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Illustrators Corner - Microstock Illustrators Forum => Illustration - General => Topic started by: leaf on November 25, 2015, 15:35

Title: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: leaf on November 25, 2015, 15:35

I'm wanting to convert some of my wife's drawings to vectors - but can it be done in a way to keep the texture of the pencil marks?  The illustrator auto trace creates 1000's of vector points which makes for a poor vector (if I'm not mistaken).  Is it even possible to create a good vector from drawings like these or would the colors need to become 'flat'.  Is the only option to simply submit a raster image of the drawings / a scan?

thanks for the help from a vector 'newb'

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: VB inc on November 25, 2015, 17:13

Hey Leaf,

From my experience, it is very hard or near impossible to keep that pencil type texture as you vector it. If there is actually a process that I am aware of, I would love to learn it too. It would be extremely helpful to my workflow too as I always lose the sketchy feel of my sketches when I transfer from sketch to ink to vector. But if there is a vector version of the sketchy look, it would be so memory intensive as  the program has to account for so many points that is making the texture up. I do not think illustrator has a plug in for this either.

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: Shelma1 on November 25, 2015, 20:29

I think it would be possible, but time consuming. You could scan just the outline and live trace that to keep some of the line variation, then fill in the color and use a grunge texture to mimic the variation made by the pencil. I don't think any of the big sites would accept a live trace of a pencil image as is.

Another option is to do a cleaner version of the image with flat color as a vector, which wwould require tracing by hand, and scan the original to submit as its own jpg. Some scanned images sell very well.

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: Me on November 26, 2015, 01:00

Hi Shelma,

Is there a minimum size for scanned images of sketches? Is it the same as for photos being submitted? I appreciate each site has different requirements but if there was a minimum which covers all sites, what size would it have to be?

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: Shelma1 on November 26, 2015, 05:54

The size rules are the same for photos and scanned illustrations. I don't remember what the minimum size is...I usually output to 4000x4000 or 3000x5000. I seem to remember that they stopped accepting smaller sizes sometime in the past year or so.

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: Dog-maDe-sign on November 26, 2015, 06:08

I make 5000 x 5000 pix raster file starting from an original scan of 600 dpi and it is normally accepted on SS FT IS and CS.

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: Me on November 27, 2015, 00:52

Thanks both for info

Title: Re: Creating vectors from drawings - can you keep the pencil texture?
Post by: leaf on November 28, 2015, 17:29

Thanks for the responses everyone.  It sounds like the best plan might be to make high res scans of the drawings and simply upload them as rasters.