Premium Tutorial: Racing Bike

Need more tips on drawing vehicles in illustrator? John Urban will show you how to draw a sleek vector racing bike in illustrator in this new premium tutorial. He will start with a pencil sketch and show you how he turns it into a full blown detailed illustration. You will learn various techniques and tips to color the bike in this new tutorial.

So let’s get your engine started!

Difficulty: Intermediate
Requirements: Adobe Illustrator

What will you get?

• Instant download of PDF e-book (16 pages)
• Learn the techniques and tricks to draw a vector bike in 30 steps
• Comes with AI file for easy reference

Tutorial Preview:

1. In this tutorial, I will show you one way to render a bike in Adobe Illustrator CS3. First, I will start with a sketch. This is a pencil sketch which I did in 10 minutes. After that, I set the Contrast and Levels in Adobe Photoshop.

2. Let's begin to do the wheels. Use Ellipses Tool to draw the circles in order to get the tire profile right. After you're done, duplicate the tire and drag it to the front or to the back depending on the starting area of the drawing.

3. Now, go to the front wheel. Start by drawing one element of your rim. In my sketch, the rim has 5 elements. In order to get this right, select the shape you drew and press R key. Place the blue cursor into the center of your rim.

Now holding Alt key, click and drag the shape in order to duplicate it. Afterwards, press Ctrl+D keys to generate the other shapes in order to complete your rim. Duplicate the entire rim and move it into the back.

4. Although the bike is in side view, you can still see the profile of the tire. We will build that now. Start by drawing a curve using Pen Tool. Now let's do the math...a circle has 360 degrees; we want to repeat the curve eighteen times. That means 20 degrees between the curves.

Go to Object/Transform/Transform Each, fill 20 in the value box. There is a square to the right, indicating 9 points. Select the one from the left at the bottom. That will rotate the curve like we want. Repeat this until you have completed a circle, as shown hereby.

5. At this stage, you should be able to use Pen Tool pretty well. So using Pen Tool, ellipses and rectangles, you should end up with this. From time to time, remember to switch on the sketch layer in order if you are going into the right direction.

Feel to improvise your initial sketch. Don't worry about the parts which shouldn't be visible. We will cut them in the next step.

6. Firstly, adjust the stroke values, depending on the shapes and importance etc... After that, select the drawing and go to Object>Expand. Now let's trim and cut. Open Pathfinder box(Shift+Ctrl+F9). Start with the back wheel and select the first two big ellipses, Right Click>Arrange>Bring to Front.

Select the ellipses and the tire profile shape and click Trim from Pathfinder box. Delete the unwanted pieces. Enjoy cutting the rest.

7. When you're done with cutting, you will come to outline stage. Now, check if all shapes are well connected or if you want to modify shapes for a little bit.

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