independent illustrator tutorial one.

For this tutorial I followed a beginner lesson on YouTube about vectorizing and tracing images, as well as manipulating colors and filters. To begin I placed the original image in Illustrator and embedded it so I could begin to trace it. The trace option I ended up using was low fidelity image because it resulted in the cleanest vector lines, because some of the other trace options were too busy. I then expanded the trace to have a bunch of vector points that I could then mess with. I still had some edges to clean up near the mouth and whiskers, so I used the direct selection tool to either smooth the curves or I entirely deleted the vector lines that were not smooth. I then used the live paint bucket tool to change the color of the inside of the cat mouth to a softer red, because the black in the original image blocked the whiskers from being shown. After that I followed the tutorial and used some effects on the whole vectorized image, and the filter I liked the most was "stamp" because it gave this very crisp black and white feel.