Gentlemen, thank you so much for the patience and effort you both went through in explaining this process! I am very much obliged!

Wow. Thank you both so much for your quick responses and welcomes! I tried precisely what both of you recommended with regard to both tracing and referencing and I was able to whip it up in mere moments. Thank you!

One last question. Alan could you explain your last comment a bit more about texturing and coping before tracing?

Hello. I recently discovered Sketchup and it is truly fantastic. Over the years I've enjoyed making 2D drawings and architectural pieces using MS Paint and Paint.net and I've gotten rather good at making decent imagery using these fairly simple programs. After exploring Sketchup for the past week or so, I was curious as to whether or not it was possible to import images of architectural elements into a Sketchup file. I'm aware of how to import pngs as textures, but I'm wanting to import images that can be converted into actual Sketchup components than can be pushed/pulled, scaled, painted, etc. Here's the problem I am encountering and I'm not sure if there's a solution:

I attached an image of a typical Spanish gable found in Spanish mission architecture that I quickly threw together on MS Paint for the purpose of this topic:
What I'm wanting to do is isolate the gable shape itself from the white background and import it into Sketchup. From there I'd like to be able to push/pull it and make into a 3D component to use in Sketchup and incorporate it into actual architectural designs. Programs like Paint.net allow you to delete the background of an image. However, when I import the .png into Sketchup, the image shows the deleted background as a solid black background instead.

Might there be a solution to this? I hope I was clear enough in my explanation! Thanks for your help, folks.