[Vincent Rosati]

You probably do want to delete the original raster, as this won’t scale in the way your friend expects. Those anchors are the corners of the raster. They don’t behave the same way as vector anchors, as it’s not a vector object.
You might have to do a little more drawing.
If you do intend to keep the raster, you could use a Clipping Mask to hide the unwanted parts – Draw a shape object on top of the raster, at the size you want, select this new object and the raster and Object > Clipping Mask > Make.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

I don’t know of a formal word for what you are seeing, but I might just call it a ‘wrinkle’ – When you have an acute angle, an angle less than 90 deg., and a jagged corner pops out.

Your basic options would be to set the path to use ‘Round Join’ in the Stroke palette, or reducing the Miter Limit of the path, also in the Stroke palette.
These options might not work for you, depending on what’s acceptable to you.

Another option might be to draw the outer stroke, then offset the path to a negative value.

I suspect it would just be easiest to Object/Expand the strokes and manually correct them.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

I’m not sure if there’s anything here that you could use, other than uploading them as files in your account.
How about GitHub and WikiMedia Commons.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

Select all of the expanded text and Object / Compond Path / Make, then it will work as expected, as a single clipping mask.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

Based on your description, it sounds like all of the paths you need might already be in the artwork.
You’d use a combination of; View / Outline Mode, Group Select Tool, and Cmd + 2 (Object / Lock / Selection) to find them.

Otherwise, here are the steps I used to reproduce your issue..

Project File Here

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

You probably want to use Object / Clipping Mask / Make – Where a copy of the purple shape is the clipping mask.

On the purple shape..
Use Copy, Paste in front (Cmd + C, Cmd + F).
Then Bring to front (Cmd + Shift + ])

Next, with the new purple shape selected, shift-select one of the other internal shapes, or all of them, and make a clipping mask.

You can search the forum for Clipping Mask for more info.

You could alternatively use a Pathhfinder approach. Instead of masking the shapes, you can cut them to the precise size.
Do a search for Pathfinder, here on the forum, if that sounds like something you’re interested in.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

An article on stipple shading:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/245/861611

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

The good news is, everything you want to do is basically doable. However, there are a lot of potential topics in your post 🙂

Create a bunch of rectangles to the side of your artboard, as color swatches:

Try applying colors to them first. This will verify that you can apply color swatches.
It’s difficult to say why you’re having trouble applying swatches.
It could be that the color is being applied to a mask and is behind the raster.??

Based on the artwork that I see, the paintwork appears to be stipple shading, which you can do totally as vector in AI with a custom Scatter Brush and a clipping mask.

For the white background, I think you’ll always get that when you paste artwork.
Use placed images instead of pasted images, with File / Place. Only paste rasters into AI if you need to, for some reason, which you may.

Create a project folder with a ‘src’ folder inside it:

My Project folder
|
+– my-project.ai
|
+– src folder
| |
| +– placed-image-1.tif
| +– placed-image-2.tif

For a transparent background you should use a placed file that has a transparent background, such as a PNG or TIF or whatever.
You can knock out the white with a Clipping Mask or an Opacity Mask. Clipping masks are easier:

Here, the red circle is the mask and the blue object is the subject.

There’s a lot to say about making textures and tiles in Illustrator. This would be a situation where you might paste images. You might paste in a texture tile pattern image, then drag it into the swatches palette. You now have a raster tile pattern that you can apply to anything.

Just some initial thoughts.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

Another cause of blurriness is in that AI uses sub-pixel measurement. If you place a raster image out of alignment with the pixel grid it will be re-rendered and blurred slightly, even if it is the same size.

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.

[Vincent Rosati]

I’m sure the confusion is just PPI.
Illustrator is honoring the PPI of an image when it imports. It’s a feature.
What pixel dimensions are you exporting to?

Vince

*Please remember to Rate our replies or check Solution if solved. If you get a good idea from the post, consider clicking the Kudos option.