean whatever the dimensions of your icon.

  • 0:35

    I just like to have a little bit of space.

  • 0:39

    Now hit OK.

  • 0:41

    Very good.

  • 0:42

    So now we're ready to go here.

  • 0:45

    Let's go ahead and save this.

  • 0:47

    Even though it's blank, save it as Pencil_Logo.

  • 0:51

    I'll hit Save.

  • 0:53

    OK.

  • 0:54

    And now What I want to do is import my sketch.

  • 0:58

    And this is a raster graphic.

  • 1:01

    It's a jpg image.

  • 1:03

    And those are treated a little bit differently than vector.

  • 1:05

    Though, you can bring raster images into Illustrator.

  • 1:09

    So we'll go up here.

  • 1:10

    File, Place, here it is.

  • 1:13

    Or, Shift+Cmd+P.

  • 1:17

    Here is my pencil sketch.

  • 1:20

    Place.

  • 1:22

    Okay.

  • 1:24

    And actually, I mean, I could draw over this,

  • 1:27

    but I'm not going to be using this directly as my reference.

  • 1:32

    It's more like just something I'm gonna be looking at.

  • 1:37

    So, I accidentally double-clicked and

  • 1:38

    went into isolation mode, I'm just gonna back out, okay.

  • 1:42

    I'm going to drag my image onto my canvas area,

  • 1:46

    because it's just going to be a reference.

  • 1:48

    I'll be drawing here in the art board area, in vector.

  • 1:55

    Right now when you import or place an image, it links that file.

  • 2:00

    So if I were to send this to a client somewhere else, just this file,

  • 2:05

    they would have a missing pencilsketch.jpeg.

  • 2:10

    So what I want to do is embed this image into the file so

  • 2:14

    wherever it goes I know that this raster image will also be inside of it.

  • 2:18

    The way you do that, go to Window, Links.

  • 2:26

    You can see we have our pencil sketch here, it's linked.

  • 2:29

    And then you go up and let me turn this off.

  • 2:33

    Up here in the top right, we have a little flyaway menu.

  • 2:36

    Here we want to choose Embed Images.

  • 2:41

    And if you had multiple images, you could select them all at once.

  • 2:43

    Embed.

  • 2:44

    And there you go.

  • 2:47

    And now, when I hit Save, no matter where I open this,

  • 2:52

    this image will be part of this Illustrator file.

  • 2:56

    Moving on, we will be drawing the logo.

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