Suggestions for preparing hand drawn art for print

[Shanarchy]

We get a lot of hand drawn artwork, typically from tattoo artists. The artwork is really good and I do not want to mess with the integrity of the designs. Typically, I do a live trace in illustrator, resize and create an outline when needed (it's usually drawn black on white but the print is white ink on black). The problem is I end up playing around with this for a while to not lose the detail (usually stipple) during the trace.

Thoughts and suggestions?

[zanegun08]

eww, don't live trace it!

Just take it into photoshop and curve your levels so it is mostly 100% black, make it a bitmap at 900 lpi and paste it into illustrator and assign it a spot color.

Live trace takes away so much details, and don't you typically want to retain a little bit of the hand drawn "flaws" and not make it a vector graphic look.

If you attach a sample drawing at high res I'll add a PDF back of how I would do it.

[Shanarchy]

eww, don't live trace it!

Just take it into photoshop and curve your levels so it is mostly 100% black, make it a bitmap at 900 lpi and paste it into illustrator and assign it a spot color.

Live trace takes away so much details, and don't you typically want to retain a little bit of the hand drawn "flaws" and not make it a vector graphic look.

If you attach a sample drawing at high res I'll add a PDF back of how I would do it.

This sounds much more of the route I want to go. I am really rough in photoshop but will try this with the one I'm working on tonight.

I've attached the file I'm working on. I'd super appreciate a walk though so I can improve in this area.

File is too large to post. Can I e-mail it to you? 

[Sbrem]

Same here, far more control in Photoshop, for me anyway. Then you can save as a bitmap tif and simply place that into Illustrator, resize it, even color it. If you have tones, you could define them in the Bitmap options, line count, angle, dot shape... or, save as a grayscale tif (or PSD) and again place it in Illustrator and size it up. If I'm going to trace it, I usually make it 3 - 4 times the finished size, then reduce it; any of the weird sh!t tracing does is barely noticeable then...

Steve

[Shanarchy]

Thanks Steve!

I really need to learn how to better utilize photoshop.

[Sbrem]

Great Dane Graphics has a good Photoshop for T-shirts that covers a lot of basics very well. I learned how before that came out, but bought it anyway because someone else's take can be very eye opening, not to mention saving you the time of figuring it all out by yourself, especially with all the other tasks you have.

Steve

[zanegun08]

I emailed Shane this tutorial he said I could post of the art he sent me.

It was pretty candid, so maybe in retrospect I'd resize the image to print size / proper DPI first.



You can download the illustrator file for the end result here

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/711723/handdrawn.ai.zip
This is just a site I found online to host a zip file bigger than I can upload here so open at your own risk.

If anyone has a better or different way of handling let me know.  The reason behind 900 LPI is because I don't like halftones and would rather just let hand drawn art have that look and let the exposure / print be what it is.  You can do proper halftone sizes as well (make sure your art is to print size), I just despise halftones.

[screenxpress]

Nice job Zane.  I use photoshop a lot and would like a copy for the future. 

Would you email me the insert, if it's in one file?

[Shanarchy]

Thanks again Zane!

This makes my life very simple going forward for handling these types of jobs. And will get me a much better end result.

It's people like you that make this forum so amazing!

Steve,

Thanks for the heads up! I'll look into the Dane PS tutorials. I'm sure there will be a lot of great stuff in there for me. PS is a powerful tool which I've generally avoided at all costs and would do everything in AI. I really need to change that.

[Sbrem]

Nice Zane, pretty much 95% of how I'd go as well. Great layout of the details.

Steve