How Juan Afanador sees his characters from new angles.

The Bogotá-based designer uses Turntable in Adobe Illustrator to spin his creations into fully editable vectors — without redrawing a line.

"Turntable in Adobe Illustrator speeds up my workflow…it allows me to explore more of the creative side rather than doing repetitive tasks."

What you’ll need

Practice in the app

Open Illustrator

Juan’s work starts with personality. For this piece, he sketched an irreverent cat with a big smile on his tablet, then vectorized the linework in Adobe Illustrator, grouping every part so the drawing could move as one.

With his feline friend selected, Juan selected Turntable in the Contextual task bar, then used the slider to rotate the character left and right, and tilted him up and down. “Turntable lets you rotate it 360 degrees without needing to re-vectorize,” he says.

Inside the Turntable menu, Juan selected Place views on canvas to see every pose at once, then picked the ones with the most cat-itude.

With his favorite view in place, Juan refined the linework, layered in his signature saturated colors, and prepped the artwork for print or animation. “Many creatives see AI tools as a threat, but they’re the complete opposite,” he says. “They truly enhance us.”