Graphics - Illustrator demo

With little experience in Adobe Illustrator, I got to know it a little better on Thursday. Since I'm comfortable with Photoshop, I knew some of the commands and the interface of Illustrator. In the demo, I was introduced to live trace and paint, and was able to mess around with the many functions that the program uses.
So with this exercise, I uploaded a picture of my hand brush (above) into Illustrator. I then used Live Trace, as seen in the second picture, to make an outline of the object so I could start painting it. The results, I think, are interesting, mostly because Live Trace didn't just outline the object like I thought it would, but instead traced around the shadows, highlights, and midtones of the object.



The image below was the brush as I had traced it using the pen tool in Illustrator. This came out the best, and gave me more control over where I wanted to place color. As for the bristles of the brush, I simply chose to use the paintbrush tool with an appropriate size and stroke to make it look like a brush. I think it turned out all right for someone new to Illustrator.