I was experimenting with techniques for creating an organic, varied line weight in vector apps like Adobe Illustrator and came up with this approach.
Cartoony illustration is not really my thing, but I thought it might be a good choice for a poster for local Jazz Festival. To get the varied line weight, I drew each line twice -- first forwards, then immediately backwards -- loosely retracing the first line. I let Illustrator fill the resulting closed loop. No stroke was used -- only fill. I was sort of going for a style like that in the old Anna Nicole Smith tv show main titles.
UPDATE 4/26/2009
This is an old blog entry from when I didn't understand Adobe Illustrator as well. Now I would use a Wacom tablet and create a 'calligraphy brush' with a round tip whose size is proportional to pen pressure, as I did in this reproduction of The Flammarion Woodcut
That style of working has a nice action, somewhat like a fine point brush dipped in India ink, or a nib, or even a Rapidograph, depending on how you set it up (haven't used one of those in a while)
UPDATE 5/23/2009
The new Blob Brush in Illustrator CS4 looks good. More on that when I finally upgrade. Until then...
UPDATE 5/30/2009
madpencil [myspace] [conceptart.org] is putting some great tutorials together on how to setup and use the calligraphy brushes in Adobe Illustrator in order to ink with presure sensitive variation in line weight:
Adobe Illustrator Inking part 1 [brush set-up]
Adobe Illustrator Inking Part 2 [inking]
more to come from him...
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