TMNT Leo Cover:
This is the last of my 4 Turtle covers for IDW (though I may do some more TMNT covers & work for them in the future). I had a melancholy feeling as I was working on this one. Bittersweet to be getting the chance to draw the Turtles (something I only dreamed of doing as far back as age 11) while at the same time finishing the job (at that point I didn't know if I was going to get the opportunity to do any more). To show Leo's commitment to his "work" I thought it would be good to show him in a rotten alley full of garbage. Someplace that would be uncomfortable for him, not only because he is above ground where he could be seen, but someplace even filthier than his sewer home.

The piece started with two sketches in my sketchbook that I compiled in photoshop. One was of Leo, the other the alley. I found a photo online to use as reference for the details of buildings and fire escapes and ladders and clothes lines and sketched it out with omissions and the addition of trash (though you can see I added quite a bit more in the final art). The section missing out of Leo's leg and his one sword were altered in photoshop. The sketch was a bit off (his one leg was too short and his sword was at the wrong angle and making an unfortunate tangent line with his head). The sewer cover I lightboxed from a photo of a NYC manhole cover I distorted in photoshop to match the angle and perspective of the alley.

The folks at Nickelodeon, who have approval over the comic line, were worried about the background seeming boring (they were also the ones to point out the tangent between the sword and Leo's head). To hedge my bets with them I added a great deal more trash to the alley. I filled up both sides and made some of the items recognizable (like a small mattress or couch cushion, florescent light bulbs, garbage bags, a pallet, & fruit crates) while making the rest of the bulk just shapes that are obviously junk. This was all done in the inking stage.

I also thought the scene would have more intensity (and make Leo more miserable) if it was raining. I placed my finished inked linework on my lighbox with a sheet of drawing paper over top. On the drawing paper I inked in rain falling, splashing, and running down the various objects in the alley. The inked rain is later scanned and adjusted to become semi-transparent light colored rain in the color file. This is the same method I use when creating rain and snow in Mouse Guard.

With the inked work scanned, I started flatting in the shapes. Flatting is the part of coloring where you distinguish color areas from one another: the green of his skin stops at the edges of his body, the red bandanna is different from his eye color, etc.. I have said in the past that the color choices are not even important, and here I used the wrong colors as I was flatting the garbage on purpose. Using these garish colors it's easier for me to see as I'm going that I have all those bits differentiated from one another and that I didn't miss any or that I didn't color outside the lines.




The final color art is ready when I have done all the textures and shading and highlights. I've color corrected all the color choices, and dropped in the rain overlay.

Upcoming Appearances:
London Super Con: Feb 25-26
Forbidden Planet London signing: March 1

Emerald City: March 30-April 1

C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22
FCBD: Jetpack Comics: May 5th
Heroes: June 22-24
San Diego Comic Con: July 11-15

Papercraft Lieam:
Want your own Lieam papercarft to make, display and/or play with? Now you can! I've provided the file on the mouseguard.net website crafts section. I started designing this papercraft about a year ago. I then handed the final design tweaking and file making to the talented Deanna Piotrowski. My goal is to provide several more characters over time for you to download and build: Saxon, Kenzie, Sadie, Bastian, Elymis, Sienna...(so that you can have a army of papercraft guard mice on your shelf...just like you always wanted!) Here is the direct link for the printable .pdf

Fan Art:

Christian is a fan who sent me this link to a video file he made for his college final. He was instructed to make a mock-movie intro. He chose Fall 1152 as the subject for this intro. Watch the credits he's lined up for this mock-movie...Christian has some high hopes for the folks who would make a Mouse Guard movie! Even as a fantasy, it was fun to watch. Thanks Christian


Upcoming Appearances:
London Super Con: Feb 25-26
Forbidden Planet London signing: March 1

Emerald City: March 30-April 1
C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22

London Super Comic Con
In February, I will be a guest of the London Super Comic Con's inaugural show. This will be my first UK convention! For the convention I'll be doing commissions a bit differently than I have in the past. I'm taking a pre-order list by email. The pieces will be inked 7" x 7" on 12" square bristol for £130. I will get these done before arrving at the LSCC, so I will need to cut off the list once I have the number of requests I can handle before we depart for the UK.You MUST be at the convention in person to pick up the piece (no proxy picker-uppers please). Email me to get on the list (payments will be handled through paypal in advance)*EDIT: The 7" x 7" Commission list is now closed* . At the convention I will be signing books, selling prints, and doing much smaller commissions that are limited to 1 mouse  + 1 profession/ with 1 weapon or tool for £40 (these will be limited and as time permits).
In addition to the convention, I'll also be doing a signing March 1st at the London Forbidden Planet. And perhaps another London signing I'm waiting forconfirmation on.

LSCC Program artwork:
I was asked to contribute a piece of artwork for the convention's program book. This is the final artwork I turned in, and the organizers have decided to make it the back cover of the program guide! The original inked artwork used to make the image is up for grabs too! To enter to win it, you MUST have purchased a ticket for the LSCC. Email creator@londonsupercomicconvention.com with the subject line Petersen London Super Comic Convention. Include your name and your order number from your ticket receipt. Cut off for entries is Feb 6th. The winner's name will be announced February 7th on the LSCC site


Process
The process of this piece started with me wanting to do something very specific to the UK. I toyed with doing a mousey version of a few London architectural icons, but decided instead to do a piece that paid more respect to the UK than that. Using the heraldry of the countries that make up the UK (Lion: England, Unicorn: Scotland, Elk & Lion: Northern Ireland, and the Dragon: Wales) I figured a mouse could pay homage to the animal icons of the UK. I sketched out the animals looking at reference for the animals as I drew.

The sketches were all scanned and assembled in photoshop. I grouped the animal heraldry into a big mass with the idea of it forming something like a UK Patronus for the Guard Mouse. I resized and rotated my sketches as I came up with the final composition. The tinting was a way for me to easily see which lines belong to which animal. I pasted in a Union Jack flag and distorted the perspective to become the setting of the image.

I printed out the layout and placed it behind the 300 series Strathmore bristol board I do my final art on. Using a lightbox I was able to use the layout as a guide to ink the piece. Most of my time inking this piece was to get the animal manes and fur and scales to all swirl together so that it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. For the Union Jack, I distressed the surface texture as I inked...even making the flag seem to be disolving or being disturbed by the supernatural force of the summoning of the heraldic animals.

To color the piece I scanned in my inks, and worked in my traditional way in photoshop 7. Most of the work here was in establishing the various color holds. Color holds are areas where I choose to have the black inkwork display as a color instead of the original black. Here I have a color hold on the heraldic animals, the red and blue of the Union Jack and a few small ones on the details of the mouse's sword. The holds help push the animal figures back and to make them otherworldly. It also helped make the flag read more as the Union Jack instead of just shapes.





Upcoming Appearances:
London Super Con: Feb 25-26
Forbidden Planet London signing: March 1

Emerald City: March 30-April 1
C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22

Art Nouveau Mice:
A few weeks ago I was inspired to do a decorative piece of Mouse Guard artwork, perhaps to be used as this year's Sketchbook cover. We have a print in our hallway by French artist Paul Berthon. I thought it would be fun to do a piece completely in homage of this print. Berthon was a printmaker. So this piece (c.1900), while a print (a lithograph) isn't like owning a print of a painting, it was always meant to be a print. The subject is also of two women examining wallpaper they have just printed on a press. As a printmaking major, I like the piece for these reasons in addition to the aethetics of it.

I started with some very rough sketches in my sketchbook, and then scanned it knowing I would have to adjust a great deal in photoshop to get the mice in scale with one another where their ears didn't obstruct each other's faces, the arms were in proportion and still interacting with the wallpaper they are examining. Unfortunately, as I was doing this as a "quick evening project", I didn't save the photoshop file with the adjusted sketch. But if you look back at previous posts, it looked a great deal like the others with a border pre-sized and the mouse figures tinted different colors to help me distinguish the lines between them

I printed the adjusted digital mock up and using a lightbox inked in the mice in a more stylized manner than I normally do. I  focused on the outer contour line, making it thicker than any interior contours, which I kept to a minimum (other that decorative patterning). It felt unusual to be inking a Mousey piece like this and not doing any hatching or stippling or texture. The patterns on the dresses and in the background were all drawn onto the bristol as I looked at the Berthon original for reference.

The piece didn't come alive until I scanned my inks and colored it. I inked in so many of the patterns dark and thick, that in ink it looks too heavy and clumsy. I color held all of the linework (meaning I used a color overtop of my inkwork to change the lines to a color instead of their original black). This way I was able to soften the dress and background patterns and get a closer sense of the original.



Papermodeling Large Scale:
I've done several posts about the models I build out of scrap cardboard and paper to make Mouse Guard locations and sets. Yesterday I decided that my Sister-In-Laws dog Olive, who is staying with us, needed a little indoor dog house. A past dog of ours, Augie, liked having a little place to hide, so I had made that dog a little box house. I wanted to make something nicer for Olive though (we also didn't want a taped up cardboard box in the livingroom as part of our decor).

The house is made of one box  with another box or two cut up for the gable roof, the shingles, and the siding. I pre-painted sheets of cardboard before cutting it into strips for the siding. The shingles on the otehr hand, I pre-cut and then painted each one. For the shingle paint I poured a few similar colors into a tray and as I painted changed the color mix on the brush as I went so the shingles would look more random. and patchwork, as real shingles can. The benifit of this house, it that it's incredibly light and easy to move if we decide to relocate the house or for cleaning.

It took a little convincing to get Olive into her new house, but Autumn, our big dog, was ready to move in for her. Autumn is very curious (where Olive tends to be nervous) and seemed rather jealous that I made such a thing for her little cousin. I suppose I'll have to make one for Autumn, though I shudder to think of how big it will be and how many slats of siding and individual shingles I'll need to cut and paint. But it will be a fun project that is a change of pace for my hands from penciling, inking, and coloring.


Fan Art:
Since this feels like a crafting post, I figured this piece of fan art by Kate Buike seemd fitting. Kate wrote telling me she had just read the Mouse Guard books in December and enjoyed them so much she wanted to make her own plush of Kenzie. The Mouse Pattern she says comes from Carol's Zoo. Thanks Kate!!


Upcoming Appearances:
London Super Con: Feb 25-26

Emerald City: March 30-April 1 

Boston Comic Con: April 21-22

Donatello Cover:
I'm thrilled to be working on a childhood dream thanks to IDW Publishing. The Turtles are what got me excited about comics when I was 10 or 11. It also was my first foray into pen-and-paper role playing. For the IDW line of TMNT 1 issue micro series, I have been doing the covers, one cover per turtle. Here are my past posts about the process for Raphael & Michelangelo, but this post is about Donatello. Covers are storytelling and like the Raph & Mike covers conveying something about the personality of each Turtle, I wanted this cover to talk about the personality I saw Don having.


I decided to place Don in the sewer. It's where the Turtles call home, but I also felt that I could convey a bit of a loney-loner vibe that I see Don having. While I avoid the idea that the cartoons pushed of him being a computer programming rocket scientist, I think of Don as having more of a Mythbuster/practical physics mind..and I'm sure that would separate him from his brothers in terms of relate-able subject matter to discuss. Don is also the favorite turtle of Jesse Glenn (basis for my character Kenzie). Turtles are what brought Jesse & I together as friends, and I thought it would be fun to give Don a Kenzie-esque lantern-staff...but of course using NYC salvaged materials.

After searching for good sewer photos, I wasn't able to come up with something I liked, so I just drew a sewer with a vaulted ceiling. I was worried about all the perspective for the concentric circles the arched roof was made of. I was also worried about getting the spacing of the bricks right. So I quickly mocked up a sewer model to match my sketch using printed out sheets of a brick pattern conformed to the shape of the arched cardboard. I added a few dowels and straws to simulate steam and or electrical pipes that can run along the roof of sewers and drain pipes.

I printed my rough drawing above with a photo of the model substituted for my rough background drawing. I inked the piece on my lightbox using my rough & photo as a guide for the ink lines. Like usual, when inking I'm concerned with texture and line quality...how different patterns of line can suggest different textures or surfaces. For pens I'm now using Copic Multiliners, the same pens I'm using on Mouse Guard. I did a little bit to suggest the lighting with the ink (the cast shadow & the darker recesses of the sewer stippling into lighter foreground) but I wanted to save most of the lighting effects for the coloring.

The next step is to scan the inks and start 'flatting' which is the starting stage of coloring. Here I'm establishing areas of color..making the area that is Don's front shell different than the colors that are his arm or head or the sewer. Some color choices are made in this stage, but they could be all wrong on purpose if I wanted. The goal is to make sure that the different parts are all separated by a different color. Here I was pretty close and only made a few adjustments after I got into the rendering. I have to admit, even though I know the process, the flatness of these flats left me worried. I had envisioned a very atmospheric cover with a lot of depth and the flat colors showed that I had a long way to go to get there.

The last step was to render the piece. This means adding in all the shading and lighting effects and color holds and highlights. I was right when I thought it was going to be a long process from the flats to this point. There was a few hours of just tweaking the lighting and shadows until it was the right amount of contrast and glow.


Upcoming Appearances:
2012
London Super Con: Feb 25-26

Emerald City: March 30-April 1 

Boston Comic Con: April 21-22

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Free Comic Book Day
As Archaia announced earlier this month, they will be releasing a 48 page 6" x 9" hardcover for Free Comic Book Day (May 5th 2012). I'm doing a new Mouse Guard story which follows last year's tradition of being a morality tale told to a younger incarnation of one of the adult characters from my series. Other stories will include a Cursed Pirate Girl story by Jeremy Bastian, Labyrinth by Ted Naifeh & Cory Godby, Rust by Royden Lepp, Dapper Men by Jim McCann & Janet Lee, and Cow Boy by Chris Eliopoulos & Nate Cosby. It's going to be a real honor sharing the book with all that talent! (5 of whom either have-done or will-be-doing a Legends of the Guard story!)

Before I knew Archaia's plan to do a 6" x 9" book, I started work on a FCBD cover the way I normally would...as an 8" x 8" square flip book like the last two years. The morality tale in my story is all being told through a puppet show, so the cover features the three main cast of the play with the puppet theater where the show is staged. There was barely room to accommodate the traditionally blank space where retailers can stamp or label their store's info so new customers will know where to return. Then I got the call about the size format. I still plan to do my pages square, floating them on the 6" x 9" page with decorative elements framing the panels (so that later I can collect the FCBD stories sometime down the line in a Mouse Guard 8" x 8" format), but for the cover...that needed to be special.


With the art already colored, I needed to do a patch job to extend the artwork. I laid out more bristol board over the original inked linework and using a lightbox I added more height on this new piece feathering into the existing linework on my original below. I added a little to the top, and a great deal to the bottom. This way there would be plenty of room to place the retailer's stamp, and display all the titles for the various stories going into the volume. Scanning in my height-patches, I feathered in the coloring and tried to make it look as seamless as I could. Here is the artwork I sent to Archaia. They made some changes to the design to make room for all the titles and logos. It looks great this way too, and it sounds like the retailer's stamp/sticker will be on the back cover(?). You also notice the Free Comic Book Day banner on Archaia's version? That's one I was asked to draw. I don't know if it's fully approved by the FCBD committee yet...so let's move on (plus I could do a whole post just on the process for that logo!)


Once I started working on the story, I wanted to build myself (you guessed it) a little model of the puppet stage. I did this because 1) I had already designed the look of it when I drew the cover, so it would only mean printing out my cover at and pasting it to a few sheets of cardboard, and 2) since I was going to be blocking out a tiny theatrical play, I wanted to make sure I had an understanding of how deep the stage was, how the backdrops could be unfurled for a new scene, what room the puppeteers had etc. The model is made of cardboard a few balsa sticks and my printed out drawings from the cover art. It has one of the highest quick/quality ratios of all the models I've built.




And earlier in the year, after drawing a Mouse puppet builder, I had a bug to make my own mouse marionette. I sculpted the shapes out of Sculpy, building up the mass of the head and body with balls of tinfoil. Once the polymer clay had baked in the oven and cured, I carved the enlarged woodgrain (and various dings, dents, & scratches) with my woodcarving tools. The marionette has come in very handy for me to reference...not just for proportion, scale, and the anatomy of the joints, but for feeling the weight of how the arms WANT to hang, the head WANTS to loll to the side, the legs WANT to dangle.

That brings us to a teaser. Here is the first page of my Free Comic Book Day Story colored sans-text. I know it's a long wait till May 5th of next year for the rest of it, but now is the time to tell your comic shop that you want this hardcover!

Upcoming Appearances:
2012
London Super Con: Feb 25-26

Emerald City: March 30-April 1 

Boston Comic Con: April 21-22