Sketch tutorial: Dribbble inspired ice cream illustration
Though I’ve used Adobe Illustrator for years, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try illustrating my first ever post to my dribbble account in Sketch.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to how I made this dribbble-inspired ice cream.
Step 1: Colour
To get the colour palette for this, I found a dribbble logo on Google images, and dragged it into Sketch. From here I used the eyedropper tool to get the two primary colours:
- Light pink: #EA4C89
- Dark pink: #C32361
Step 2: Draw Dribb(b)les
For these dribb(b)les, I used the pencil (P) but you could easily use the vector point (V) tool. Handy shortcuts here are F to toggle the fill, and B to toggle the stroke or outline.
If you’re use to Adobe illustrator these shortcuts may mess you up a bit — the vector point tool (v in sketch) is the equivalent of the pen tool (p in illustrator).
Step 3: Clean Curves
After I had a satisfactorily dribbly shape, I went back to clean up the curves by double-clicking on my shape. This reveals the anchor points and handles, which can be manipulated to get smoother flow. Notice that there are four options for anchor point control in the right menu here: straight, mirrored, disconnected, and asymmetric.
If you’re used to Adobe illustrator, alas, there is no direct-select (A) tool. I got access to these anchor points by double-clicking which seems unnecessarily laborious – if anyone knows how to make this more efficient in Sketch please let me know in the comments!
Step 4: Stroke & Merge
I added a nice fat stroke, and then realized that the underlying shape structure was interfering with the smoothness of my lines. I learned that, unlike illustrator’s union tool which actually merges shapes, Sketch’s union tool preserves original shapes. I decided that flattening the shape was the fastest way to combine these shapes and leave me with a single clean path.
Layer > Paths > Flatten
From this flattened shape, it’s much easier to edit those awkward sharp lines on the left-most dribble, making it a smooth curve like the rest of its dribble-siblings.
Step 5: Triangle Cone
For the cone, I literally plonked in the default triangle shape. Use Shift + Cmd + R or the rotate button in to top menu to rotate this 180 degrees.
Insert > Shape > Triangle
Step 5: Pattern
From here, you can play with the patterns that come under the fill menu (shown above on the right-hand menu). While this checkered pattern could have made a decent waffle-cone I didn’t like that you can’t control the colour of these present patterns.
Note: I discovered a strange limitation in Sketch’s fill section. If you pick a pattern, and then a colour, the colour will block the pattern. This applies to any additional colours or patterns in Sketch’s Fill section — the top fill is layered on top, but there’s no easy way to change the order here (which absolutely blows my mind).
So, I created my own pattern (using the borderless dark pink circle above), using Aaron Tenbuuren’s tutorial for making patterns as a reference. In a nutshell, you have to create your pattern, export the artboard, save it to a folder (probably called patterns), and then re-import it into sketch as a fill on a specific shape – when you have a shape selected, you can click on the patterns tab in the fill panel, and select choose image to navigate to your custom pattern.
Step 6: Add lines
The nice thing about illustrators pencil tool is that it smooths lines after you draw them. You can use this (P) or the Vector Point tool to draw these lines to give the ice-cream scoop look a bit more like the dribbble logo.
To give your strokes a rounded edge, like in the highlight, select your line and then click on the settings icon in borders panel on the right-side menu. From here you can control the ends of your lines and more (eg. add arrows ends, control your join line, or create a dashed line).
Step 7: Final touches
I copied the dribbble lines, changed their stroke colour, and positioned it one layer below to give the lines a bit more of a stylistic pop. I also used the pencil tool to quickly draw a shadow under the scoop.
Step 8: Animate in Principle
This was my first time downloading and playing with Principle to animate — I was inspired by this YouTube tutorial from Sketch Together which makes the steps look as easy, fun and fast as they really are.
The problem with Principle seems to be in exporting. Both MOV and GIF formats produced a de-saturated pink, and the suggested hack I found suggested importing the MOV into After Effects, exporting that as a PNG, and then using Photoshop to create a GIF (Yikes!!). Or Abhinav Chhikara’s suggestion to also use Photoshop to control the quality.
You can see this GIF, exported from Principle, looks jittery which blows my mind for a 3-frame image with a under 8 colours.
I even tried using Quicktime and Recordit to capture this animation as it looks in the Principle preview, but it’s still jittery and dull. If you’ve found a way around this, pleeeeeease let me know in the comments below!
^ ewwwww grossest export render ever. But it was super fast and easy to make, and looks great when it previews directly from Principle – worth playing with at least.
This is the result I got after some finagling with Photoshop using this guide. Not the best or fastest approach, but better than the quality of Principle’s export.
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