Hi there, just a quick question for all you designers who use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

I have been working with the Adobe programs for about 2-3 years now, and I have gotten into using Illustrator a lot recently, but one thing is bothering me about my work. I go through people's designs on flickr, and see amazing shirts here on threadless, and there's one thing I really haven't tried or had success in the distant past doing. A lot of hand drawn elements are interesting me, and It's driving me mad to how they might go about it. I want to be able to take a clean, well defined pencil sketch or inked sketch and bring it into Illustrator.

For some reason I have not seen a way to scan things in Illustrator ever, so I assume you import in Photoshop, clean up there, adjust contrast, and bring into Illustrator for a live trace. The thing is.... not to rag on the function at all, it's a great tool in Illustrator, but.... live trace isn't the most accurate.

Could anyone grace me with their glorious knowledge of experience and let me know how they go about doing this? Do you even rasterize your scanned elements? Is there some other way to go about this all together that I have no idea how to pull off?

Please enlighten me, because I'd love to be able to use things that I draw more in my Illustrator work, even though I've been getting better and better with the pen tool trying some things out.

Thanks so much for your time!