Make complex form appear "disappeared" using dashes

Question

I'm currently new into Adobe Illustrator and I'm having quite a bit a stroke when it comes to icon design.

I'm mostly using icons from flaticon, in this case, I'm using an icon of a can, a package and a fruit (Source).

Now I'm trying to make it look disappeared / gone. I'm trying to achieve something similar like this (found via Google here):

Now what I achieved is to make a border appear dashed just like I wanted. But this did not fit my needs, as I do not have a border on this, but this is rather a complex form which is filled with color, instead of having a border:

How would I achieve the same result (converting this into a line and make it dashed) as in the picture above, without having to make every dash by myself by applying a cut mask?

Thank you in advance for helping a beginner out! :-)

Answer 1

What you have is an icon which has been converted from line to shape. Which means you will have to find a not-converted icon or redraw the lines yourself manually to be then able to apply a dashed style to the line (aka: stroke).

Once you have an actual line shape, you can apply a dashed line via 'Window → Stroke' and play with the numbers in red highlight below.

There is no automatic conversion from object to line. There may be some combination of advanced tricks to give you a partial result, but that won't be easy and some manual work will still be needed for a perfect conversion.