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Zebrah Harry
Zebrah Harry
Participant
February 16, 2017
Answered

Problem Converting a Drawing to Vector in Illustrator

  • February 16, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 3115 views

Hi,

I'm hoping someone can help me with this because I've been tearing my hair out for a month trying to find an answer.

I have some drawing I did by hand and scanned. My intention is to have a final image that is a vector copy of my drawing with a transparent background, which could then be used for something like a t-shirt design.

I started out by opening my drawings in Photoshop and edited them to have a transparent background. I then saved them and opened with Illustrator, where I converted them using Image Trace. For reference, this is the tutorial that showed me how to do that: - YouTube

Now that I have the drawing open in Illustrator, I want to increase the stroke weight just a little bit over the entire drawing. The problem is, the second I try to do this, I end up with a rectangular border around my drawing. This border is the edge of the image as it was cropped in Photoshop, and only appears once I increase the stroke.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I want to be able to increase the stroke without having this box border appear around the final image, and for the life of me, I cannot find a way to do that.

THANK YOU!!!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Jacob Bugge

    Harry,

    Why not try to use Image Trace on the original drawing file, with Ignore White ticked, and with the right settings (you may use stroke as one thing)?

    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

    Always expand after image tracing to get things to work.

    Select it/them and Object>Image Trace>Expand.

    1 reply

    Jacob Bugge
    Community Expert
    Jacob BuggeCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
    Community Expert
    February 16, 2017

    Harry,

    Why not try to use Image Trace on the original drawing file, with Ignore White ticked, and with the right settings (you may use stroke as one thing)?

    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

    Always expand after image tracing to get things to work.

    Select it/them and Object>Image Trace>Expand.

      Zebrah Harry
      Zebrah HarryAuthor
      Participant
      March 14, 2017

      I'm sorry for being an idiot, but this doesn't work for me. I can't open the pdf directly in Illustrator and use Image Trace because the Image Trace option is greyed out. I've tried saving the file as a jpeg and a .psd document in Photoshop first and then opening in Illustrator, but Image Trace is still unavailable. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

      Jacob Bugge
      Community Expert
      Jacob BuggeCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      March 14, 2017

      Harry,

      I have some drawing I did by hand and scanned.

      After pondering over the (im)possible things that may go wrong owing to your using PDF as the scan format, and the use of Photoshop underway, I would suggest your scanning anew directly into a suitable raster format of your liking such as (greyscale) TIFF, PNG, or JPEG, then File>Place (as a copy), then trying to Image Trace it (with the right options) and see.

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