It is a great idea to get all your hand sketches converted into vector arts. Thus, you could put them to several uses without issues. You could scale up or scale down your drawings infinitely, without adversely affecting their visual excellence or appeal. You can use them for features as small as a business logo or as huge as a billboard banner. Indeed, vector arts are a huge rage online and your sketches could open new advents of revenue generation for you hence. However, there are a few challenges usually faced by artists while converting hand-drawn sketches into versatile vectors. These include poor contrast, low resolution and intricate designs of illustrations. By choosing among your illustrations wisely, you could easily turn the tables in your favor.

Choosing sketches fit for vector conversion

The first step towards vector conversion of any drawing is to scan it. For obtaining a (raster) image file of your drawing, you may scan your sketch using a scanning device or simply click its crisp and clear digital photograph using a camera. However, before scanning the sketch, you must notice the contrast and intricacy of your illustration.

At the outset, you must ensure that the sketch has good contrast. A drawing with too light lines that almost blend with the color of the background would not be easy to vectorise. Not to mention, any details to be added in the sketch should be added at the drawing stage itself, as adding anything at a later stage will be plain challenging.

In case you have the sketches in the form of images only, you must choose only those images having crisp contrast and high resolution (preferably with 300 dots per inch).

Only a miraculous performance by an adroit and experienced artist can possibly transform a poor contrast and low resolution raster image to vector. So, you better contact a credible professional service provider for the job, if your raster image file suffers from poor contrast plus low resolution but the sketch is too good to be passed over.

Converting sketches into vector art

There are only two ways to convert your sketches into vectors – the easy way and the difficult way. When your drawings have healthy contrast and saved in high resolution, you may comfortably use the live trace feature of Illustrator and transform your sketches into vector arts in a jiffy. That’s the easy way to go about it.

However, many a times, the illustrations aren’t that simple for the live trace feature to render them into their picture-perfect vector versions. In other words, you have little option but to do it the harder way – that is by manually tracing the drawing in Illustrator, Inkspace etc.

Manual tracing of the sketches in Illustrator

Manual tracing of sketches in Illustrator can be achieved using a variety of means and techniques. Though there is no one right or best technique for tracing manually, the pen tool and the blob brush tool along with eraser tool are the most popular of tools in Illustrator for manual tracing for vector conversion, among both professionals and learners alike.

Pen tool in Illustrator is an effective tool to trace along all kinds of shapes by creating Bezier curves along the edges, which can be scaled ceaselessly. The blob brush tool along with eraser tool is effective for manual tracing in low resolution images, which renders without killing the spirit of the illustration.

In the end, whatever design application you may like to work in, you should attempt to master it and experiment with various gradients and color fills to figure out what works the best for you. Try and try until you succeed and you’d eventually make it, flawlessly.