How to be more productive when tracing your sketches? #adobeillustrator #astute

tracing over my illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. I like to stay as true as possible to my original sketches and I often end up creating paths that don't match my sketch. This is when SG graphics reform tool comes in really handy. With this, you can click anywhere on a path and start dragging it around and see your original path in blue and the adjusted path in red. You can add multiple reform points if you want, or you can double click on one that you don't need. And when you're ready with your changes, just press enter to accept it. And sometimes you might want to limit the reform tool to only make changes to a certain part of a path. This is when you can drag these end points in and define exactly where you want your changes to happen. My path looks already much nicer, but I'm going to use the smart remove tool as well to remove some unnecessary anchor points, which uses a default tolerance for keeping things looking exactly the same as before. However, if you hold down the alt or option key, you can also ignore the tolerance settings. Now, since we reposition this path, we have to fix some alignment issues. Here, for this small overlap, I can just use the dynamic sketch tool and hold down the shift key to trim that bit. Up here, I can use the brilliant extend path tool, another one of graphics plugins, which can continue these paths naturally and precisely snap onto the intersecting paths. Believe me, once you start using Astute graphics tools, it will be hard to imagine working without them ever again.