As you may know, Scribble is an effect you can find in Adobe’s Illustrator to fill objects. Nothing out of the ordinary, but if you tweak it a little you can get an interesting result.

Some time ago, this client needed illustrations for a little educational booklet that was to be printed in black and white.
He needed only a few illustrations so I figured it’d be quite simple. The thing was that he had this special request: He wanted contour drawings out of a set of photographs he had taken.

I was OK with his request, but the result seemed less than dull. So I decided to give it a little twist by adding shades and volume without using grays or gradients. Guess I cheated there… But at the end he did like the outcome.

So this is what I did:

Step 1

Take your picture through Photoshop to desaturate (shift+cmd+U)

Step 2

Set maximum contrast using Levels (cmd+L) by sliding the input levels towards the centre. Save this copy.

Step 4

Next, open a new file in Illustrator, and place the image ( File>Place )

Step 5

Then select Object>Live Trace>Make and Expand

Now you have your picture converted into a vector object.

All you have to do now is select your object go to Filter>Stylize>Scribble. But before you do that, you should copy the object and set the copy aside to use it later. Since we want to add a little volume, we need to have one or two degrees of shadow.

Here’s how:

Step 6

First, apply the scribble to the object and adjust the scribble options to get a light stroke.

Step 7

The first variation option should be set to 0
On the line options set the stroke width to 1pt, curviness to 0 and spacing to 5.
Now you can adjust the angle nob to get an even stroke.

Note that the result of these adjustments will depend on the size of your vector object. So play a little until you feel it’s right.

Now the tricky part: for those areas where you want a darker shadow you need to go back to the object copy we had set aside.

Step 8

Using the knife tool you can cut off the areas that you want to darken.

Step 9

Grab them and place them on the scribbled object where they fit
Apply the scribble effect, but this time just switch the stroke angle to opposite angle and you’ll get a darker shadow.

You can repeat this step as many times as you deem necessary to until you get the desired effect.

(This is optional) Another way to get those shadows is by using the original picture as reference, and drawing additional shadows with the pen tool (P) right over the picture, like this:

To do that, just open the image file in Illustrator: go to File>Open and then with selection tool (V) click on the picture, copy it and paste it on your canvas.

And finally, you can give it a final touch by adding contour lines using the pen tool (P). (This one is optional too)

Original photo by: Michael Loccisano

What I really wanted was to get a hand-drawn-like feeling to the vector illustration. In the end the result turned out to be interesting in its way.
You can experiment with icons and fonts too. Or you can go negative by using white lines over black background.

What else could we do with this effect? Any ideas?