The Enchanted Dagger

Here is the first page of the Moon Man short.  I’d been messing around with Illustrator for about a year when I made it.  My first effort on the computer was inking/coloring a “sword and sandal” comic I had made called Angry Centurion.  It was based on a passage from one of the historical books of antiquity.  I jumped in to the art making “nintendo style” without having any clue how anything worked.  I ended up relying heavily on the calligraphic brushes setting.  I didn’t have the software that came with the Intuos 3 tablet (still don’t) so I wasn’t able to figure out how to use any of the fancy “pressure” settings for the pens to give your lines varying weights (still haven’t).  I ended up setting up a dozen different pens, each at a different angle so the look of each line would have a variety of options….in illustrator each stroke is a free standing, adjustable form.  It was touch and go at first but by the second half of the comic I was cobbling together some nice stuff.

I mention it because I was still using the calligraphic pens to ink the Moon Man.  By the time I got to work on EDag I was using the vector pencil tool for everything.  The caligraphic pens are a real pain in the neck!  Its very difficult to connect one line to the next and it seemed like my computer/program didn’t appreciate what I was doing all that much…It would have a hard time saving the files once they reached a certain size.  To make things easier I had pretty much ditched the varying calligraphic lines in favor of a round nib setting, closest in function to a regular old micron pen.