Baltimore Comic Con Yearbook 2012

This year for the Baltimore Comic Con, Marc Nathan is doing a hardcover sketchbook called the Baltimore comic Con Yearbook. He asked Frank Cho for permission to use Liberty Meadows as a theme for the book. Participating artists were invited to do a piece of original work of Liberty Meadows and encouraged to add their creator-owned characters to the piece as well. I opted to no do a literal Mouse Guard/Liberty Meadows piece, but rather a Liberty Meadows piece that has the hallmarks of a Mouse Guard piece: small adorable creatures in medieval warrior garb cascading over rock piles while riding animals.

I knew instantly I'd use Truman (the duck) riding Oscar (the wiener dog)...and the rest fell into place..well, sort of. The sketch seemed fine, but once I scanned it and place it in a template for the book's dimensions, I had to rework Truman's sword arm. Doing so meant cutting and pasting his arm in a few places, moving his leg, and replacing the word balloon (as well as a tweak to the length of the sword & scabbard). While drawing this, thought about the balance of copying or imitating someone's work and doing your own take on it. In this case, the character's needed to look like Frank's designs, so I didn't do too much interpretation. I printed out the layout and used a lightbox to lightly transfer the drawing to watercolor paper in pencil.

The finished piece is in watercolor. I did this because the original is part of an auction for the convention. If I had done the artwork traditionally, the high bidder would get an inked piece, this way that person gets a color one. I also figured that if I was going to try something different (like a full piece in watercolor) this would be a piece I could do it on without creating an inconsistency like if I had done a new Mouse Guard piece this way (though I'm not ruling that out either).The book will be available this weekend at the Baltimore Comic Con, and the original watercolor will be auctioned there as well.

New Limited Tee Shirt
With a few more conventions left for this year and the holiday season approaching, I saw that quantities of the Mouse & Crow shirt design are running low. So it's time for a new shirt! As with the last design, I plan to only do this print run with this design, and when it runs out, I'll do a new design/color/etc. The image shown here is a digital mock-up with the colors as closely approximated as possible. If everything goes according to plan, I'll debut these at Baltimore this weekend and then make them available in the online store once I get home from the convention. (We will have more sizes available than last time also)


Watercolor Wednesday: Last week's Watercolor Wednesday piece was this Oz themed piece of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman.Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. Brains & Heart...Kenzie & Saxon... 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