If you do not know the answer to that question or cannot create vector art out of your raster (pixel) images, you may have a tough time in today's commercial cartooning industry.

I receive many submissions from newbie cartoonists wanting to know what I think about their cartooning and also wanting to know if I would hire them. I have to say that there is almost no way I could hire a cartoonist that does not know how to turn a sketch into a high resolution digital file and then turn that file into a vector art file. If you don't know Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop or Corel Draw you most likely will not be hired as a cartoonist or be able to supply clients with the correct files they will need to have their projects printed.

Vector art is scalable and does not lose detail when resized. It is made up of lines that can be moved and stretched with a pointer tool. A vector image is much like a wire frame that creates the shape of a design. Adobe Illustrator now has Live Trace built into the program which turns most any file into a vector.

Vectorizing colored bitmaps or photographs can be pretty tough. The file output is never that clean of a file. My suggestion is to create your cartoon designs as high resolution bitmap (300 dpi) files, namely TIFF files. Clean all of your lines and make sure your TIFF file is as clean as possible. Place that image into Illustrator and Live Trace. You will then have a nice, crisp black and white vector image. Ungroup it and you can easily Fill each section of the image with color. Add shading, blends and gradients to create professional cartoon artwork.

I will provide visuals of this process in the future. Learn Illustrator and PhotoShop and get busy creating those vector art files.

Labels: Cartooning, How To, Vector Art