Adobe Illustrator Live Trace Tutorial

Ready for some fun with Illustrator’s Live Trace feature?

So what I’ve done here is draw a picture on plain paper and then scan it to the computer. After inserting the scanned image into Illustrator, you can use the Live Trace feature to turn your sketch into a completely editable, colored vector image!

Here’s the techniques and tools we’ll be using:
- Live Trace
- Simple Trace
- Expand
- Live Paint Objects
- Live Paint Bucket

Estimated Time: 5 minutes

Enjoy the video tutorial or scroll down for the textual!

After setting up your document, you’re going to want to drag your scanned sketch into Illustrator.

With your image selected, click the “Live Trace” drop down and hit Simple Trace. This will convert the image into simple black and white lines and fills.

With the trace still selected, click Expand to turn it into separate strokes.

You should have something like this now.

Chances are that you’ll have some artifacts in the paper that Live Trace may pick up. To get rid of these, double click on your image and then select which artifacts to delete.

After cleaning up the artifacts, select your image again and convert it into a Live Paint object.

Then, click your Live Paint Bucket tool and get ready for some coloring!

Color to your liking…

Then style it however you want!

So there you have it! Turning a paper drawing into an infinite quality vector image is quite simple as you can see. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of use with this.

Cheers!
Aaron

Shmoggo
Design&Print