Image Tracing Tutorial

This is a shot of the original Las Vegas sign, which I have used as a template to recreate  the sign  in Adobe Illustrator.  It was set as a template then put down to 35% opacity so I could work over it.

The first step to creating this sign was the elongated diamond, which was simple just  by making a rectangle, rotating it, and stretching the points to the sides. Making the top and bottom come to a point instead of curve was done by creating points at the top and bottom, and deleting the curved points next to them. Creating the lightbulbs around it may look hard, but was actually very simple. I makde one lightbulb with an oval and black rectangle, along with a white strip with no fill under it, to help later when they go on the sign. I used the pattern brush options to make lightbulbs into a pattern, which put them on the sign simply by selecting it's outline. The words were done with the type tool, getting the right fonts, sizes, colors, and manipulating the correct kerning and leading inbetween. For the welcome sign, one sphere was made to match the size of the original, then was transformed into six copies and moved to be barely touching at the ends. "Welcome" was written then I clicked "create lines" to be able to move each letter on it's own, to be put in the center of each circle. That's basically all that was done, this was my favorite tutorial so far, and I enjoyed recreating this sign!