I’m starting to design next year’s calendar which of course will be a free printable for you, my reader. But, in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting and helpful if I showed you the process of how you can vectorize your hand-lettering in Illustrator.

I love drawing on my iPad Pro and in Procreate. But, I also love using Adobe Illustrator because I can take one thing I drew and use it over and over again in different projects. By vectorizing art, you can enlarge it to your hearts desire. So drawing something meant for a business card can be used later for a poster-sized design. Trying to enlarge a jpg from Procreate or a scan can end up in blurry end product soooo.,. let’s learn how it’s done!

HOW TO VECTORIZE HAND LETTERING IN ILLUSTRATOR

To make this easier for some folks to learn the process of vectorizing your hand-lettering in Illustrator, I’ve videoed a tutorial, but I also have the steps written out for following along.

Step 1

Create your lettering in Procreate. For me, I wanted to create some month headlines for my calendar so I needed the words to be uniform while also being hand-drawn. So, I used the guides. Under the wrench icon in the upper left corner — > Canvas — > turn on “drawing guides” — > Edit Drawing Guide — > adjust guides to desired size and opacity.

Step 2

Draw your lettering. Now, you want to export it as a jpg. So, hit that wrench icon again — > Share — > Jpeg — > Share it however you want. I like to airdrop it straight to my computer.

Step 3

Now that you have the jpeg on your computer you want to import it into Adobe Illustrator. So, open a new document in Illustrator, and go to File — > Place — > Find your file — > Place.

Step 4

Now lets get that image traced! Object — > Image Trace — > Make. Now it’s been vectorized so we have to expand it to make it usable. Object — > Image Trace — > Expand — >

Step 5

Last step! Deselect the image by clicking off of it onto the artboard. Now, using your white “open” arrow, select the white background around the lettering. Then, Select — > Same — > Fill Color — > Hit Delete.

Step 6

Save your lettering as a .ai file to be used again in Illustrator.

And, there you have it. Now you know how to vectorize your hand-lettering in Illustrator!

Let me know if you have any other questions or tutorials that you might want to learn.