How do I trace a gymnast?

Hi

I am looking to do a series of posters advertising some gymnastics, trampolining and cheerleading courses run at our leisure centre.

For the gymnastics poster, I'd quite like to have an outline of a gymnast in a typical 'finishing' or 'balancing' pose.

What is the best way to achieve this outline in Illustrator? I'm very new to this software but good at experimenting if someone could start me off in the right direction!

Thanks

Lisa

Hi Lisa, you have several ways of approaching this.
Go to Google Images and search for "athletes" or "gymnasts" and download any suitable results. Place them in Illustrator and with the pen tool, trace around the outlines.
The pen tool is an absolute pig to use if you aren't familiar with it.
Alternatively you can use the Live Trace option in Illustrator, which should give you outlines that you can work with.
Thirdly, you could cheat and download either athletes.ttf and fitness silhouettes.ttf both free dingbat fonts and use those. (see attachment below).
Saludos,
Bob.

Thats a good starter for 10, Bob. I wasnt very happy with my pen tool effort, but I'll give the live trace option a go.

PS The boss was well impressed with my last beach hut effort!

Thanks

Lisa

Am I just daft, or is there no way around this problem I've encountered with the pen tool?...

When I am tracing around my gymnast, there's a white 'fill' that follows the pen around which is fine until it hides what I'm trying to trace around.

Lisa

yes you can disable this - in illustrator there are two colors for the pen tool:

the stroke [line]
the fill

you need to set the fill to no color - a white box with red stripe on the color palette - check out the help section

First fig. shows how you probably have your stroke and fill set up. You need to click on the downward arrow in fig 2 and select red diagonal line - no fill.
Edit; I see Steve beat me to it.
Saludos,
Bob.

thanks guys - I'm learning!

Lisa

The shortcut for the pen tool is "P".

Pressing "X" will will switch from fill to stroke and pressing Shift + X will change the stroke and fill colour around.

Pressing / will make the colour null (not there) depending on which part you have active (stroke or fill).

When using the pen tool, if you need to go from a bezier curve to a corner, use the pen tool and click on the last anchor point. The pen wool will show a lil angle icon.

Also, when using LiveTrace - this is only really good for solid high contrasting images where edges are clearly defined. If you use a low res jpeg it will not trace with a nice solid edge. I hardly use live trace. Practice with the pen tool and get upto speed and you shouldn't need to live trace anything.

another way to do it with a bad quality image is to print the image out, trace it with tracing paper, with a black pen ans then scan it, and thn use live trace n then it should give a good outline

Good reply from a_c here. Have used that method a few times with logos when the supplied logo was not good enough.

A potentially pricey option is use Vector Magic then export the resulting trace in a format Illustrator can handle, like .eps or .pdf or .ai. The download version costs something like US$250, but you can subscribe to an online interface for something like US$8 a month. Their tracing algorithm is incredibly good. You can download a trial version that won't save anything, and with that prove whether it'll work with your particular image(s).

I would say the process would be basically the same on any vector application you chose to use...
If you only want a silhouette then this will most likely be primarily a single object.
(i would assert)
But the steps necessary to produce a vector from a raster image would be different if you wished a colour graphic.

Assuming its a silhouette i would first manually create the outlines for all the "holes" (negative shapes) in the silhouette and then group these together when finished... then i would either cut these or copy them to a different layer for safe keeping whilst i did the main outline....
When the main outline was completed i would paste the holes on top and subtract them from the main outline shape.
Leaving you with your completed silhouette... one object with holes...

Of course the first thing you should do is put your art on its own layer and lock this.....for a complicated or hires raster image i would palette reduce the image first in your paint program of choice (i use paint shop pro)... this will save you allot of trouble when creating your vector shapes as this initial reduction will take allot of the guess work out... and leave you with an image allot easier to manually trace....

for more complex tracings....
i often then put another layer ontop of this and call it "Veil" or something like that... for this i just make one white rectangle bigger than the entire project and then make it 50% transparent....
This helps when your trace is half done to flick this layer off and on to see where your up to.

Then i would create a layer called main for completed stuff and 2 working layers above this...

I sometimes also create a backdrop layer if white is going to be distracting so i can preview my work as i go on a backdrop closer to the actual colour.

its important that you do employ overlap... as if you decide to blur or feather anything or even make some manual adjustments... producing a design in such a way that is has little or no overlap would be a blunder.

one approach is to block in large areas first and fill in the piece (block it in).
Then overlay the smaller shapes....

another approach is to start with the highlights and then progressively work down (top down)....
or a combination of these 2 ...you'll work it out good luck....