How do I do this basic drawing task? Please help [noob request]

Question

G'day Illustrator Wizards,

Here are the steps I'm taking:

I'm using the paintbrush tool on 0.25 stroke weight to draw in illustrator (going for a more "drawn" look).
I direct select the drawing (usually an outline - say, a car for example)
Then go OBJECT - EXPAND

I should point out here, I'm not entirely sure what that is doing - but I think it's joining all of the individual lines up?

4. Then I go OBJECT - LIVE PAINT - MAKE

Again, not sure why, but I think it's to be able to use the paint bucket tool to fill in any areas where line work meets?

Then I got into two weird places that I cannot work out...My line work looks like it has it's own stroke if that makes sense? So instead of this: ______ it looks like ======= and the other weird situation was when I used a gradient fill with the paint bucket tool - it seemed to completely trip out the drawing and was selecting each varient of colour as a seperate thing...Is it possible to reverse this? I don't even know what I did!

5. I make different layers for different aspects of the image so they can be exported seperately.

QUESTIONS FOR YOU LEGENDS!
Am I doing anything obviously wrong in my process?
Can you suggest any pertinent tutorials that I should watch? Obviously there's hundreds of illustrator tutorials online but I just need to do what I'm doing - I don't really need to go down the street via the moon if you know what I mean?

Any help, mercy, favor, answers would be greately appreciated!

Monika Gause · Accepted Answer

1. If you are just drawing uniformly stroked lines, use the pencil tool and just basic strokes

2. as Barbara said, you don't need to expand them. Expanding is necessary in your case, because brushes cannot be inside a live paint group. But when you draw with the pencil tool, there wouldn't be brushes, so expand is not needed. Simple strokes are easier to edit if needed.

3. Object > Live Paint > Make is also not necessary, Just select them all and paint them with the Live paint bucket. Illustrator will create a live paint group for you.

In order to get informaed, just read the documentation.

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/brushes.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/grouping-expanding-objects.html#expand_objects

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/live-paint-groups.html

If you want to dig deeper, get a book like Mordy Golding's "Real life Illustrator". It's old, but teaches you the basics of how Illustrator works. To understand what happens and to understand your own workflow it might be necessary to get the big picture.

barbara_a7746676 · Answer

You shouldn't need to expand the outline of the shape (car in your example).

Live Paint is an efficient tool to use for filling in areas of a drawing without having to create closed paths for each area. As long as the areas appear to be closed paths, they can be filled with Live Paint.

To apply a gradient to multiple objects as if they were a single object, select all of the objects and use the Gradient tool to drag across the objects.

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