Heya all.

Currently im just scanning the penciled artwork which i do and then firing up illustrator and inking it digitally.

Is there any better way to go abou this process?

Also i cant find any way of just going 'path all the lineart' in illustrator, is there any way of doing this?

Thanks

Well you can use auto trace programs or features within Corel Draw or Illustrator but these are generally crappy at best for this sort of thing, giving you jaggy lines and a zillion nodes that you would have to edit.

My suggestion is taking some clean pencils into photoshop and using the levels to 'darken the line art and clean up the noise. With this done you may be able to create a clipping path from the pencils and use them in illustrator.

When I would receive 'dirty artwork' for a logo concept form a client or another designer, I would clean the line art up with levels and through the use of gaussian blur and some more levels adjustments I would get a smoother cleaner line, however this didnt always work...but when it did the lines could be easily imported into a vector program and some slight modifcations made there.

Alot depenjds on the type of artwork itself.

I hope this helps. :)

Another good choice is Streamline also made by Adobe it's a stand alone raster to vector converter, it does a lot better job than the autotrace in Illustrator.

I didn't even know there was an autotrace feature in Illustrator. Would it work on a photograph placed into the workspace?

Yeah it should work on photos though I have never used it for that. It's found under the blend tool and the options are under the Type & Auto Tracing preferences (in the edit menu).

I read an article a few weeks ago (graphics exchange I think) about auto tracing and it said there are a bunch of freeware/shareware programs available. Just search under raster to vector at somewhere like www.download.com.

:)

Thanks freaky, I'll have to try it out sometime.