So my good friend and fellow artist Erik Sagen has been posting his incredible Brushes compositions to Flickr lately and they are pretty amazing.

Looking at them, I began to wonder if this could be a new medium of digital art, and if so, how would one go about reproducing them in sizes larger than the iPhone screen.

After some thoughtful consideration I decided to test out converting one of Erik's paintings to a Vector with the help of Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace functionality.

With Erik's permission I am publishing this tutorial so that others might benefit from my trial and error.

First, pick your painting

I think it's obvious that the first step here is to have a painting created with Brushes to convert. Since I don't have the app yet I am using one of Erik's paintings, with his permission:

I have chosen this since it is a great little painting, has interesting color and most importantly, my son loves red balloons. Now that we have our painting chosen, it's time to import it into Illustrator.

Now the fun begins

Right, so fire up Illustrator, I am using CS3 so that will be our baseline. Simply go to File → Open and select your masterpiece from within the file dialog. Your image should be placed on the stage, which means we can now start to play.

First, click once on your image to select it, then invoke the Live Trace dialog found at Object → Live Trace → Tracing Options. If you painting is color, make sure that you have set the Mode, found under adjustments, to color.

Your palette should be set to automatic and kick your colors up to the highest setting, 256. Now click resample and kick this slider up to its highest setting, 600px.

Lastly make your Path Fitting and Minimum Area both 1px. By this time you should have a vector that closely matches the original piece. Now hit Trace, which will apply the settings to the piece. The only thing left to do is hit "expand" which can be found in the toolbar at the top of your screen (appears when you have selected the artwork).

Once expanded, you can select areas of the new vector image to edit them. After you have done any cleanup you wish to do, convert the Live Trace into a Live Paint object by choosing Object → Live Paint → Make.

And now you have your vector

That is all there is to it really. At this time you should have a vector version of your artwork that can be printed out at much larger dimensions than your original piece ¹.

Here is a jpg taken from the vector version of Red Balloon:

And here they are side-by-side (original on the left, vector on the right):

Footnote: Please note, you won't be able to take this vector and print a 50 x 50 inch version of it. The vectorization in Illustrator just isn't that good. But I do think you could create a very pleasing print in the 8x10 range, or as I am hoping to do, get a print on canvas in the 8 x 10 range. The texture of the canvas will complement some of the rougher edged polygons in the final vector quite nicely.