I am preparing illustrations for a scientific publication. As a direct result of calculations I obtain figures (raster format) as depicted in the first row below. Now journals are full of these kind of plots, which to my opinion do not convey much information and not actually deserve to be depicted in color. Therefore I decided to stylize these images in AI by tracing them in 3 colors (second row).
It is quite common in this field, however, to make even more stylised plots as shown below
While I probably can draw diagrams like that in AI directly, I would like to base them on the realistic data (Fig.1). Therefore my question: How can I stylize the diagrams on Fig.1 (second row) even more, in order to create a recognisable picture with minimum of elements and colours?
In response to some comments. I did try to trace to contours, etc.
However, it is a lot of manual work and it is just repeating someone's style...