So these several pieces are the 2D drawings I made from the scanned copy of the components by using adobe illustrator.

Before starting everything, it took me a while to read through the scanned pages in order to understand which piece goes where and what is the relative dimension of them. I found this helped a little bit, because later on trying to adjust everything to the right scale actually took most of the time.

The steps to make each piece of drawing are similar: I first imported the desired page of pdf file into adobe illustrator and cut out the rest of the scan using rectangular tool and clipping mask (hot keys: m for rectangular shape maker and control+7 for clipping). Then, I adjust the size of the piece through proportionally enlarge or shrink the picture to keep the corresponding dimension correct. The adjustment is done when the size of the piece matches the requirement in the book. I used the ruler bar above and on the left of the artboard as standard (And never forget to adjust the units of the ruler beforehand). After this, it’s just plain boring sketching. A curvature tool (hot key: shift+~) is used to trace around the scan on Layer 1. I did all the tracing on another layer just so I would not accidentally mess around the already adjusted scan. Where a circle is present, I use ellipse tool (hot key: l). The dimensions of the pieces are checked again when the tracing is finished.

Like I mentioned before, getting the pieces to be dimentionally correct is actually far more difficult than tracing the lines. Partly because I had a hard time trying to understand the specifics of the pieces and partly because I was not careful enough when scanning pages and the scans were therefore a little bit skewed. Another problem is that the curvature tool closes every shape ”too well” that once you close a shape, it is somehow manipulated to be smoother. In order to solve this problem, I chose to escape the curvature tool before closing the shape, and use pen tool (hot key: p) to complete the final step.

And here’s the .ai file for the dinosaur toy: dinosaur-toy.