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2. Line Art

Before I do any kind of coloring, I always do the line work on a separate layer. In Flash I’d use the line tool for this, convert the lines to fills and manipulate their thickness with the selection tool, but in Illustrator I use the pen tool, of course. It’s not only the most important tool in this program, it’s really easy to use once you get used to it and it’s especially easier to use than Flash’s pen tool.

So I start to “ink” my sketch with the pen tool, outline color set to “none” and fill color set to black. In any other vector, I’d just trace over everything without really considering the different parts of the body or whatever I’m tracing, but in this case, I already have to separate the different parts (i.e. the top, the belly and hands, the pants), because the lines of the vector I created in Flash have different colors depending on the part they outline.

When I’ve chosen to change the color of the lines in Flash, I just had to separate the different shapes with a line, but something like this doesn’t work in Illustrator. So I’d have to do the lines all over again (at least in some places) to give them a different color without effecting other lines. Again, I kept this in mind for later use when I “inked” my sketch. When I was finished, I deleted the sketch layer and came up with this:

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