The first thing to do is to scan the image of the character and clean it up in Photoshop. You don't have to clean in depth. All you need is to increase the contrast and brightness to eliminate all grays.
So now let's place the image onto a new Illustrator document. Make sure the color mode is set to CMYK, as for the size I normally work on something like letter size. There is no need to work on the actual size of the skateboard as it could slow down your machine. Once we finish we can always adjust the size.
