Illustrator Align drawing

[netu]

I am looking for a way to straighten a drawing. To illustrate, I want to get from this:




to this:


I have used rotation and skew tools and was able to achieve some results, however, it was not perfectly straight. Can you suggest how to make this transformation perfectly, not but eye? I have a feeling that perspective grid could help, but I cannot figure out how to use it in my case.

 

[dv8_fx]

I see you've done a good job with it except for the eyes.

If I would do this, I would first remove the background leaving me with the drawing to work with. This could mean a difference as you've got a bigger area to tweak if you didn't remove it. Then I would enable the grids which I use to align the black image border and to get a near perfect circle shape.

In the MENU controls, use the Controls found on them to manually enter an amount needed to fine tune the re-shaping. Here I used the Skew adjustments.



As you can see the eyes turned out differently.

I didn't go further as I was preparing this image grab for upload here. But if you can't manage to get it right regardless what tweaking you do - Select one eye, right click on it and select Copy via layer, nudge it up or down or sideways into place and merge it back to the original layer.

But looking at it closely, the eyeballs look aligned.... it's X's that's not.

 

[hawkeye]

There isn't a single tool or technique to make it perfectly straight that I am aware of. But for simple geometric shapes like you posted, it wouldn't even take a minute just to re-draw it.