Coloring a file not created in adobe

[Jenna5FEF]

Hi!  I'm new here and super excited to be using illustrator now.  I can't believe it's take me this long to start!  

My question is, I drew line drawings by hand for a coloring book I made and then scanned them and saved them as pdf and png files, the pngs I saved in Gimp and the PDFs were saved in Photoshop by my brother, all a few years ago.  Now that I have Illustrator I was hoping to turn them into vectors, so I know I need to use the trace option to turn them to vectors, but then I want to color in the spaces on the coloring pages so they are colored images, and I don't now how to since I can't select the shapes since they are all connected and one, the whole image and the background is all one.  Is there any way to do this?

Thank you!  

Jenna

[Michael Bullo]

When using Image Trace, are you creating Fills, Strokes or Both? If you aren't seeing these options, click on the triangle to the left of the word Advanced within the Image Trace panel.

With a series of selected separate paths, you can fill the inferred areas using the Live Paint Bucket tool. Note that this creates an entire Live Paint "thing" 🙂 Happy to discuss this feature in more detail if you have questions.

[Jenna5FEF]

Woah!  It took some fooling around, and also searching for the live paint bucket tool and now the whole thing is selected and it looks so crazy and complex, but I filled in a few spaces and I think it's working!  Adobe Illustrator blows my mind every day.  I've only had it for a week or so.  I feel my brain expanding.  I only ever did traditional art on paper, canvas, etc, besides digitizing those coloring pages.  Thank you so much for taking the time to leave that information!  I greatly appreciate it.  I might come back if I can't figure something else out with this as I play around with it.  Thank you again. 🙂

[Michael Bullo]

Hey that's great. Congratulations. Thank you. Enjoy exploring this whole new digital world 🙂

[Jacob Bugge]

Jenna,

You need to Expand the Image Trace to work with it.