Manipulating artwork - advice needed

[Mitch K]

All,

I have a selection of hand-drawn artwork I want to convert to shield decals. What I need to do basically is cut or select the appropriate bits from the scanned images, dump these into a new file, tidy up, recolour and resize.

I've tried mucking about in PhotoShop Elements and Inkscape and got nowhere useful. I've used The Gimp in the course of work, but not for anything like this. Searches of various forums have come up empty.

I guess a vector-based package would be better to preserve the integrity of the image during resizes, but I'm open to suggestions.

Can anyone suggest which package would work best, and point me to a tutorial please?

TIA,

M

[Centaur_Seducer]

Without knowledge of the pics intented to rescale, I'd go for Illustrator and the automatic vector tracing (If I remember correctly it's below Edit - Tracing). Muck around in those settings and then clean up the vector lines (Illustrator has a tendency to fuck everything that's detailed, so be check the settings and preview a lot before you commit to the tracing).
There are a zillion tutorials, but I reckon this one should be enough for you to get a clue about the process.