Open the Swatches panel and click on the black-and-white Radial Gradient swatch. Select the Rectangle tool (M), click on the artboard, and set the dimensions to 1000×800 pt in the resulting Rectangle dialog. When done, select everything (Select>All) and go to Object>Group. Repeat this process to other areas of the image using varying shades of blue to get the overall two-color look. Open the Swatches panel (Window>Swatches) and choose a light gray color to apply to the selected shapes. This will select all other shapes with the same color. Click on the light green area of the snowboarder’s sleeve with the Selection tool. We want to make this appear more like it’s only using two colors. The Live Trace left some residual color from the original photo. Be sure to delete the areas between his legs. It’s okay to leave some vector fragments here and there, but we want to get the image down to just the snowboarder. Starting outside of the image area, click-and-drag to select various sections of the large background elements and then press Delete (PC: Backspace) to delete them. You may have to do this a couple times to be sure all is ungrouped (two times should do the trick). Well almost, you still need to choose Object>Ungroup. This will turn the newly traced photo into individual vector shapes. With the image still selected, click the Expand button in the Control panel. Once you have the settings in place, click Trace.

(This setting may vary if you’re using a different photo.) The Preview checkbox is unchecked by default, so simply enable the checkbox to see the results. In the Adjustments section, set the Mode to Color and the Max Colors to 10. Click the icon and go to the bottom of the drop-down menu to select Tracing Options. In between the buttons is the Tracing Presets and Options icon with a small downward pointing arrow. Select the snowboarder image with the Selection tool (V), and in Control panel locate the Live Trace and Mask buttons. Click the Place button to place the file on the artboard. Locate the snowboarder PSD file (or a file of your choice), select it, and make sure that the Link checkbox is unchecked at the bottom left of the Place dialog. Choose View>Hide Artboards to make the artboard invisible. Select Basic RGB for the New Document Profile, and click OK in the New Document dialog. Let’s begin by creating a new document in Illustrator by going to File>New. Follow along below to learn more about vector graphics. Here, we’ll achieve a similar effect using only Adobe Illustrator and a PSD file of a snowboarder.

Throughout the winter games, they had a continuing graphic theme of very stylized vector art. In this tutorial we’re going to explore the graphics created for the Olympic Winter Games recently held in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Vector drawing in illustrator