How do I trace a gymnast?

**shents** · 11 February 2009, 11:51 AM

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

**iamtheblues** · 11 February 2009, 01:12 PM

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.

**shents** · 11 February 2009, 02:13 PM

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

**shents** · 11 February 2009, 04:47 PM

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

**handrawn** · 11 February 2009, 05:14 PM

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

**iamtheblues** · 11 February 2009, 05:24 PM

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.

**shents** · 11 February 2009, 05:55 PM

thanks guys - I'm learning!

Lisa

**Idefriginit** · 11 February 2009, 11:29 PM

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.

**Idefriginit** · 12 February 2009, 02:02 AM

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.

**a_c_18** · 19 February 2009, 05:38 PM

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