Scientific habitus in AI (Adobe Illustrator)

I recently did a small workshop with a friend on illustrating habitus (drawings that represent a whole specimen, usually in a predefined view) for scientific work. One thing I hope to achieve by this post is to get some of my drawings and art out of my system. The other reason is that I might end up getting some constructive feedback and learning some new things from eventual comments.

I believe that adobe illustrator is a sandbox tool and almost any given task can be accomplished in several different ways. If the end result is to equal standards it is not a wrong way of doing it. Where the difference lies is in the ease of doing certain tasks. Drawing every single setae (bristle or hair) on a spider leg is not the wrong way of doing it, but making an art brush can significantly improve quality and save time on a drawing.

There are hundreds of good tutorials for illustrator so I will not be introducing the basic tools and short cuts. In general the more you know the program the easier it is to solve many of the problems and challenges you meet along the way.  

The objective of the workshop is to teach show how to make a quick sketch of an animal and how to draw with varying thickness of lines so as not to get a drawing that has a too schematic look but more of a hand drawn style.

My way of drawing is quite straightforward and it is only a matter of how much effort (time) you want to put into it.  The main point in the way I draw is that I am actually not using vectored lines but spaces between shapes create lines. This should become apparent from the description below. I hope you enjoy.

Basic outline

1.     The first step is making a silhouette. The silhouette is the base and what will create the color and lines, including the outline of the drawing.

2.     After the silhouette is done it is filled in with shapes representing the different parts of the drawing. It is here that you are able to define the thickness of the lines ao the distance between the different shapes will decide how much of the dark silhouette shines through.

 

These two first steps should give you a nice outline where you can now go in and select your line thicknesses. All this however can almost also be done using lines and the line width tool or by making a line drawing into an outline by selecting your path and making it into an outline (Objectà Path à Outline path). I might start experimenting with this but the next steps work best for me when I have the shapes and the silhouette. 

Coloring and shading

3.     Coloring is rather straight forward. I select the different shapes and try to match the a base color of the image with that of my shapes.

4.     As a minimum I always try to use tree shade gradients.  There is also usually no color selection in my shading, unless something actually does change color in its darker form. What I do is I use the same color as my base (or black), but I choose the multiply option in the transparency window and then adjust the transparency if I need a lighter shade. I like this as I feel it gives me a natural transition between the colors. Another reason I use multiply is that multiplied colors do not ad to black and are therefore invisible when overlaid on my outline meaning that I can make shadows that stretch over several different areas of my drawing.

5.    My basic method of creating a shadow is to select the shape/s that I wish to shade, copy (ctrl c) and past in front (ctrl f) in my shadow layer. I then draw the shade on top of my newly pasted shapes and using the pathfinder options I subtract the shadow shape from my base shape. This allows me to get the exact contour of my base shape without having to painstakingly try to follow the base shapes outline.

6.     Highlights are done in the same way as shadows except the color is white and it is not multiplied but simple a transparent shape.

7.     The lady but image is in a rather low resolution which means that the cuticle sculpturing cannot be replicated. The legs however do have some visible setae that could be good to have in the final drawing. To do these I created a art brush remembering to select (Brush scale options à scaling proportionately) and (Colorization à Method à Tint). The setae are then drawn on individually using the brush tool.

 

Thoughts on my method

As much as I enjoy this way of drawing, mainly because it is fast and I find my results satisfactory I will begin trying to work both with meshes and with importing the paths in to photoshop. If I get around to doing a meshed drawing of this same lady bug I will make another post to show you all my results