Tracing is an excellent technique to quickly create your own digital illustrations, perfect for educational materials. Let’s learn how to draw a microphone using this easy method, creating our own “Learned Clipart”.
We’ll start by importing a photo of the object we want to draw. In this example, it’s a microphone. We bring this photo into our drawing app as a Photo Layer. To make tracing easier, we’ll adjust the layer’s opacity, making it mostly transparent. This allows us to clearly see our drawing lines over the image.
Now, switch to the Draw layer. Using a black brush, carefully outline the microphone. Tracing directly over the photo helps to capture the shape accurately, which is great for creating recognizable clipart for educational use.
To achieve straight lines, especially useful for objects with geometric shapes often found in educational clipart, many drawing apps offer tools like stencils. In Adobe Draw, the Line stencil is a great option. Select the Line stencil, and use two fingers to position it precisely where you need a straight edge. Drawing along the stencil edge ensures a perfectly straight line, essential for clean and professional-looking learned clipart.
Once the tracing is complete, make the Photo layer fully opaque again. This allows you to see your traced outline against the original photo, ensuring you’ve captured all the details.
Now it’s time to add color! Let’s color the top of the microphone purple, matching the photo. To get the exact shade, use a color picker tool. In Adobe Draw, a long press on the Color selector brings up a chooser. Move this chooser over the purple area in the photo to sample that exact color. This precise purple shade is now your selected color, ready to use in your learned clipart. Other apps may utilize an Eyedropper tool for the same purpose of precise color selection.
Choose another color for the handle of the microphone. Then, use a fill tool (often represented as a bucket icon) and tap on the handle area to fill it with the selected color. Fill tools are incredibly useful for quickly adding blocks of color to your learned clipart, making the coloring process efficient.
For the remaining parts of the microphone, which might have different shades, explore color variations. In many apps, clicking the Color selector and choosing ‘Picker’ allows you to adjust a slider to select lighter or darker shades of your base color. Use these varied shades to bucket fill different sections of your learned clipart, adding depth and visual interest to your educational illustrations.
With the coloring complete, your learned clipart is ready! You can now save your illustration or copy it directly to paste into other applications. Copying and pasting is particularly useful for incorporating your illustrations into educational resources like Keynote presentations, Google Slides, or interactive books created with Book Creator. There, you can easily combine your newly created learned clipart with text, other photos, and multimedia elements to create engaging and visually rich educational content.
