Next, I open it up in Adobe Illustrator, and use the pencil tool to draw the shapes of everything,
being careful to get everything in the right order. I use flat colors and no stroke.
Right now, it's like a digital version of cut paper art.
For example, Santa's coat extents under his head and beard,
and the boy's head is a circle that'sunder the hair and pillow.
Having characters on separate layers keeps the confusion down, and I've got the commands for 'deselect' and 'send to back'
programmed into the buttons on my wacom pen.

It's a lot easier than it sounds. And at this point, it's super easy to move things around, make them bigger
or smaller, twisted up, whatever.

Also, and this is important, on the bottommost layer I always have two rectangles that are
the exact size and position ot the trim and bleed. You'll see why later.

Another important thing is to make sure the Illustrator document is CMYK, and that when you're done
with this step you save it as an Illustrator 8.0 file (it's an option in the save dialog box.)



So, don't bother saving it as an 8.0.
Instead, click on the little triangle in the upper right corner of the Layers palette,
and click on 'Flatten Artwork'.
Then, from the same triangle, click 'Release to Layers (Sequence).
Then, go to File>Export and export it as a Photoshop file with 'Write Layers' checked and 'Maximum Editablity' un-checked.
Make sure it's at 300dpi, or 150 if you have Genuine Fractals or another upsizing plug-in.
Then, open the new file up in Photoshop, and ungroup all the layer groups by shift-clicking on the top and bottom layers in the layers palette, control(or right)-click on the topmost Layer group, and select 'Ungroup Layers' from the pop-up menu.
Save it as a .psd, and open it up in Painter.
Then you're ready to skip to Page 8.

(I'm working in AI CS2, not sure if this works in older versions.)