What medium do you use as the basis for your weaving designs? They may be pencil drawings on paper, or photos taken on the street.

In this article, I will introduce to the initial process of applying a design to a grid for weaving, using the Adobe Illustrator grid template created in the previous article “Creating a Grid Template in Adobe Illustrator“.

The general steps are as follows:

1. Turn your drawing or photo into an image format
2. Create a layer for a rough sketch on a grid template in Illustrator
3. Place the image on the layer
4. Save the file as a different name

Each of these steps is described below.

This time I will use a drawing of the lotus flower and import it into Illustrator as a rough sketch.

1. Take a picture of the drawing with a camera such as a smartphone.
   
   
2. Send that photo to your computer. You can send it to yourself as an email attachment or save it to cloud storage.
   
   
3. If you only have one photo, it is easier to send it by email.
   Open the email on your computer and download the attachment.
   
   
4. If the file format is JPEG, JPG, HEIC or HEIF, it can be imported into Illustrator as an image format.

Before placing an image, create a layer for the image.

1. Select File menu – Open in Illustrator and open the grid template created in the previous article.

2. Click Create New Layer in the Layers panel. “Layer 3” will be created.

3. Rename it to something easy to understand, such as “Image“, “Sketch” and so on.

4. Select the image layer you just created and drag it under the grid layer.
   Lock the scale layer so that only the image layer is editable.

1. With the image layer selected, select File menu / Place and choose an image file saved on your computer.

2. Click in the upper left corner on the artboard to place the image there.
   
   If the image is too large, shrink the screen and adjust the size of the image.
   
   When resizing an image, click the lower right corner of the image with your mouse and move it to the upper left to make the image smaller. If you do this while holding down the shift key on the keyboard, the image can be resized while maintaining the aspect ratio.

3. To crop the image, right-click on the image and select Crop Image.
   
   Adjust the image frame and press Enter on the keyboard to confirm the crop.

Let’s save the file as a separate file from the template.

Select File menu – Save As.

Give it a name that is easy to understand and save it.

This is the end of this article.

In the next article, I will introduce you to the process of creating a rough grid design.

Thank you for reading to the end!