Sketch to Illustrator?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
March 29, 2019
3 replies
4637 views

My daughter created a drawing in Adobe Sketch on a tablet. I am trying to work with it as a vector file to create film to letterpress the drawing. She saved it as an .ai file, but I when I open it in Illustrator, I can't select anything in it. I can't Live Trace it. . . . I also lose a lot of detail when I change it to CMYK which I need to make the film. . . . Does anyone know who to make one work with the other?

Thanks!

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M

mjbelt

Participating Frequently

First try using Image Trace:

How to edit artwork in Illustrator using Image Trace

Keep in mind artwork will be grouped automatically.
Use the proper selection tool (group selection tool) or ungroup all and reselect shapes to fill color, etc.

You may find that recreating artwork in illustrator may be easier In the end.

Good luck.

B

Bobby Henderson

Community Expert

Adobe Sketch is a raster-based program that produces pixel-based artwork, not vector artwork. It used to be called Adobe Photoshop Sketch.

I'm not aware of Sketch being able to export drawings as Adobe Illustrator .AI files. If it is able to do that then that's news to me. But I wouldn't even use such a feature since raster-based content is still just raster-based content regardless of the file format container that is holding it. I've received more than my fair share of customer-provided "logos" in which I requested an Illustrator .AI file or some other vector format rather than the JPEG image the customer initially sent. What do they do? They paste the JPEG image into Adobe Illustrator (or an application able to export in .AI format) and merely hit the "save" button.

I frequently use Adobe Sketch and Adobe Draw on my iPad Pro for creating hand-drawn artwork to later port over the desktop versions of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator for further refinement. I port that artwork over to the desktop computer applications by using the "send to" desktop application functions within either app. If you have Photoshop or Illustrator open on a desktop computer signed into the same Creative Cloud account the artwork from the iPad will automatically open there.

Raster-based artwork drawn in Adobe Sketch or any other raster-based tablet image editor (such as Procreate) has to be traced somehow to be turned into vector-based artwork. Adobe Illustrator has its own Live Trace functions. Using the pen tool and other object editing tools will deliver more precise conversion results. But then you also have to ask, "does this artwork need to be in vector format?"