I decided to do something a little different with the mermaid set. Instead of the whimsical pencil line I like and I have been using recently I tried the "live trace" that illustrator has. Now there are benefits to live trace in the it is faster once I spend all my time making the sketch a complete line art drawing and then cleaning it up. But there are two serious draw backs it seems (well there are more but two that erk me at the moment).The resulting line is not a smooth as the ones I create when I use the "pencil" brush and two - there are tons of anchor points - which makes the file horrendously large - or maybe I have missed something in a layer. The good points is that this drawing might be easier for digitisers to use - the line issue (again) and also seems to conform with most of what people are doing in the digital stamp world. The problem is I don't really like it. Anyway after saying all of that, the result was not bad, and quite workable. The pic is using one of the mermaids from the mermaid line art set and playing with it.
2 comments:
I love your mermaids! The colored picture on the top especially looks very nice. :-) I too have tried Illustrator's live trace, and I agree it tends to have some drawbacks, and sometimes you have to toy with the settings to get it to look 'just right'. What I've been using is Inkscape's BMP trace. It's one click, and you can take a scanned in and inked image, trace it in Inkscape, and it looks awesome. You need to make sure the scanned lines aren't too crisp though, or the traced lines will have jaggies here and there. You have to select a 'descreen' or softening filter on your scanner for it to work well. But I still love it. :-)
Thanks. I don't have inkscape, but I will try a bmp. I will also try a finer pen.
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