- We're going to start things off with one of my
favorite features in Illustrator which goes
by the unassuming name Image Trace.
Among other things, it can trace scanned line art.
Meaning that you can take something
made with traditional tools,
things like pens and pieces of paper,
and then scan or photograph it,
and convert it to vectors inside illustrator.
In this chapter, I'll walk you through three scenarios.
We'll start with this pen and ink portrait
that I drew for a local newspaper article back in 1986,
a year before Illustrator started shipping.
Not only does this prove that something very
old can be come very new in a matter of minutes,
but it also means that you can start with conventional
tools, and end with technically impeccable
vector-based path outlines that you can refine,
and later scale to any size.
Near the end I'll show you how to trace a casual,
if preposterous, pencil sketch with open pass
and uniformly weighted strokes.
Then we'll wrap things up by tracing one of the most
famous line drawings of all time,
Albrecht Durer's 16th century Rhinoceros.
The finished result is a combination of fills
and strokes that demonstrates in high resolution
detail why Durer's is in fact the original
preposterous rhinoceros.
Crazy classical artwork meets Space Age drawing program,
that's how we get the party started in the far-flung,
futuristic world of Illustrator One-on-One: Advanced.