Cutting out a shape from a complex drawing

[Nicola B]

Hi There, 

Hoping someone can help, I've tried a few ways to try and cut out various shapes form a faily detailed drawing but doesn't seem to work every time. See attached image. 

I draw this crest black and white. Then transferred to illustrator using the image trace tool. Then I drop colour into it on illustrator. You'll see some shapes that should be 'cut out' ie transparent are white. I want those bits to be cut out ie see-through. I have managed to do this using the shape builder tool & subtrating it from the image. However, I try this now and its simply so time consuming as eveyrthing is selected, invariably I get the rainbow wheel of death and nothing works. I've tried doing the copmpound path option & then using the pathfinder minus front selection but eveyrthing goes transparent execpt the black outline. 

Help please - I've googled loads on cutting shapes but they're all simple 2 peice shapes and so much easier. As this is multiple shapes on top of another black shape, it's proving triocky. There must be an easier way of doing this? I am a relative notice to illustrator so do go gently please 🙂

[Monika Gause]

So you image traced this? Then just deleting the white does not work?

If it does not work, then selecting just the background path (not the colors) and the white and then making a compound path does not work? 

[Bobby Henderson]

The Live Trace and Live Paint functions are kind of dumb in some repsects. I think they're decent for creating certain kinds of effects using photographs, but they're not so great when used on more graphical items. They don't always understand what is supposed to be a negative "hole" in an object. So they just stack more and more "positive" polygons on top of each other regardless of the color. It can be a real mess if you're trying to certain shapes to turn into compound paths to make certain parts of the artwork see-thru.

When I need to convert a pixel-based image of something like a crest into vector format I usually have to re-build it by hand. I'm often sending the finished results to vinyl cutters or routing tables so the artwork has to be cut-ready. Auto-traced artwork rarely ever passes for that unless you're doing a straight black and white conversion (and even in those cases some artwork clean-up will almost always be necessary). Pixel-to-vector logo conversions done by hand are almost always going to be more clean, precise and organized than something that has been auto-traced.