Hello, and welcome to this tutorial. Here you'll learn how to
do those nice looking traced images like the one to your right.
Now, I know there is a lot of software out there that will do this work
for you, such as Adobe Streamline, but I'm sure you'll agree with me that there's nothing like the real thing baby, so let's get on with it and get some skills.

Here are a few keyboard shortcuts I will refer to later on,
so get used to these and your work will go much faster!

lock object :: ctrl+2
unlock all objects :: ctrl+alt+2
hide object :: ctrl+3
reveal all objects :: ctrl+alt+3
move object forward :: ctrl+]
move object to front :: ctrl+shift+]
move object backward :: ctrl+[
move object to back :: ctrl+shift+[
Swap fill and stroke :: shift+x
Group objects :: ctrl+g
Ungroup objects :: ctrl+shift+g
Zoom out to see entire canvas :: ctrl+0 (zero)

Just draw a couple of different colored squares and play with these
shortcuts for a while. When you are used to them a bit, please read on.

Please take note that I use hide and reveal a lot.
You don't realy have to go that route.
If you like you can also use the layer method, where
you store vectors belonging to an object on a layer.
You will however need a recent version of Adobe Illustrator
to experience the benefits of layer functionality.

Getting started
First pick up a nice image from the web or from your own collection.

You can find good high resolution pictures here: sxc.hu
Or scan them in yourself.

A high contrast picture is easier to work with. Of course you can go
and enhance the contrast yourself in Adobe Photoshop.

Now open up Illustrator, and place the picture on the canvas using
file place, and tag "link" before pressing "Place".





There you go. The picture is on your canvas, ready for tracing.

Draw a couple of squares and set up a color palette to work with.
A picture consists of thousands of colors. Try to bring those down
to a small palette. As you can see I mixed up three skin-colors,
grey for the shades on the shirt, and three lipp-colors.
We'll leave black and white out because we can get to those easy enough.



I am asuming you know how to work with the bezier pen tool,
but if you don't, here's at least one thing you should know.
When you draw a curve (and you will do that a lot during this tutorial),
you can remove curve-handles by clicking the anchor point they are
attached to. I always click the anchor points, thus preventing weird
transformation of curves you've done before.

On to the tracing
I've started by tracing the shirt and pants using
white as the line-color, and not using a fill-color.
Now, select the objects and press shift+x to switch fill and stroke.
Presto! Traced shirt and pants!



Say I wanted to add the shades now. I select the white objects and group them.
It's always handy to group objects that belong to one certain shape in the picture,
i.e. clothes, hair, mouth, eyes etc. Then you can easily select them, hide them,
send them forward or backward etc. Now press ctrl+3 to hide the shirt and pants.

And we're off to trace the shades in the clothing.
You can go about it working very precise, but I just tried to draw some nice
shapes, roughly following the guides given to me by the original image.



When you are done, select all the shade-objects and group them.

Now for some magic! Press ctrl+alt+3
to reveal the white clothing vectors you did before.
Ain't that pwetty!



Now that you are done with the clothing you can hide it by
selecting those handsome vectors and pressing ctrl+3.

That's it for the basics, let's add some skin
Here you can see the result of using the
three skin-tones I've set up at the beginning.
Start of with the lightest shade, and move on to the darkest.



As you can see, I haven't been that precise with tracing here in certain arreas.
That's because we can easily hide parts of objects behind other objects.
I was very precise tracing the clothing, and that makes life easier doing the skin.

Select all the skin objects, group them and
then press ctrl+alt+3 to reveal the clothing.
You can see that certain parts of the skin overlap the clothes. We don't want that,
so select the clothes and press ctrl+shift+] to bring them to the front.
Wow, we're realy getting somewhere now!



Facial features
We can now hide all stuff we did before, and zoom in to do the facial features.
The hair, the eyes and the mouth. As you can see I've grouped and scaled down
my palette to have it closeby when needed. Select shades from it, and do your
tracing magic. Again, start with the lighter shade, and add objects, moving them backward and forward, and hiding and unhiding them at your leasure.



When all is done, zoom out using ctrl+0, and reveal previous work with ctrl+alt+3.



Finishing up
There you go! You've got yourself a traced girl!
Now all you have to do is add a background.
Draw a large square the size of the image and give it an appropriate fill.
Send it to the back with ctrl+shift+[ and delete or hide the original picture.
If you haven't unlocked it yet, press ctrl+alt+2.



Hurray! We're done!
Hope this tutorial was usefull.