Breaking apart an image

live trace should work, but if it is that simple, just trace it manually with the pen tool and you'll have better results.

and even though you are not making any money off of it, it is still copywrited and you do not have the permissions to use it. i doubt you'll get into any trouble but the above poster is correct, it's not yours. the law says you cant use it. maybe YOU should look up the laws. the monetary aspect is only a very small fraction of copywrite issues.

i know you are probably a senior or something... but trust me, almost everyone here knows more about copywrite laws than a college kid.

Have you tried doing a live trace?  Depending on the detail of what you want, this could work.

(instructions from CS4, not CS5... hopefully, they're not too far off)

Open your image in illustrator, and with it selected, go Object>Live Trace>Tracing Options

Set the preset to Custom

Set your mode (B&W, color, grayscale)

Mess about with the threshold - you'll see what I mean when you experiment.

The Max Colors is the number of colors that will be produced.  The max is 255 (RGB colors).

Less blur for more accurate photo re-creation.

If you're using for a print, resample to at least 300 px.

Leave set to Fills

Create a smaller Path Fitting to closely follow the original lines.  Same goes for Minimum Area and Corner Angle.

Experiment with Ignore White

Warning - if you have preview checked, your computer will take forever to render the image, as it tries to render for every little change you make.  Best to not have this checked and just Trace when you're ready to try out your settings.

If your computer is running slow, be prepared for it to take a few (long) seconds to render.

Once you have the image the way you want it, click "Expand", which will give you all the vector lines.

By creating a very detailed picture, you will find yourself with a ridiculous amount of anchors, quite useless in the end, really.  So you may have to adjust your original idea to match what you're going for.

Another option is to take the image into Photoshop first, crop it to roughly the size you want and erase any extra bits, then bring it into illustrator to do the live trace.  Don't fret about having to rasterize the image - Live Trace will only work on rasterized images anyway.  If you save it as PNG or GIF, and check the transparency box, you won't have to worry about any unwanted white background.

Good luck!

Can you be more clear as to what exactly you are looking for? As an vector drawing application, AI does not deal with bitmap imagery in such a manner, but it has a ton of ways of breaking apart vector shapes/ paths...

Mylenium