Magic wand tool that will select broken-line shapes?

I'm an illustrator... working in both digital & real artwork.
I work mostly in Photoshop CS, but I have been searching for a solution to a digital problem that I can't quite seem to find using either Photoshop or Illustrator.
What I wish to do is scan a pencil drawing and then create selected shapes in a quick and easy method using a magic wand tool.
But it needs to be a magic wand tool that will select an area drawn from a series of broken lines. Photoshop will only select shapes that are 100% intact, so I wind up having to spend lots of time searching to repair broken lines before Photoshop selects just that one area.
I KNOW that such a program exists... because I recall there used to be such a program. It was a free dowloaded program that I got once, way back around 1998. I think it came from Australia... and it was a basic digital paint program of some sort. I can't recall the name.
It allowed one to quickly click and select an area from within a shape drawn with broken line segments...
Does anyone know of any program (hopefully for Mac) that allow this sort of selection?
This would save me hours of frustration. I can't believe Adobe hasn't come up with something like this already.
Thanks...
John Nez
www.johnnez.com

Gerno
I doubt that I will get to trying the proposed method on that sample image this weekend. I can make a few quick comments, however.
Like numerous Photoshop tools, the success of Illustrator tools like Live Trace and Live Paint are very image dependent and some experience helps. Here are some comment on the three steps needed.
First, the Live Trace step must be done well. There are a boat load of parameters for this process. For the subject image my guess would be to start with a preset and the one I would choose would be comic art.
Secondly, once you make a live paint group you have to have automatic gap detection checked (turned on) and you choice of predefined or custom gap sizes specified. You will then see where the gaps are automatically found and fixed and the gap options dialog box will tell you how many have been found. If you like what you see you can just start painting. Usually, however it is an iterative process of painting some of the areas and then resetting the gap detection and painting again. At any point you can automatically close the paths (but you cannot go back), change the settings to auto detect even larger gaps and try again.
Third is the manual phase. If lucky you will have none of this. On the subject image, however, I can see that some of this is required. To preserve the artistic content of the original one draws a line in the very big gaps having no stroke or fill (invisible line)and then you use the live paint bucket. While the above sounds like a lot of work, it can go very quickly with many drawings.
JN
>That's why I think Adobe ought to work on designing a 'smart magic wand tool'... that could select imperfectly closed shapes.
The Live Paint tool in Illustrator does this. It automatically detects gaps and lets you paint as if they were not there.
Paulo

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