Creating an Illustration From Hand Drawn Art in Illustrator

(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 drawing tablet such as the Wacom Cintiq.

The process is repeated a third time to refine and lighten the drawing.

The final drawing is scanned and placed into a new document in Illustrator.

With the image selected click on the small arrow next to Live Trace at the top of your screen. For this image I selected the default option so all I had to do was click on the Live Trace button, but you should experiment with the different tracing options to see what they do to your drawing. There is also an option at the bottom that says Tracing Options that allows you to manually change the various settings. You may find something that works better for you by experimentation.

Once you have the image traced go to the top of your screen again and click on expand.

On the top menu go to Object and select ungroup.

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 area must be a closed shape.

Next I suggest moving on to the tutorial called Creating a Design From Your Previous Illustrations in Illustrator.