Subtitles of the Movie

Live Trace is a great tool for people who like to draw traditionally, like myself. I'm going to bring in, I'm going to open a recent file, and this is simply called Thief dot PSD. It's an artwork that I created on simple typing paper, and then I traced over it with a regular old Sharpie marker. I could also have used something like Higgins Black Magic Ink with a brush, which I often use. But in this case I just used a marker. Now, since this artwork is pretty much a solid piece of art, there's no way to really use the Direct Selection tool to select any of these color regions to color. So that's where Live Trace comes in handy. Once you select your artwork, by the way you'll notice that your tools will change up here because Illustrator is kind of smart and it realizes that you want to trace something. So what I can do is choose a preset, in this case I think Comic Art is appropriate. But I could choose anything else based on any other type of artwork from technical drawing to a hand drawn sketch, or anything else like a logo. But Comic Art is going to work for me here, so I'll choose Comic Art. Illustrator warns me that this could take some time because this is a pretty large image. Illustrator, I pay you the big bucks to trace, now go. So I click OK, and now it's done. I can see a slight visual change in the artwork indicating that the trace has taken place, and now I can use something like the good old Live Paint Bucket. Now I do have a lesson on how to use this guy, so check out the Live Paint lesson and really learn how to use this tool in full effect. But for now, I'm simply going to select this and move it into a region like this in my artwork, and it's simply going to ask me to click to make this a Live Paint group. When I click, it's gonna give me another dialog box. I get a lot of these. I mean it's like what is up Illustrator? Stop warning me about everything, I'm ok. I'm going to click OK, and then it's going to create editable regions for me. Now when I move my paint bucket, I can choose a color and I can click and color in this artwork. And for people who like to draw comic books and Manga, which is Japanese style comics, this is going to be something you're going to love because now you don't have to worry about finding a way to trace your artwork, and you can simply choose colors and create new regions to paint, and it's very, very simple. So once again guys, Live Paint is going to really help to bridge that traditional and digital coloring for you. I also suggest that if you decide to bring in pencil artwork, that you make your lines as dark as possible. The reason I say that is because whenever you scan pencil artwork, since lead is made of tiny crystals, the crystals reflect the light back at the scanner. So that's why you have broken artwork when you bring it into the computer. So it's a little hard to attain this level of clarity with lead. So make sure you really press down and make that nice and dark. Likewise just take a marker, or some ink and a brush, and just make sure you create some very, very nice closed regions so that the Live Trace tool will have less work to do. So it's a great tool and definitely incorporate it into your workflow, especially if you like to draw by hand.