🚀 go-pugleaf

I need to transform an illustration into vector art for screen printing on T-shirts, etc. The problem is the original art is a colored pencil illustration on rough paper. (The artist did a beautiful job and is quite talented. Why he chose colored pencil, I'll never know, since he is a painter.)

I scanned it and used Live Trace in Illustrator CS3. The problem is I had to use 36 colors and a huge amount of paths for it to look good. Live trace is picking up all the sketchiness inherent in colored pencil drawings and the unevenness of the paper. When I simplify it through the Live Trace settings, it loses too much crucial detail, but still keeps the sketchiness of colored pencil and paper in myriad tiny closed paths.

I'm a graphic designer who works for a printing company so I am very familiar with creating graphics for print, but not silk screen.I know more colors means more screens, which means greater cost. I'm also afraid the complexity of the illustration will be a screen printer's nightmare. Am I correct?

Merging the paths would be very time-consuming. There are tons of tiny paths. Using "select same fill", then merging is a possibility. I'd then have to deselect a lot of paths. Merging colors is a possibility too. The only thing I could figure out was to reduce the number of colors and paths in Live Trace to create the basic object, then add the details and make a lot of the fills into gradients myself.

The whole point in using Live Trace vs. creating it manually in Illustrator was to save time and streamline the process. It seems no matter what I do, it's not going to be quick. Naturally my client wants an estimate on design time before I start. (I charge by the hour.

I recently upgraded to Illustrator CS3 so am not familiar with all the new features. Perhaps there is another tool/process that I could use. I'm using the tutorials through lynda.com to get up to speed. Great website!

Any ideas would be appreciated!

Thanks, Meg