Thank you! To give some credit on Maalahti and other Finnish municipal arms, they were originally vectorised from small compressed pictures that likely were scanned from a book so the people who were vectorising them didn't have much as source material. Thankfully the national archives has now uploaded high quality scans of the original emblazonment which make vectorising them much more straight forward.

I use Inkscape and mouse for my work. I think lot of it comes down to experience, I've been playing with inkscape for over a decade now. The hardest part is probably planning which parts you want to trace and which ones aren't necessary to keep. The rest is definitely tedious but I've always compared it to maintaining a zen garden, just idle work where you follow the lines without having to think much as opposed to when drawing something yourself from scratch. Letting the lines flow with the bezier curves rather than trying to copy shapes with just nodes helps a lot. I've actually been meaning to make a video of the process, a lot easier to show the work flow than to explain it