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. Oh, we should be able to find it. Ah, generative. There we go. You cheeky sausage, found you. Sketch to vector, click that. Illustrator's 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 banana banana Gemini 2.5 or try some of the other ones. This is 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 could 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 colors 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. Color 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 color 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 colors 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 can bring the colors back in. And I'm just going to put give the character some color. Just out of curiosity, I want to see what it does. Ah, 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 colors myself. So, we're going to go back and I'm going to add the yellow and the funky striped hat from before. Now, what I'm going to do here for this part, this is like the shadow, is I'm going to sample this color and then I'm going to pick a We're 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 color. 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 color. And then what do 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 grays 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 color. There we go. Let's pop that one in. We've got the teeth here. Go, let's go and make those white. Right, we've got a shadow there as well. Not entirely sure what happened there. Highlight color, fantastic. Things like this, we could easily go in and fix and refine that. Just grab color. There we go. Then what I probably do is fix the illustration itself before coloring 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 we'll color a little bit of the party hat, but rather than spend too long, I'm just going to really quickly add some color to it. We'll make sure he's got his stripy 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 gray color back for now. We'll leave that. You remember you're not an Illustrator. And we'll put the gray 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 color 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 flipping cool. No idea what it is, but I like it.