Illustrator - How to import scanned linework into Adobe Illustrator and do a Live Trace.

This tutorial is the first of a series of Adobe Illustrator tutorials I will be creating that will teach you the basics of importing scanned line into Illustrator and producing a nice vector image.

(For this tutorial you will need  Adobe Illustrator (CS2 or above), Adobe Photoshop, and some paper and a nice black pen.)

Firstly, when you are drawing your design, cartoon, illustration, keep in mind how you will be importing it into Illustrator. I will be showing you how to create image made of one solid vector colour, so don't create an image with rendering or form, unless it is a solid black colour. Create something like this:

Obviously we all draw, design and create different images, but the key thing to remember here is solid shapes. This image is simple, and will transfer nicely to a vector graphic.


So, once you have drawn up your image, scan it into your computer, grayscale, at at least 300 DPI (dots per inch).  This is a nice resolution to scan in as a general rule, it is the normal resolution for at which Print Companies print at. Then open up Photoshop (I use CS2, but the version isn't important for this tutorial) and open your drawing.

Use the crop tool to crop your drawing down so you just see the drawing and the surrounding white paper as shown below:

Then go and adjust the levels to give the image more contrast. The levels is located in the photoshop menu Image>Adjustments>Levels or you can just CRL+L in windows or Apple+L on a Mac. Adjust the levels like so:

Bring the left handle to the middle of the big mountain on the left (this will make your black ink drawing more completely black). Then bring the right handle past the right mountain toward the middle valley This will eradicate most small pencil lines, paper texture and mistakes, cleaning things up a bit. Click OK.
Save this file as a PSD, JPG or TIFF if you like and you can close photoshop.
Great, now we are ready to import your file into Illustrator!

Open Illustrator and File>Open your edited scan. It should open up looking much the same as it did in photoshop:

Now select the cursor tool (the black arrow, 'v' on you keyboard), and click on you imported image.

Next go up to the menu Object>Livetrace>Tracing options. A box like this will open with default settings:

I will leave it to you to fiddle around with the options later, but there are already some good settings in your illustrator Presets (such as Inked Drawing or Comic Art) that usually work very well. However I have a custom setting I like to use, so put in these details below:

Then hit Trace. Your computer will work a little while producing the vector art, depending on how complicated your image is. You should have a result something like this:

This is a great start , and you can go ahead and edit any thinks you don't like about the vector later.We are almost finished but first you need to expand the Live trace. make sure you still have the vector selected and go up to Object>Live Trace>Expand. Your image will now look like this:

 

You have here the white of the paper, and the different objects that make up your drawing (in this case the eye, the arm, the leg). Now, because if you try to move the vector around you will find they are grouped, you need to ungroup the selection. Object>Ungroup or right-click the image>ungroup. 

Great. Now click outside the panel area to unselect the vector paths, and then click again on the WHITE BACKGROUND. It should look like this:

Once you have this white area selected we want to grab all the other white areas in the vector, so go up to Select>Same>Fill Colour. This will select all the other white vectors Live Trace has created. Hit the Delete button. Now we don't have any white areas left in the file.

Now press CTR+A or (Apple+A on a Mac) to select all the objects and then CTR+G or Apple+G, to group you vector.

Nice! You now have a Vector image you can put on top of any background and you can change it into any colour you wish (using the the colour slider or swatches).

From here you can edit your vector handles and correct any paths you don't like.

I used this technique to create the following Design. Enjoy! Please do leave a comment if you have any questions or anything to mention I may have missed out.