Illustrating Anger

Illustrator is an interesting program. A whole visual style seems to have been generated around it. It’s a simplified, almost re-engineered version of pop art. Or at least that’s what a lot of live traced images look like in the end. I played with a few images this weekend that I had sketched in Sketchbook to see if live tracing or doing it by hand was a better option.



The above sketch was live traced into the above full color image. Now, the live trace did an ok job, but there are some weird artifacts that need to be cleaned (click to see full image). The question is, are the artifacts small enough to call it good or do we clean the lines up, while wasting just about as much time as drawing it in illustrator from scratch?



These two images were sketched and drawn from scratch in sketchbook and illustrator. The sketch (left) was done first and the illustrator drawing (right) was based on the sketch but done by hand not live-traced. While the illustrator drawing is cleaner than the live trace, it is also simpler and seems to have changed in its rough style. In fact it seems to have taken on a style all its own.