How I Do It: Live Trace

We now move into the Adobe Illustrator portion of our program.  We had to ink our drawings in order to allow Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace tool to create a (relatively) crisp digital version of our hand-made drawings.  That is our next step.

Basically Live Trace can convert anything into a manipulable digital form, but I find it really shines in black and white situations.  Therefore, our black and white inking of Comic 1 is a perfect candidate to be Live Traced.

If ever you want to follow along, this is a very straightforward progress.  Take your scanned-in inking and do a File > Place... of it onto your Adobe Illustrator canvas.  Work with its size until you have it just as you want it, and then go to Object > Live Trace > Make.  Voila!  That will generate an image similar to the one below.  We'll clean it up a bit more before we get to the final product, but we have a pretty sharp digital image to work with now.