new to illustrator- much difficulty with hand drawn art

dougofakkad wrote: redgiancola wrote: Here is an original scan of one I vectorized with a 3rd party app, what was the app?

It's called Image Vectorizer by Icosasoft.

Jacob Bugge wrote: redgiantcola, Presuming you have used Image Trace, you will need to expand after image tracing to get things to work. Select it/them and Object>Image Trace>Expand. To get stroked paths, use Strokes under Tracing options: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/image-trace.html You may also look here: http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeillustrator/2013/07/image-trace-in-illustrator-a-tutorial-and- guide.html

Okay, I retraced a sketch under "trace and expand," but the results are the same. And the expand option under Object>Image Trace> Expand is not highlighted. Even when I select everything.

Monika Gause wrote: Autotracing an image usually produces closed paths. That's why you can't join them. You might be looking for something different. In your case I would recommend drawing them manually. Gives you greater control, a better result and open paths. But no matter how you traco your images, the live paint tool should colorize it. Turn on the Gap detection. How to create and work with Live Paint groups in Illustrator

I don't want to redraw all my drawings, I just want to color them.

The gap detection is on, and it says there are no gaps. And also, I have no color options at all. Only the black and white of the tracing.

geoffb81943439 wrote: In the Layers panel, what do you see when you twirl down the arrow to the left of the thumbnail for Layer 1? Do you see one sublayer called <Image>, or one or more sublayers called <Path>?

There is one sublayer called group, and under that there are about a hundred sublayers called paths. I can highlight the paths, but not the areas inside them.