Here's how I made this drawing in Adobe Illustrator using mostly basic shapes.
I started out with a basic circle with the Ellipse tool, and I stretched it really wide to give it the illusion of some perspective of the top side of an object. I used another basic circle to make the bottom part of the base, and I grabbed the two left and right points and I pressed (S) for my scale tool and I scaled it slightly so the circle was a little bit off and not perfect. Then I use the rectangle tool to make the top part, and I grabbed the bottom two points and scaled them closer together to create a trapezoid and lined up the three pieces to make the base shape of the vase. Then I use the Shape Builder Tool to merge the bottom two pieces and offset that part by a few pixels to make the water inside the base.
Then I copied my circle to make the top surface of that water. Here's a good tip. Press command+K to open your settings and make sure that you have the option to “scale strokes and effects” unchecked. When you have it turned off, you can scale your objects without affecting the size of the stroke, so you'll maintain whatever stroke that you've chosen from the beginning across all shapes, no matter how many changes you make
I like to switch to outline mode (Y) every once in a while to make sure that my lines are matched up perfectly because I use the shape builder a lot in this technique. So I need to make sure that there's no crazy overlapping paths or spots where the paths aren't touching at all. Use the Shape Builder to knock out the top part of that offset path, and I get a really nice water effect inside of the base Then I make sure to group all of my pieces together so I can move on to the next part.
I didn't do a great job of drawing this leaf the second time around for the tutorial, but I took my time whenever I was drawing the first one and I used my pen on my Cintiq tablet so I could draw directly on the screen. If you want to list the equipment that I use. Here is an affiliate link list of my entire set up. I receive a commission off of any purchases made through these links that help me fund my channel and continue to make tutorials.
Once the leaf was drawn the way I wanted it, I drew one little line to make a stem going down the base and to the water. I drew another circle to make the top of the coffee cup. I copied it straight down and then I use the rectangle tool to make a box that connected the two from all four left and right points.
I use my shape builder to connect the bottom two and knock out the top shape so that that one's still visible. I made another circle with the Ellipse tool. This time I grabbed the top and bottom points and scaled those out, and I copied this shape. Paste it in front. I shrunk it down and knocked it out to make the handle of the coffee mug.
Scaled the handle back up a little bit. And you can see my strokes didn't change, and I just moved it over to the cup, center it behind and I had a perfectly good coffee. I made sure to group all of my items as I went because I knew I was going to want to tweak the layout and the arrangement of everything later.
I did a quick sketch of the steam coming out of the coffee, and I think the one I drew in the original was a lot better. I was trying to power through these things for the second time around. For this tutorial, I drew another stretched circle for the top of the ramen bowl and for the bottom of the bowl, I actually used a rectangle and then grabbed the bottom two points and rounded them really far to give it that nice bowl shape. I use the Shape Builder Tool to knock out the excess of the rectangle, and then I use another smaller rectangle to create the bottom of the bowl and merge that rectangle with another circle to give it a little bit of rounded edge at the bottom, just to keep it the consistency of the rest of the drawing.
Keeping your smart guides on is a good idea, so that way you can always lock in your lines and points, so that way they meet up perfectly and it makes it really easy to use the shape builder tool for the noodles. I just drew a bunch of squiggly lines over the top of the bowl to make things easy. For the chopsticks, I just started with the long rectangle and I drew one solid line between them and I grabbed the bottom two points of the rectangle, scaled them out left and right so that I got kind of a little bit of a taper shape so it looks like the chopsticks whenever they are still connected before you break them apart. I grouped the bowl and the chopsticks separately just in case I needed to move them around separately later. For the iPhone and YouTube screen, I just started with a rectangle and rounded out the corners. I drew a really small rectangle for that little notch in the iPhone screen and a solid line on the left side, just kind of representing the UI whenever you swipe up, drew one more rectangle in the center. I use the star tool to create a perfect triangle for the YouTube play button for the water bottle. I started with the long rectangle and I created my same stretched circle to create the rounded bottom. Once those pieces were connected with the Pathfinder, I grabbed the top two points and I rounded the corners as much as I could to make a perfectly rounded top. I used my stretched circle and rectangle method to make a lid. Then I just copied that lid and shrunk it down behind itself to make that little stem coming off the round part of the bottom. This is where having your scale strokes turned off is super helpful because then you can just copy these shapes and stretch them and scale them and move them all around and it won't really affect the strokes no matter how many edits you make to it.
I use the same technique for the vase to make the inside water on this bottle. I freehanded some of these line details just using my Cintiq to draw straight on the screen. For the Wacom pen, I started with the long rectangle and I added a small square to the top with the intention of grabbing all of these points and scaling them out left and right to create another like trapezoid shape. I used a basic line to make the nib and I use a rounded rectangle to create the shape of the buttons that are on the pen. I added one more square to the bottom and I rounded out the bottom two points to represent the eraser side of the pen.
For the cactus, I started with the top part of the planter using the same stretched circle and rectangle approach and then I copied the circle to the bottom, created a square and tapered the top two points to give it that perfect planter shape on the actual cactus. I started with the circle and I selected the left and right points and I scaled these up a lot more than I did on the base. This gave it a little bit more of a boxy circle shape, but I thought it looked a little bit cooler and more stylized for the plant. I copied that shape and pasted it in front, and then I scaled it in on itself just to create two extra lines inside of the plant.
To create the spines, I used the line segment tool to create just one at the very top in the very center. Then in my Object menu, I chose Repeat > Radial. This allows you to create a perfectly round repeat of one object in Illustrator.
Just grab this handlebar from the top, stretch it up to create a bigger circle. Then you can just grab this part and center it over the cactus object I shrunk it down just a little bit so that we would line up better to where I want it to be. Then you can grab this handlebar on the right and increase the instances of your object didn't count, but I just made sure that I always had one in that same starting position.and these bottom handlebars will allow you to pull left or right and hide instances so that you can keep them just in certain segments of your repeat path. I use my pencil tool to make a little hash mark or the inside spines, and then I copied that spine to the bottom of the path and rotated it to mirror the angle. Then I use my blend tool to create some instances between the two specified the amount of steps that I wanted in the blend tool options, and then I copied the path that I wanted these to align to made it the exact size that I needed it to be selected both objects went back to my object menu select blend and click on Replace Spine.
Now, I had a perfectly spaced out and repeated spine image on the inside of the cactus that I could just flip to the other side. I group this whole cactus, put it in place, copied it, and placed a smaller version of that copy on top of it. Once I had everything arranged in the way that I liked it, I just added another stretched ellipse to the bottom to create that big black shadow.
I grouped all of these objects together and set them to multiply so they would drop to my background color. All right. Here's my last trick that I haven't shown yet. So when I make these drawings, I usually post them to my Instagram, but before I post them to Instagram, I actually open them up in the VSCO photo editing app.
I use this app to tweak my color slightly, but also most importantly, to throw a lot of grain on there. That green gives it this nice texture, and I don't know why, but for some reason, the grain in this photo just looks so much better and so much more natural to me than the options that you have in Photoshop.
And I can just hop right over to Instagram and make this post. And if you want to see how to take this to the next level, watch this video about getting a hand drawn look in Adobe Illustrator.
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