Seperating bitmaps

[Rock]

This is the sketch I did of Kage. You can see that it is pretty loose and I made quite a few changes before reaching the finished product.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y11...ageSketch2.jpg

[handrawn]

like it

I've attached screen shots of traces that I did with xara and inkscape

For this sort of work I reckon you are limited to tracing in greyscale in xara [brightness threshold in inkscape]

Gnurf has done a very helpful tutorial on this in xara:
http://www.xaraxone.com/guest/guest62/
Xhris also has a bitmap tracing tutorial on his site:
http://xhris.digitalred.net/

once you have the lines vectored, the next step is to make the shapes to color

xara produces some of these when it traces - but only for areas where there are no gaps

so there is extra work then to produce these - with a drawing like this using the shape editor to trace round [on a separate layer] is best I reckon

in theory inkscape will fill unclosed shapes - but in practice with a loose drawing like this it will tend to 'miss out bits in the corners'

illustrator CS live paint is better here for dealing with gaps, if you happen to have access to it

so - is this a short cut? - I guess that's for you to decide in this case

[Rock]

Wow, lots of work there! Thanks for sharing your knowledge and time!