An intermediate tutorial of one of the ways to create a clean looking vector with a ‘hand drawn’ effect from a sketch, using live trace and live paint.
If your wondering why I use this technique instead of drawing with the pen tool over the raster sketch, it’s cos I like the natural ‘hand drawn’ look and the odd shaped lines that you end up with while still being ‘clean’, besides, I find it easier than drawing with the pen tool – sometimes those beziers just won’t behave ;)
Hope you enjoy it!

Tracie x

p.s I’m using Illustrator CS4

Finished bear

1. First pick your doodle or sketch (if you draw it in pencil you should go over it with a fine liner ink pen so it’s easier to live trace), scan and place in illustrator – select it.

Now we want to live trace it, so go to object > live trace > tracing options. In the dialogue box pick simple trace and tick the ignore white box – see image below. Then click trace and expand it (top tool bar, far right).

2. As you can see some of your lines will be quite messy, now to tidy them up! Use the direct selection tool (or white arrow tool). My general rule to keep the lines as clean as possible is to have as few points as possible.

Here’s my before and after:

3. Everything nice and tidy? good :)  Now create a new layer (should be layer 2) and drag it underneath layer 1. Select your image and copy it. Then paste in front (ctrl +f) into layer 2. Lock layer 1 and hide it (click on the eye icon). See image below:

4. Now to live paint!

Go to object > live paint > make. Select the live paint bucket from your toolbar on the left and choose a colour. Click in the unfilled areas to fill with colour, ignore the outline till later. When your happy with what you’ve got (you can add more detail later) select your image again and click expand (top toolbar, far right). Then ungroup it (you might have to ungroup more than once). Now select your outline (this can be done with the magic wand tool (left toolbar) and delete it. You should end up with something similar to this:

5. Unlock layer 1 and make it visible (click on the eye icon again). Select all your outline and change the colour. Now, if you zoom in a bit, you can see some white bits showing through, see image below:

so we need to get rid of this by making the outline slightly larger. To do this select the outline and make it a compound shape (Object > compound path > make). Then go to Object > path > offset path using the settings in the image below. This makes a copy of the outline underneath the original, delete the smaller original.

6. And there you are, from sketch to nice clean vector ready for some more detail.

Here’s my finished cute bear, with some shadows a cute pattern and background :)

He's finished!