One thing bothered me about the Emily Pinup piece. The lace patterns were simple scans that I masked in Photoshop. I wanted to create a real vector lace pattern. Live Trace wasn’t an option because it was too complex and the results looked horrible. After 3 days of painstaking tracing and trimming I uploaded a new lace pattern brush for use in Illustrator. I created it in CS4 but saved it as CS2 version so I can share it with others. Included in the file is the original trace with stroked lines. After the drawing was complete I copied and reflected it so I could create a seamless pattern brush.

I outlined all the the strokes and combined it into one object so I could trim the edges and add a stitch pattern as a border. I have two versions. One is the plain one color version and the other has and added offset path with a different color. The one with the offset path leaves a telltail seam at the junction points but it still looks good for most uses.

Now go make something cool with it. I’ll add it to Emily soon.