I’m not a huge fan of the autotrace feature in Adobe Illustrator. Mostly because I think it make the lines either too smooth or too sharp. You spend any time you saved using it cleaning up the messy lines. That being said, I’ve had a few success stories. Here’s a technique I used to add a pen and ink texture to my file.

I started with a file I drew using the Pen Tool in Illustrator. If you’re not familiar with drawing with the pen tool, I have cartoon tutorial here using the pen tool to trace a sketch.

I printed out my Illustrator file and drew in shading and wood texture with a sharpie. If you screw up the shading on the first shot, you can always print another file out to draw on top of. Next, I scanned the new inked drawing back in at 300 dpi. You may need to take your scan into Photoshop to tweak the Brightness and Contrast. After you get the contrast right, open your inked drawing in Illustrator.

Select the placed artwork and run Live Trace. I just used the default settings, but feel free to play with the settings.

Now, you have your inked sketch as a vector file. Illustrator seems to do a pretty good job at tracing its own work. If your outline is a little jagged, you can always take the original illustrator file and overlay it and use the Object > Path > Offset Path to cover any autotrace sloppiness.