>>1691078An artboard is basically the boundaries of an image that you set for the program to recognize. What you want to do at the beginning of every image that you decide to vector is to select the original image, and fit the artboard to it, and then lock that image. Then you make another layer above where you can freely draw inside and outside of the artboard and it will only export what is included within the artboard, provided you tell it to.
Here is how you fit it in both Illustrator and Inkscape. To export with Artboards in Illustrator, you select the checkbox "Use Artboards" in the export window. In Inkscape, you select "Page" in the export window.