For this, the pen tool is definitely going to be your best friend. I’m afraid I’m not at my work computer at the moment, so I might give some of the wrong shortcuts, but I’ll double check either Saturday night or Sunday.

The first thing you’re going to want to learn is how to use the pen tool, especially how to curve the line using points. You’ll probably use this for both the lines and the colors underneath.

The next thing will be arranging. If you think of Illustrator like cutting out pieces of colored paper and arranging them how you like, you won’t be far off. Arranging basically decides which cut out is on top of the other cut outs.

Another thing you might want to look into, depending on the version of Illustrator you’re using, is Livetrace. I usually hate using livetrace because you have very little control over what your doing, but a clean design can be converted with a little tweaking instead of having to trace it by hand.

I almost forgot to add, lock object will save you a lot of frustration when you import the original picture. If you lock that down, you won’t accidentally select it when you’re drawing. Things can still go behind it though while you’re arranging, so if something disappears on you when you click “Send to back”, just bring it up a few levels and it should appear again.

Thank you Ill try and see if I can mess around with it some more, its hard to get the hang of this thing. =[

I have been learning Illustrator for a little while and I have found the Lynda tutorials to be vary useful. This is a link to the first one. Just go through the complete list of tutorials and try each of them out in Illustrator. You will get a great introduction to the program.

thanks everyone!

Do blocks of color first and then take care of the outlines.
Don’t forget to use layers to your advantage.

Get a pen tool tutorial. It takes practice, but is worth it to learn well.

If you have CS4 select it, go to “Object”, down to “Live Trace” and use the bottom active option. Then use color. I can send you my 30 sec. result and a snapshot of the settings I used.