Absolute beginner: shirt design related questions

hi all. i thought i'd be as detailed as possible to give you an idea of what my questions are:
i have some hand-drawn art/design for a t-shirt. so i took some pictures, and my daughter opened them up in photoshop elements 6. she was able to easily trace over my pencil lines, BUT the lines were not smooth at all. say i drew a circle. it is not so much that it is not a perfect circle, especially if free-handed, but that the edges of the line of that circle are not smooth.
turns out elements can't do that, after i called adobe. they suggested illustrator, which i am currently demo'ing. when i had my daughter (she's 17, been playing with elements rather well) try to do it illustrator, it wasn't as intuitive as both of us thought. it's gotten her stumped.
for the most part, that's all i want to do. pull up a picture of a hand-drawn sketch, and draw it in illustrator with some smooth lines. i would very much appreciate some guidance on what to do!
stumped!
THANKS IN ADVANCE.
jack

Jack,
When you start from scratch in this kind of program, you just have to read the instructions. Otherwise, you'll be floundering about forever being confused. Vector drawing programs like Illustrator are not immediately intuitive to someone who is accustomed only to working in raster image programs (i.e.; Photoshop, etc.).
Vector graphics is the "other half" of the computer graphics world. In a program like Illustrator, you're not recoloring pixels; you're creating and manipulating objects, most of which are mathematically-defined shapes called paths. You draw paths, give them strokes and/or fills, move them about, stack them, scale them, arrange them so that together they comprise a piece of artwork.
Go to the help files, start at the beginning, read through it like a book, perform the operations described. You'll then get the conceptual principles down and start using the thing with much less frustration. It will take time. This isn't the kind of graphics program you just dive into blind, have someone tell you a few command sequences, and start doing productive work in. You have to read the instructions.
JET

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