Before you begin this tutorial, you will want to read the basic image editing tutorial.

The process of turning an image into a vector is also a great oppurtunity to exploit any artistic creativity you may have. That’s because a lot of this process involves making heuristic (rule of thumb) judgement calls and repitition.

Preparing

To begin the conversion, first select and import the raster image you would like to vectorize and import it into the document. To do this, go to File > Import (or Ctrl+I) and select the image:

Next, you will want to resize the image to fit the page. To do this, click on the image and some arrows (“handles” will appear). While holding Shift, click on one of the diagonal arrows and scale the image to the size desired. Holding Shift ensures that the image maintains its aspect ratio.

To more easily see your work, you will want to make the image slightly transparent. Transparency (also known as opacity) settings determine how much of the image can be seen and how much will fade into the background. For our purposes, I recommend changing the opacity setting to 30%.

Our final step to prepare for vectorization is to lock our image layer so that we don’t affect it when drawing our vectorized image. Think of this step like “taping down” our image so that we can trace over it:

To start our vectorization, we now create a layer above the drawing to work on:

Vectorizing

Now for the main steps; basically we’re going to trace outlines of the biggest features and work our way to details and shading. We put details, shading, shadows, and the main outline on seperate layers. This ensures that we can lock down layers as we progress work on the image: