The Adventures of Daniel Kwan

I’ve been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator over the past week because the powers that be at work have nothing better for me to do right now than make a bunch of logos. I’m starting to see that this application is pretty friggin’ awesome.

I got tired of making logos (when I finish one, they just have me make another) so I tried to do some sketches using Illustrator. I love it!

I hated drawing vector lines before but it just takes some time to understand how the Pen Tool works. Now I get it. I still need more practice but I feel I can do pretty much any line art in Illustrator that I can do with a pencil. With more precision even.

For fellow Illustrator noobs, here are some essential keyboard shortcuts:

P – Pen Tool
V – Selection Tool
A – Direct Selection Tool
Command G – Group
Shift Command G – Ungroup

Have fun!

I drew the above illustration in pencil and did the rest in Photoshop. The video below shows me in Photoshop cleaning up the drawing, coloring, then shading the foreground characters. Not exactly a tutorial since it’s sped up so much that you can’t really tell what’s going on, but it gives you a general idea on the process.

Yeah that’s right, I can totally draw. Check out that awesome taxi. Yes it is a taxi. Got bored at one of the Starbuckses (Starbucki?) at Wujiaochang so I started drawing in their guestbook. But then I kinda liked what I drew so I ripped out that page and kept it. It’s now on Lisa’s wall.

I don’t just draw fruity stuff, I swear. On the next page I drew an ogre but I didn’t take a photo, and I let Starbucks keep that page. I drew a gargoyle last month. Maybe I’ll post that later.

Here’s the third Mission Man comic strip, which introduces Freshman Boy to the series. Like Mission Man, he wasn’t created by me. He was another character from MSJ lore that I decided to incorporate into the comic. I think I saw him during a school assembly.

Aiyouweiya was one of my AOL Instant Messenger screennames at the time. I don’t know what it means exactly, but it’s something that a Chinese person sometimes says when something unfortunate happens. (Like if you accidentally kicked the foot of a table with your pinky toe.) And it should be spelled aiyoweiya, without the u.

In case you missed the earlier posts about Mission Man:
Mission Man comic
Mission Man - Part 2

I forgot to show these sketches in my previous post about Mission Man. Click on a sketch to make it bigger.

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Back in 1998 to 2000, when I was an upperclassman at Mission San Jose High School, I drew a monthly comic strip for The Smoke Signal. (I was also the graphic artist and then the Special Feature editor, but I think more people cared about the comic.) It was called Mission Man, and it was about … Mission Man!

I’m not exactly sure what Mission Man was (is?) or why he was there. He was kinda-sorta the school mascot, but not really. MSJ’s mascot was and still is the warrior, but the logo was a Native American Indian. After the Natives complained, students voted to have the logo become Mission Peak, Fremont’s pathetic little mountain. But Mission Man was always around, apparently to be kidnapped by other schools in those awful homecoming skits.

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