Baltimore Comic Con Program Cover & Process:

I was asked by Marc Nathan to do the cover of the Baltimore Comic Con program Guide this year! It's huge honor for me and Mouse Guard. The Baltimore show is one of my favorite of the year. It's a show about storytelling and art. It has a very strong artist alley, and is organized by people who really care about a good convention where creators can meet fans and nothing else gets in the way. Here is the final artwork sans-logo & text, but below I run through the process in making the cover image.

Sketch: I considered doing a Baltimore themed piece (something including a piece of Baltimore architecture or an Oriole) but I opted instead for  a pure Mouse Guard piece, and specifically a Black Axe themed piece. I had a rough compsition in my head, but I figured I'd worry about the composition after I had a few figures draw that I could move around in photoshop within the confines of the cover's dimensions. Celanawe and Luthebon were drawn in my sketchbook along with some circles to represent ladybugs (which seem to be a repeating motif for Celanawe with the Axe).

Composition: Marc warned me that the cover not only needed room for the con-logo and text, but also for lots of signatures. People like to get their program signed, so as I worked on getting the figures in a pleasing arrangement, I also had to leave plenty of sky and open grassy area for signatures. The architecture of Ildur Hall in the background is a photo of the model I built of it. The yellow frame represents the 'bleed' in printing. If the artwork is going to go off the edge of the finished book, the artwork needs to be extended beyond that cut so that there is no chance of a white edge if the cut is a bit off register. I don't intend anything inside that yellow edge to be seen, but I have to extend the artwork out to that point for the bleed.

Inks: The layout seen above is then printed out (at 10.5" x 16") and taped to the back of a sheet of bristol board. On a large lightbox, I can see through the bristol board and use the layout as I ink in the final drawing. I ink with Copic Multi Liners (the 0.7 nib mainly). A lot of the work is done in this stage, I didn't draw in all the blades of grass or the texture on the rock when I was penciling the rough. It's in the inks that I concern myself with the rendering of textures and creating shading and dark spots that draw your eye through the artwork.

Flat color: After the inks are done, it's time to scan the piece and begin coloring it. This stage is called 'flatting' because you are establishing the breaks of different color areas solely with flat color. In photoshop, the line-work sits on the top most layer with a mode turned on that pretends the black pixels are opaque while the white areas are transparent (like an overhead projector slide from school...or at least when I was in school). All the color layers go below that. For color choices, I was mostly able to just eyedropper up colors from the Black Axe issues where Celanawe, Luthebon, & Ildur Hall appear...but in the rendering stage, I did make adjustments o those colors to make this piece work as a whole on it's own.

Final rendering: Using tools called Dodge & Burn (terms from photographic exposure developing techniques) to lighten and darken the flat colors, I shade highlight and render the image. To push the hall and the hill back away from the figures, I added a color hold to their linework. A color hold is just a term for making the black inkwork a color rather than black (usually a slightly darker color of the thing it is an outline for). So that's the final cover art! I look forward to seeing fans stop by with it at the Baltimore Comic con in a few weeks!

Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week's Watercolor Wednesday first piece was an original forest spirit type creature. Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. The wrinkles on his face and his small predator eyes were inspired by seeing a photo of an old shark.



The second Watercolor Wednesday piece was a painting of my favorite character from Kory Bing's Skin Deep webcomic (which by chance also has a Kickstarter going to fund printing of her 2nd storyline collection of the series)

Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the new art is available.




2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

Black Axe #5 Matriarch's Room model:
In Black Axe #5 Celanawe enters a room just off of the Matriarch's office that is a private room of knowledge, memorial, and reflection for the leader of the Mouse Guard. You can see it here to the left in this collage of panels from the issue. This room needed to be special, it needed to be really special. I wanted it to have beauty and mystique. I had vision in my head of floating details, but not a complete room..so...I built a model.

My first inspiration source was from a visit to Christ's Church in Dublin I made a few years ago. The baptistery was surrounded by stained glass windows of various patron saints. When I was standing in that room in Dublin, I said I wanted to make a room like this for the Guard, but one that featured Matriarchs instead of saints. I photographed the saint windows (and compiled them here into a single image) and kept them in a folder for later inspiration. I also had photos of the floor (which I used a single tile as inspiration for the floor of this room) and the rest of the church (arches of which will appear in Black Axe #6).

I copied the border and layout design of the saint windows and then went about drawing up stained glass versions of important past Mouse Guard Matriarchs. To make them more unique, I came up with some iconographic symbol of what the were known for during their reign. While I had mentioned Allyson & Laria in past Mouse Guard issues, I needed to come up with more past Matriarchs. Two of them are Easter egg characters from Legends of the Guard volume 1: Ferruin from Jeremy Bastian's story and Moria from Mark Smylie's. The rest were inventions as I drew them, though Dorys is an homage to my paternal Grandmother, who was the inspiration for the Guard being led by strong women in the first place.

The model itself is modular. Each wall is a separate piece with it's own floor base. All of the surfaces are cardboard with printed 'skins' glued on that I designed in photoshop. The windows are recessed printouts of my above designs. I made a ceiling section out of cardboard, craft sticks, and hot glue. When assembled, the tile sections of the floor match up and the ceiling can be placed on top while still exposing one open end of the room for viewing and reference photos. I will make sure this room gets a nice detailed cutaway section in the extras section of the Black Axe hardcover, so it will be nice to get this model off the shelf again.

*Edit*

I've added a video tour of the room as well as it's exterior & construction:

http://twitpic.com/am4yfu

*Edit 2*
Also added more photos below of the model from more angles:

Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week's Watercolor Wednesday was a 2 part-er. The first piece was of the Auror Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody from the Harry Potter books. Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. I'm a big Harry Potter Fan (as evidenced by my original Harry Potter themed art collection). The rough for this painting was from a coffee shop sketchbook drawing seen here.

Because this sold so quickly, I decided to grab an older watercolor I had in the queue: An American Flag I painted in 2003 as part of the art for an invitation to our house-warming/my birthday on the 4th of July. Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the new art is available.




2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

Black Axe #5 Boat Model:
In Black Axe issue #5, Celanawe & Conrad decide to return home to the Mouse Territories. Since Conrad's original ship was destroyed in the storm that brought them to the Isle of Ildur (click here for that ship's model) They would have to construct a new one. In this page to the left you can see the final result of the boat and their work in gathering materials and building it. But before I could draw this page (and all subsequent pages with the new boat) I had to design it, which, as so often is the case, meant building a model.


The boat needed to be made of materials found on the Isle of Ildur and not be too 'worked'. The lumber needed to still look like stick and branches and twigs, not square hewn beams (though I gave myself some wiggle room here since the ferrets may have some spare building supplies around). I also wanted this boat to look very different than Conrad's first ship. For the Legends of the Guard #4 cover, I drew a boat made of a hollow turtle shell, and while I didn't like the idea of copying the boat from that cover, I loved the idea of that shell being the boat's hull.

Because I wanted to keep all the shell's details right, and because I didn't know how I was going to attach everything else to the shell, I started by making a card-stock shell model. I looked at a few reference photos and started cutting, gluing, snipping, and drawing on some scrap bristol until I had the shape and pattern I wanted. Then the fear set in. I had built a model shell I really liked, and I didn't want to start gluing more parts to it for fear I may not like the final result and not be able to salvage the shell to start over. So everything I made had to be modular and attach and detach from the shell without glue. This also made drawing the panels when the boat is being constructed easier.

The catamaran like pontoons and the stick trusses secure to the shell with some rubber bands glued to the shell's front and back. The mast, sail, and deck slide in to a bristol board groove along the back edge of the shell's opening. Speaking of which, the sail is modeled after Chinese Junks and has florist's wire along the top ridge so I could bend the sail into shapes like it was caught in a billowing wind or collapsed up for landing in port. When I was a kid I had a wooden model kit of a catamaran and I did my best to replicate the rudder design from memory. Sure I didn't need to make the rudders pivot and work in tandem for sake of the model...but I did.


Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week's Watercolor Wednesday piece was of the folklore trickster Fir Darrig. Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. Fir Darrig is a character I did a few short comic stories of in the past (found in the out-of-print Voices 1 and/or Ye Old Lore of Yore). The paper I did this on already had a mottled parchment-like tone watercolored on it before I started. I used the parchment watercolor piece as the digital background for this piece I did of Fir Darrig as a mock-cover to an eventual collection of his stories I'd like to do. So it only seemed fitting to honor the paper with a real painting of the character. Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the art is available.


2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

TMNT April Cover Process

My 7th TMNT Micro Series cover is the April cover. This cover was tough for me in a few ways. First off, I'm not all that well versed in drawing humans well, and even worse if they are supposed to be pretty ladies. Secondly, April is a character that has been represented a different way with every TMNT reboot/relaunch/media. And even though I have my own favorite idea of who April is, I was having a hard time coming up with a layout interesting enough to be a cover for her issue. I talked to my editor Bobby and we agreed that the old VW bus was an iconic thing from the old comic and the new IDW comic that would serve as a nice prop for April to interact with.

My first attempt at a cover layout was deemed a bit too boring, and looking back at this, I completely agree. However when I got the email from IDW asking me to rework the layout, I was crushed, because getting me to draw a woman once is hard enough, getting me to do it a 2nd time with the same or better results is rare. Other notes that came in from Nickelodeon were to give April less of a passive pose and more sass, hide/eliminate the VW logo, and give the turtles a bit more visibility through the glass for the reader.

IDW suggested April twirling the keys on her finger, an idea I liked. But as I said, since I'm not great at lady-drawin', I had to work hard to get the drawing where I wanted it. This is was drawn in my sketchbook. I started drawing her on one side of the paper, but worried I had flaws in the proportions, so I flipped it over and looked at it on a lightbox so I could see the errors and fix them on the clean side of the paper. It means that this drawing is the mirror of what my original drawing started out as, but I found I liked her facing this orientation instead.

I worked up a drawing of the VW, the turtles, and composited them together with my April drawing. At this stage I fixed a few parts on April's legs and moved her right arm up to where it needs to be so the shoulder is in its socket. To make sure IDW and Nickelodeon knew what my overall color and value sense was for the piece I added a lot of color under-painting to the drawing. Yes, I did that on the first layout I submitted, but that was more to cover the shortcomings of the drawing, this time it was to insure everyone was on the same page so there was less chance of being asked to make unnecessary revisions.

Like my normal working process, once the layout was approved, I printed it out at full scale and placed it on a lightbox with my Strathmore 300 series bristol taped on top of it. I inked in all the piece with Copic MultiLiners (the 0.7 mostly, but also the 0.3 and a brush tip). I feel that I lost something here with the translation of April's face. It's always a trick to turn a softly rendered pencil drawing into hard inked lines, and since ladies aren't my regular days work, I don't have practice minimizing the softness-loss. It was after I noticed the difference in my pencils to my inks that I stopped myself from over-fiddling with her face any more, and did the cross-hatch pattern on the lower part of the bus to keep myself busy.

The last step was the color stage. I skipped over the flats this time, because they aren't exciting to see (and I've shown plenty of examples in the past). I used the eyedropper tool to pick out colors very close to my color layout sketch so that there would be no surprises as I went along. I tried to soften April's face with a more painterly approach to her color-rendering, but I was worried about over-doing it, because Nickelodeon had asked me 'not to make her nose so red' after approving the sketch. The turtles behind glass were achieved with a few layers in front of their base colors that lighten and mute their tones.

Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week was the first of my Watercolor Wednesday sales. This is a better look at the piece I offered up last week in case you missed it: A Gotham by Gaslight inspired Batman. Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the art is available.




2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18