Creating an Illustration From Hand Drawn Art in CorelDRAW

(available in video format here)

First make a pencil drawing of the subject. It can be as detailed as you want. At this stage the image is still fairly rough and is meant to get the shapes right and to identify some general shading.
It may take several sketches to work out how you want your drawing to look. This sketch is done at around 7.5 inches tall. You’ll want to make your drawings fairly large so that when you get to the refining stages you have plenty of room to work and you can easily add details.

A transparent vellum is laid over the pencil sketch. Using several different size black pens and markers the image is carefully traced or redrawn with more detail. You can also use a lightbox to redraw the image if you have one available. Even better would be a Wacom Cintiq drawing tablet but they are very expensive.

The process is repeated a third time to refine and lighten the drawing. Make sure your lines are very clean and solid black.

The final drawing is scanned and imported into a new document in CorelDRAW.

With the image selected click on the Trace Bitmap at the top of your screen. Under Outline Trace select Detailed Logo.

If this windows pops up click on Reduce Bitmap.

This opens the Power Trace window. These are the settings I’ve used for this drawing. Play around with the settings to see if something works better for you.

I’ve also changed it to Black and White under the Colors tab. Click on OK at the bottom and you now have your drawing vectorized.

With it selected hit the letter P on your keyboard to center the art to the page. Now ungroup it.

Go through the image and delete any areas that you don’t need such as the outer white block, and in this instance the areas that were created between the two snakes (serpents) and the staff.

The last step is to add color to your art. You may also choose to leave your vector art as black and white. Remember that if you want to make any part of your image a specific color the shape must be closed.
I also added a white highlight to the snakes (serpents).

For tips on coloring your vector art refer to the tutorial Coloring Vector Art In CorelDRAW.

Next I suggest moving on to the tutorial called Creating a Design From Your Previous CorelDRAW Art.