Here's a little tutorial about how much is useful considering the use of vector techniques even while you're painting. My latest painting had to have a retro feel, also the lingerie of the model was typically vintage, with large bra cups decorated by concentric stitching. To better design the structure of the bra, I thought of using vectors. Here are steps of the process:
Crop the area you are interested in pencil drawing.
Import it in your vectorial application. I use Freehand but I think that anything can be done in Illustrator as well.
Place it in the background layer, to view it as through a veil.
Draw with the circle tool the two wider ellipse of the bra cups.
Then trace the upper smallest ones.
Select the two ellipses of the same cup, the largest and the smallest.
Do a fusion between them.
Select the two ellipses of the other cup.
Second fusion.
Select the first fusion and adjust the proper number of steps.
The same for the second one.
Please notice that this feature allows you to adjust the initial arrangement, by selecting the upper smallest ellipse within each fusion and moving it as you like.
Once you're satisfied, remove the pencil draw.
Then exports the two fusions as an EPS file. The size is already exact, just open the EPS file with Photoshop at the same resolution of your painting and you will get lines on a transparent background, ready to be applied to a new layer of your painting.
In this case, there is need to delete lines in the orange area, and adjust them manually with a fine brush in the yellow area.
And this is the result. What I like about these synergies between applications is that the process is also useful even if you're painting with traditional techniques. For many years I have worked with traditional media and, when the computer appeared, doing commercial work, I often had many benefits from this mix of techniques to get the results I was looking for.
If you liked this tutorial, hope you would consider to follow this blog.
