understanding

So as i play more and more with illustrator i learned something. I wanted to "remaster" the older comics. What i did was print them, trace them, scan them, vectorize them, and bam. They look 1000x's better. I've done it to about the first six comics. I'm pretty thrilled about the idea that i can go back to my un-editable mess ups (due to the fact that i no longer have the files) and fix them!

During this process i realized this my be a more efficient way to get my comics in the future done. So far it seems to be that this will be the way that i will do it but my one problem lies in the nature of fill tools. I every line (since they were traced) was black.. so this means that i couldn't differentiate from the rabbits to the outlines of the comics, etc. I found a sloppy way around it (which I'm super pro at doing) but i quickly came to an understanding about something. You know how in Movie Production sometimes they put actors in front of a blue or green screen so that they can later ad CG? WELL, if i were to apply that same concept to fill tools i can now do the following. Hand draw the comics (which I'm rather fast at)and edit and play around with them on paper, then trace the rabbits in lets say gray marker, then the borders in black, objects in red (or varying color depending on whether these objects touch or not), and talk bubbles in blue. Problem at that point solved! I can then fill eveything thing else in with in moments with no pixels in the images. If this is true then i should have a very streamlined way to go about drawing. I was never quite able to figure out the way Jeph Jacques does his drawing completely in photoshop.. but i think this way will be just as efficient! lets hope so!

thinking on this a moment more i can probably also draw the shadows in a different pen as well. then i could shade them in too! This should be amazing if it works.