Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Merry Christmas!
36 handpainted snowflakes on 3" x 3" bristol.




Watercolor Wednesday: In case you missed last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces, here they are for a closer look. Like the week before, both are fairy tale
inspired. First up is Pinocchio & the talking cricket. I'd intended to do this less Disney-fied than it came out, but the costume & color palate was so ingrained in me, that I couldn't shed it for anything more original. The talking Cricket (named Jiminy for the Disney version) came as a bonus piece so the two formed a weighted diptych.

The second piece from last week are the three little pigs. It's no secret that I enjoy drawing talking animals, material textures, & working trades, so doing a take on these guys seemed a natural fit. After the Pinocchio painting I decided not to fight the Disney costumes for these three brothers.

Tomorrow I'll post a blizzard of paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances: 
Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

FCBD 2013 Cover process

This year's Free Comic Book Day offering by Archaia will be an 8" x 8" flipbook (like years 2010 & 2011). My contribution is a Mouse Guard cover for one side and an 8 page story. I had teased a bit of working on this on Twitter, but was told that Archaia preferred to keep it hush-hush until their official announcement last week.

This year's story of mine will follow the tradition of the last two: a morality tale being told to a younger version of a character we know from the Mouse Guard series that helps explain who they grew up to be.  Sadie is the mouse who will hear a story this year.

I don't want to give too much away about the story itself, so I'll skip over that and just say that I had a picture in my head of a beautiful mouse swinging carefree on a swing held by a goose. I looked at the Rococo painting Fragonard's "The Swing" (or "The Happy Accidents of the Swing") for inspiration and to help me imagine the correct body language for the swinging mouse. I sketched the swinger, the goose, and the viewing mouse all separately in my sketchbook and then composited and resized them into this single image. I dropped in ghostly version of the logos to make sure I was keeping my composition in the view-able area.

Next step was to print out that composited rough at actual size (in this case 12" x 12") and tape it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol. On a lightbox I was able to see the printed image and use it as a guide while I inked the piece. I used Copic Multiliners for almost the entire image (the 0.7 nib mainly) other than the water ripples that I inked with a brush. knowing I planned on using a color hold on the landscape inkwork (to help it recede into the background more subtly) I carefully left a white gap between the foreground subjects and the background. That made it easier to isolate them in the next steps...


The scanned inkwork is ready to be digitally colored and have its color areas established. Laying out these flat areas of color...or coloring in the lines...is called Color Flatting. Here I kept it close to my final color choices, but since the idea here is just to make the goose's feathers a different color than the sky and the vines a different color than the goose's bill, I could have used any colors: a red feathered duck with a green bill and pink vines. The final color choices can be altered at any time easily once you've established color flats. Part of the reason to flat colors is so you can easily move between different areas when you want to render them or alter the colors without effecting the color or rendering of the part next to it.

The final color rendering is done by adding texture, shading and highlights. I use the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop for this and a textured brush to give it the right look as I go. Because this cover has more of a fairy-tale romantic feel, I also designed a new retailer-stamp area that fit the mood (and is based on some stained glass from the antique store I worked in when I started Mouse Guard.

Free Comic Book Day is the first Saturday in May each year. I've yet to announce my 2013 FCBD plans, but in any case, tell your retailer now you want the Archaia Mouse Guard flip book, and then take a friend who has never read a comic next May and introduce them to worlds of stories with a free issue of something.



Black Axe Replicas:
Skelton Crew Studio has started their Mouse Guard weapon replica line (at mouse-scale) with the Black Axe! The Axes are available for pre-order (shipping in January) for $30 through their online store. Axes come with a debossed leather pouch and the first 400 ordered have tags I signed. Israel Skelton did a fantastic job interpreting  sculpting, & casting the mythic axe of black. So, as a gift for that Mouse Guard fan in your life, consider a mouse-sized replica of the Black Axe (you can print out a photo and wrap that until the axe arrives)

As Israel started working on the Axe, he asked for 'control' art, but not only did I not have a perfect & clean master drawing of the axe, I also hadn't drawn it consistently over the course of 3 series. I drew a new piece for Israel to use as a guide for his sculpt. Knowing that some of the stylistic elements of the axe in the comic would need to be more believeable as a 3d object for this project, gave me some license to push my design a bit away from past drawings. The two biggest changes were the barley-twist handle and the slightly more curvy shape of the axe's head. Israel took all of this and ran with it to make a wonderful art object for me and my fans.


Holiday Sale Reminder:
In my online store you can use promocode MOUSEGUARD to receive 10% off your order! The discount is good on Original art, Shirts, Non- Mouse Guard art pieces, Prints, and the Winter B&W edition. The sale runs through the end of the year, so whether you are buying a gift for a Mouse Guard fan, or something for yourself, If it's still December, you can get a discount. I'll be updating the store with more items as the sale goes on (check Twitter or Facebook for updates)

Watercolor Wednesday: In case you missed last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces, here they are for a closer look. Both are a bit fairy tale inspired (but not meant to be literal illustrations of) The Beast of Beauty and the Beast and a Sea Hag like the one in Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid.


Tomorrow I'll post a few more fairy tale inspired paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances:
Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Role Playing Game Portraits
A month ago I tweeted an image of some Role Playing game portraits I did in the early '00s inspired by some Tony DiTerlizi 'Flawed Characters' Portraits from Dragon Magazine around the same time. While looking for something else in a file cabinet, I uncovered the originals of those drawings and a few more to boot! I've re-scanned & colored them for the sake of the blog. Here they are with some commentary:

Dwarven Fighter:
My favorite of the bunch. I gave him evidence of some serious injuries (and a dead eye to match) Don't know what function the rings & pins serve on his pauldron straps, but the look cool.

Elven Rouge & Assassin:
I had a backstory for these two, being an arranged couple. The Rouge was a grizzled version of my standard D&D characters (thief with a conscience) and the Assassin is a cold blooded killer that eventually scares the Rogue away. (It's a themed arc-type pairing I'll use in a later story)

Halfling Bard:
Bards get a bad rap, but I think if handled properly, they can be rather cool. Become a minstral that gets in good with the King/Queen and then uses the closeness to his advantage. The $#!+ eating grin on this guy's face makes me think he's already set that plan in motion.

Dwarven Cleric:
I don't get sick of drawing craggy old bearded characters. So often you see D&D Clerics as being clean and neat. So this guy got a tangled mess of facial hair and only a few stubby teeth to push the idea of piety and faith being a Cleric's weapon, not fastidiousness.

Elven Paladin:
After the Elven Assasin drawing I got hung up on doing ringmail with a stencil...but youy can see that it starts to fall apart as a technique rather quickly. I imagined that something horrible happened to her mouth/jaw, so the armor is also cosmetic. And even though back in the 2.0 days of D&D, non-humans couldn't be Paladins, I always liked the idea of non-human holy knights with different deitys and rituals.

Halfling Mage:
This guy looks more run down than flawed & scarred. I don't know if I had a class in mind for him back when I drew him..but after the coloring gave him a bit of a Weasley/Gryffindor looks, I thought it was appropriate he was a mage. It's also fun to imagine a D&D mage that isn't just wearing robes and Gandalf's hat.


I will be offering the original drawings (pencil on 8.5" x 11" paper) of all of the above for sale through my online store later today. Keep an eye on my Twitter feed & Facebook page for more info.

Holiday Sale Reminder:
In my online store you can use promocode MOUSEGUARD to receive 10% off your order! The discount is good on Original art, Shirts, Non- Mouse Guard pieces, Prints, and the Winter B&W edition. The sale runs through the end of the year, so whether you are buying a gift for a Mouse Guard fan, or something for yourself, If it's still December, you can get a discount. I'll be updating the store with more items as the sale goes on (check Twitter or Facebook for updates)

Watercolor Wednesday:
Here are last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces in case you missed them or wanted a closer look. First up is my attempt at a John Bauer style Giant (though he was known for Trolls rather than Giants...I wanted to draw a giant) This is one of my favorite Watercolor Wednesday pieces to-date.

The second piece started as a bad drawing of a Jack Frost like ice-pixie. The trick to turn it from a bad rough drawing into a watercolor I was pleased with had everything to do with defining the edges of the character by painting in the background space around him. The negative shapes between the icy/snowflakey bits and the happy accents that formed them are where the magic happened
 Tomorrow I'll post a few more paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances: Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*

Tuesday, December 4, 2012


From the Vault: The Big One:
Two of last week's Watercolor Wednesday paintings were based on a project called "The Big One" (seen to the left and just below to the right). My friend Mike Davis (character inspiration for Rand) had an idea for a story/setting that paralleled WWII in mood, theme, and technology but was being waged by Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Drow, Giants, Orcs, etc. (the Meta-human races of D&D)

The idea still has some legs in my mind, and while I was painting gnomes and dwarves, & giants in a more fairy tale style for Watercolor Wednesdays, I thought I'd dip back in to the WWII theme for some new and unique pieces.Mike and I started talking about this project right after college gradation (we graduated together from EMU with degrees in Fine Art...though we've been friends since 8th grade).

 Mike is a bit of a miliraty buff and we both like strategy war games (I think we'd been playing Axis and Allies at the time). The concept was his and I just helped him flesh out the factions and what races would represent the various real-world sides of WWII. Elves represented Great Britain and Dwarves were Russia...but after that we started spiraling off into our own fictionalized history and war rather than the direct comparisons of the real events. This triptych was painted on my last sheet of watercolor paper from college and was my first try at showing the major players.

While elves were my race of choice to play in Dungeons and Dragons, I was more fascinated by what we were doing with the history and culture of our military Dwarves. I was basing their helmets on Naval helmets and liked the idea of a dwarven navy, though I think Mike resisted because Dwarves dislike water in D&D. For this painting I threw them into a blizzard  hunkered down and trying to get supplies. By the time I did this painting I felt my artwork wasn't portraying a grity or realistic enough view of this story...it was coming off cartoony and cute.

I started doing research. At that time I was working at Starbucks Coffee, so after my shift ended and I didn't have classes anymore, I could work on painting a fictionalized WWII. Using a lot of photo reference, I did these three paintings for the project.

Unfortunately niether Mike or I had any idea at the time where to take the story. We had broad strokes, but no characters, no heart for our set up. And as usual, life got in the way...I found another hobby or thing to draw after work and Mike did too. Perhaps some day Mike and I will figure out a direction for The Big One, but until then..it remains in the Vault.

Holiday Sale Reminder:
In my online store you can use promocode MOUSEGUARD to receive 10% off your order! I'm running this sale through the end of the year, so whether you are buying a gift for a Mouse Guard fan, or something for yourself, If it's still December, you can get a discount. I'll be updating the store with more items as the sale goes on (check Twitter or Facebook for updates)

Watercolor Wednesday:
The other piece from last week's Watercolor Wednesday was He-Man's arch enemy Skelator. I had a Skelator action figure when I was a kid, but I took him and my He-man figure down the street to an unoccupied house. The house was maintained by a guy we all called "M'Guffy"...though I don't think that was his name at all. Anyhow the house was vacant and kids would play on the lawn and front steps of the house. As I played, I had He-Man put Skelator in 'jail'...which was really the house's mailbox. I guess I went home forgetting to ever pardon Skelator, and when I went back and found him gone I cried. I asked Mr. M'Guffy the next time he came to mow, and he said he'd found the toy and given it to a little boy in HIS neighborhood. What an odd and long story to accompany a single painting...
Tomorrow I'll post a few more paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances: Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*

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