this new Illustrator feature is wild!

Okay, what if you could take a rough sketch and then instantly turn that into a clean vector in Illustrator? Well now in the latest beta you can and flipping heck is it helpful. Right, so I'm in the Illustrator beta and you can download this from the Creative Cloud app and you can see here I've created a really quick and arguably terrible sketch of a little character. Don't laugh at me, I'm not primarily an illustrator but I'm going to see if I can turn this into something usable. So we're going to select this terrible jpeg that I've just brought in from Photoshop and we're going to go sketch to vector. You can see we have it here or we should be able to find it. Ah, generative, there we go, you cheeky sausage, found you. Sketch to vector, click that, Illustrator is going to do nothing because there's a window at the top we need to fill out. Right, so we have Gemini selected, you can try this one here. If this doesn't work I would try Nanobanana Gemini 2.5 or try some of the other ones. This has only just come out, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but we're going to try this one first of all and we'll see what happens. And here it does tell you how many credits you're using, you have a subscription and all that, just make sure you've got enough credits. Let's click generate. Also while it's doing this I wouldn't start switching to other apps and doing things. I don't know if that makes a difference but when I just stay focused on Illustrator it seems to have more success. And honestly I'm super happy with that, that's come out really well. It's definitely got a bit more personality and I can see that it's added these details around the eyes as well so maybe it can teach me a thing or two about illustration, I don't know. Now what we could do is we could select the direct selection tool and delete this invisible bounding box around the edge just so we're left with clean vector artwork and we could go and add our colours and do what we want to it. But I'm going to try and go one step further using the AI features. So we're going to go back to sketch to vector and you can even do this over here from the right hand side. I'm going to try a prompt, colour this cute character yellow and give him a magenta and purple striped hat. So I'm not getting it to generate the character, I've done that here, we've got the character from the sketch. We're just going to see if we can get it to colour it up and see what type of approach it takes. And again we're just going to have to give it a minute to do its generativeness and there we go, it's added those solid colours to the character. I wonder if we can take it one step further. Let's go add shadows and highlights to the character. Let's try that. Oh now that is a bit more like it. And the thing I love about this as well, even if I don't use this and I go back and I want to do the illustration from scratch myself, me not primarily being an illustrator, this is really helpful to know where I could potentially put shadows and highlights on the eye, on the hat, on the forehead. This would serve as a really good reference. Now I just want to try once more and see if I could bring the colours back in and I'm just going to put give the character some colour. Just out of curiosity I want to see what it does. Oh no it's completely changed it. Okay what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back because I love this version so much. I'm going to select this with the direct selection tool, get rid of it. So I can't edit this anymore but now what I can do is I can go into this and start adjusting the colours myself. So we're going to go back and I'm going to add the yellow and the funky striped hat from before. So what I'm going to do here for this part, this is like the shadow, is I'm going to sample this colour and then I'm going to pick a, I'm going to go slightly darker and maybe just a nudge warmer towards orange. We're going to keep it really slight. So that's going to be my shadow colour and what's this? This is a highlight. So again we're going to sample yellow. Let's go lighter so that could be my highlight colour and then what have we got for the feet down here? So we're just going to go in with the direct selection tool and very carefully select all of these darker greys and then use the eyedropper tool to sample darker yellow and we've got the medium yellow and then for these bits on top got the highlight colour. There we go let's pop that one in. We've got the teeth here. God let's go make those white. Right we've got a shadow there as well. I'm not entirely sure what happened there. Highlight colour. Fantastic. Things like this we could easily go in and fix and refine that. Just grab colour. There we go. So what I'd probably do is fix the illustration itself before colouring this up. Right let's go for that highlight there. Again on the top and we're just going to speed through this. I don't know what this thing is here but I can select that. Oh dear or maybe we'll just leave that for now. This is the downside of using the generative AI stuff is you don't really know what it's going to generate so I've got this shape here that is part of everything else. Maybe we'll colour a little bit of the party hat but rather than spend too long I'm just going to really quickly add some colour to it. We'll make sure he's got his stripey hat back and we'll leave we'll leave this alone for now. And oh that looks a bit weird on the eyes so we'll get rid of that as well. And the teeth that looks a bit weird. Let's just put the grey colour back for now. We'll leave that. Remember you're not an illustrator Dan and we'll put the grey back there. Yes there we go much better and I'm going to get rid of the shadow. And as you can see I've created that incredibly quickly from an arguably terrible sketch and I could go and use this or I could use this as a reference and then rebuild this from scratch with Illustrator's tools and go and add all the shadows and highlights in myself. And it would make editing things like the hat and the line work and the colour a little bit easier if I've built it from scratch. But considering I'm not really an illustrator per se I'm pretty happy with how this turned out and now I think I just need to go and work on my my sketching. And if I just select this, copy it, we'll go all the way back to the very beginning. We'll move this over to one side and we'll paste in the finished version. I think that's pretty flippin cool. No idea what it is but I like it.