Because I had little experience with the live-trace tool, and no experience with live paint bucket, I chose a very simple drawing for my first exercise. For a long time I tried to get the whole sky to be a continuous blue-white gradient, even in the parts between the parachute lines, but it didn't seem possible while in live paint bucket mode. In the end I had to ungroup the whole image and get out of live paint bucket mode in order to make the background a continuous gradient. Otherwise, the exercise went pretty smoothly.
It was a little bit disappointing to find out that because live trace doesn't let you leave a gap in the outline of a shape, some of your work can end up looking unnatural. Notice how I had to give the man a solid hairline in order to color his hair blond. I think that the resulting hair shape is a bit odd. Perhaps in the future I could resolve that by manipulating the color of the stroke.
I struggled a lot with color choices, finally settling on some colors from Illustrator's "desaturated" swatch library, and also with getting gradients to obey. It seemed like every time I finally got one shape to have the right gradient, it would disappear when I put in the next shape's gradient. I think I had to get out of live paint bucket mode in order to go from one gradient to the next without altering the previous ones. Lastly, I wasn't able to turn the horn that is brown (on the far left creature) into white. It was missing the bottom curved line, so I tried to draw it in and connect it, but it wouldn't work. I found out later that this had to do with the fact that I'd live-traced this image with strokes in it, and the strokes were getting in the way of connecting the lines properly. In the future I will leave "strokes" unchecked in the options window, and spend more time cleaning up the traced image before starting to color it in.
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| Rocky Wanderings (original) |
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| Rocky Wanderings (final) - Ananda La Vita |
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