I’ve been playing around with scoring vector line art and am trying to figure out the best way to add a cut outline to an image mostly made up of open paths. I use Illustrator CS6.
Because of the way I drew these, pathfinder > unite or a stroke/fill swap doesn’t work to give me a clean outline of the shapes. For the house, it was easy enough to draw an offset cut line and use pathfinder for the hanging loop, but I wanted a more precise cut for the wings.
I ended up using live paint to get a filled shape, then expand > rasterize > image trace. That worked ok, but I had to do enough cleanup on the trace that it probably would have been faster and about as precise to just draw my line with the pen tool and then slightly offset it to adjust for kerf.
Anyone have another method to handle this kind of thing?