SVG format in Illustrator

Question

So I was told to create a story book illustration (as seen on my first post) and convert it to an svg format. My boss, upon checking the file told me that the svg file I made was just an embedded picture and that's not what he wants. I don't really get the svg format so can someone help me? My boss goes to the files codes and says that it's just an embedded png pic or something. I find it weird because I "save as" the work on the Illustrator itself and is not embedding anything else. Can anyone please explain to me how this whole svg file works? How will I know if it's not an embedded pic like what my boss says?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can redraw the entire scene and use flat shapes where your fuzzy edges are small and "stroke-like" (like in her hair, dress, and boots, the house roof and fence- anything highly-detailed), you can also use several shapes to get the non-round rocks in a purposefully-banded type of posterized effect, so they won't be smooth but with consistency they can give the eye a good illusion.  And for items which are needing to be fuzzy and round, you may be able to use shapes with gradients inside them.  For the trees, you may want to change them to have a radial gradient with dark-green outside and shift it so they look more lit from one side, and add some leave shapes for symbolic texture. This may be a complicated process of setting up the gradients just right, but it's going to let you scale the image.  When you're done and save as SVG, open that Svg in a browser and zoom in to see what items got added well.  If you open up one of your svgs which use a mesh, you will most likely see pixels when zooming in, that's because browsers don't read AI's gradient meshes and can't display them as such, so AI converts the meshes to images and the svg has a bunch of embedded pictures which do not scale like vectors.  Even though you may be able to zoom in quite far and not see a big quality difference in your meshes which have very smooth gradation, each embedded image takes up a lot of space within the file as base64 encoded image date (if you saved with images embedded).  Otherwise, if you saved with images linked, those created images will be put into a parent folder of your svg file, and the shapes inside the svg will link to those images.  If you save your red riding hood in this manner, you may see a whole lot of those, and take note of the file size of each.