When I began drawing Terebinth more than seven and a half years ago--

     No, wait. That can't be right!

     And yet, the date scrawled at the bottom of Page 1 is indeed 1/97. So, yeah. More than seven and a half years. Of course, I didn't start posting the strips at Pandora Family Comics till April of 2003, but--

     But I seem to have wandered from my point. See, when I started the strip, I decided that I would use one pen and one pen only to draw the thing. And indeed, every spot of ink you see on the first hundred and eighty Terebinth pages was put onto the Bristol board with a Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph #2 (.60) pen.

     But after the whole "night scene" in the middle of "HatDance," the first Terebinth story--the scene starts on page 54 and runs through page 71, a stretch that apparently took me 4 months to draw, in case you're interested--well, let's just say I wouldn't recommend the experience of "blacking out" the night sky on nearly 20 pages with a pen. My thumb and wrist aching, I vowed never to set another scene after dark for as long as I could help it.

     Which is why I drew only one real "night page"--page 96--during the next 6 years. Of course, that only translates to about 110 strips--I kind of took three years off between page 122 and page 123--but still, I remembered the horror of inking darkness with a pen and tried to plan my stories accordingly.

     Stories, though, have their own requirements, and eventually, I realized that I needed to do some more "night scenes." So when it came time to ink page 181, I drove out to the big art supply house on the hill and bought myself a little twenty cent paint brush.

     I mention all this because we'll be seeing a lot of this paint brush's work from now till Hallowe'en. And I like to give credit where credit is due.