Occasionally I will do vector tracing. Using a patented method (striking the mouse repeatedly with a heavy-weave cloth until a completed image appears in Illustrator) I make images that have been described by critics as "acceptable", "portable network graphics files", "preferable to setting your desktop to a primary color", and "Chika". Here is such an acclaimed vector trace, which I completed just tonight! To celebrate the season, it is a festively attired Vita.

1280 x 1024 — the resolution used by monitors that have freakishly skinny aspect ratios

A more transparency-having one will be forthcoming, but I like to provide a suggested background for desktops because I feel the backgrounds I select enhance the effect (in this case, the train effect). So enjoy that. Also some time I will put up a Pachira and a Chika that I did.

Most excellent. A background with a train in excess of 44 mph and VITACHAN make it an epic win in my book.

Your curves with the pen tool are absolutely fantastic. I personally find myself quite often struggling to get my curves... well, curvy. Mine tend to look almost flattened, which gets annoying, fast. And it's a good thing you didn't add any filters to it. I've known some vector artists that purposely filter and add artifacts to them, which completely deviates from the point of creating a vector in the first place.

Anyway, I can't see any errors either, which is always a good thing.

However, I do have some questions:

I. Do/ Will you release your *.ai/*.svg/etc. files?
II. Do you outline an image first, and then add in the details?
III. When can I expect to see Pachira (<3)?
IV. Have you tried varying line width? It's a pain in the ass, and takes much longer, but the end results are usually quite pleasing.

tl;dr ver.:
I approve! :3

I still am not requesting vectors! Good for me!

But I will give subtle hints.

























MIU

Cuteness! =D

And I see the sleigh is indeed a complicated thing to vector up. Nice results, overall. ^^

Oh, God, the pen tool? I flee from the pen tool as though it were a marauding army composed entirely of Fate Testarosa. I use the line tool and then I Gaussian it. It's slow, but it yields nice, authoritative-looking lines. That and I'm a complete tool with mouse-drawings so the pen tool goes in precisely the wrong direction half the time.

Not usually. I have this fear that that takes me out of the process, somehow. It's probably silly, since I work slowly enough (and without varying line width; more on this later) that I'm never really in it to begin with, but there you have it. But I'll put this one out there so you can see how I do the lines. It'll go up with Pachira et al.

What I do is put in all the lines. That's the lines that are outlines, lines that are color borders, and lines that delineate shading. Somewhere along the process for every intersection of two or more lines I have to divide them up so there's no overlapping where it's not supposed to be. It's a really depressing way to do it, because until I'm done I have basically nothing to show for it. I used to do it front to back in pieces (that's how I did Pachira, whom we'll come to in a moment), so I'd have a lock here and an arm there that would be finished, but the many layers quickly became Escherish and I decided to just do it flat (which is what brought me to do Chika and Vita *rimshot*).

In like a minute or so. I got Vita up late last night and had to get to bed, but now I can seek out and post Pachira. And Chika. And not Miu (yet?).

Because of the way I do the lines, this would make a single image take about a trillion times as long as it should. That said, I do when I'm working on faces so I can get the full goodness of the expression. Vita didn't get this treatment because her facial features were like half a pixel wide so I would have been making the whole thing up, and it would probably wind up looking like she had been attacked in the face by angry house cats.

Danke! Now to find the other ones.

speaking of tl;dr what is up with this post i mean really

Edit: Alert! Before you can safely ignore this post you must view image documents containing cartoon characters:
Pachira for people who like Pachira (everyone likes Pachira)
Chika disapproves, and I approve of this

Also, Vita lives in Adobe Illustrator
Note about Vita: I got ahead of myself and forgot the runners when I was finishing, so they're not fully integrated with the rest, but to make up for that there is an exciting extra surprise in the file. MIT RAKETTENANTRIEB

Well, I figured it was long enough since I had done anything so early last month I produced a thing. And then I forgot to tell anyone about it.


So anyway, since everyone loves girls in swimsuits and boss goggles, I have a thing for everyone who loves those things, and if you don't love those things get out because I hate you:
1680x1050: Image size of champions. Champions who will be downloading a 4-megabyte file.

You will notice a new feature in this vectoring: a crotch! I mean variable line widths. Doing things this way drained me physically and spiritually and I will die an early death. Sorry about the colors; I was working from a black-and-white image, so I wasn't able to copy the colors from someone who actually knew what they were doing.

Here is a file I made.

Click it for the large version.

The large version is pretty large.

It is no longer 3 am so the finished file is above.

Hmm nice Vectors - gotta love your work =)
Pretty cute :D

Tenk you.

These are really nice! I like the Pachira one, whoever Pachira is. XD

Can I ask you some silly Illustrator questions? I've only ever used it for line art so I don't know much. What's your method for doing shading?

Very crude. I just make a very dark area and adjust the transparency so it looks right.

Ahh, I see.... So do you do the line art on a separate layer from the coloring and shading, orrrr? -knows nothing about coloring in Illustrator LOL-

Well originally it's just one big mess of lines. It looks like this:

I join them to make the areas (I need to duplicate it a bunch of times because many of the lines are used more than once), at which time the shading goes in a layer above the colors. (above that are the face, the highlights and the lines in that order)

o_o Oh wow!! That's neat. It seems hard. XD Thanks for explaining!