Back to Vectors

I recently discovered the magic of vector drawing. I was totally tired of the same old photoshop effects and brushes and all that crap and decided to do something new. I went back my hand-drawn Guitarist and thought for a while. An idea clicked. I wanted to convert that 'Pixelated Bitmap' into a ultra-high clarity image. Then came up the idea of vector drawing and I started surfing around for some good examples of vector drawings.

So what's special about these drawings? Well, Bitmaps are based on pixels and resolution. But Vectors are purely mathematical. All the lines, curves, fills(areas) are created by mathematical equations and hence any amount of zoom won't damage the clarity. They can literally be saved at any resolution without any loss.

Back to the drawing. I found out that normal bitmaps can be converted into vectors automatically with a threshold limit using some software like Inkscape, Flash(Trace Bitmap Command), etc. but that wasn't what I wanted. Mine was a pencil drawing and every small mark and shade would get converted into a vector line. So I took up the painful procedure of drawing it myself in Flash. Putting the bitmap image as a reference, I started drawing every line and filling it with colours. I had to use my own 'creativity' to 'estimate' where the highlights and shadows would lie, and had to draw more lines and fill more areas. Finally when it was all done, the result is like the image below... This drawing has a few flaws though. The more we zoom in, the easier it is to find flaws, breaks in lines, empty areas, overlapping fills, etc. And in particular, the Cartoon Drawing itself had a few proportionality flaws. The sizes of hands, arms, guitar's headstock, etc. are highly exaggerated just to make it look funny and cartoon-like and all this took an incredibly long time for me. And yet, I must call this easy. If it were a photograph, it would have taken much longer. And generally bitmap photographs can be converted to vectors using the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator. That's something I didn't try yet, but the results of that are simply mind-blowing... I'll get to that soon, but for now, enjoy this Flash Vector Drawing.