Turtles in Time Cover #1 process

I have been asked back by IDW to do the covers for the new TMNT mini series Turtles in Time! I've done 8 TMNT covers for IDW already and getting this assignment for 4 more is a real treat. The Ninja Turtles were some of my first comics, and what started my mind toward writing and drawing my own stories.
To the left is the finished cover for issue #1, where the turtles are in pre-history.
For today's post, I'll break down my process for creating the cover.


Sketches: I was given an era for each cover (though issue #3 has been changed a few times) and for the first, it was prehistoric times. With my earlier covers for IDW, each issue focused on a single character, this time, each cover would feature all 4. And what better way to get all four characters into a good prehistoric image than to have the guys riding a dinosaur! I went with a triceratops as a homage to the Triceratons of the turtle's futures. I tried to get something about each turtles personality in each of their poses and reaction to being in the age of dinosaurs.

I assembled my rough sketches in photoshop in a cover-template. This allowed me to resize and reposition everyone so the overall layout worked without having to draw it all in one-shot. As I mentioned before, each turtle's personality is shown in their pose: Mike: I see as the fun guy who lightens the mood and rolls with the situation because he has to...and in this he's grabbing on and going for the ride. Raph is aggressively charging forward, weapons ready, about to take the triceratops by the horns if need be. Leo is the only one facing the actual danger (the meteors that ultimately may have caused dino-extinction) and is keeping the family together by gripping Don, who is such a logical and concrete thinker, is loosing his mind over the unrealness of where they are.

I printed out the above digital composite and taped it to the back of a sheet of 11" x 17" Strathmore 300 series bristol. I placed the bristol and taped layout on my lightbox and used the printed image as a guide to ink the piece on the bristol surface. To ink, I use Copic Multiliners, the 0.7 and 0.35 nibs for this one, and a brush with a bottle of ink for the fills. I was on the fence about the black silhouette ferns in the foreground and thought I'd gone too far with that look when I finished the piece, but my wife Julia said she liked it and to try coloring it as-is and only make changes if the colors weren't working (smart lady!).

So I went ahead and scanned my inked piece into photoshop (I use an old version for photoshop 7.0...pre-CS) This stage is all about filling in the various ares with their colors...establishing what areas are turtle skin, what areas are dino skin, etc. Because this is not a stage where I'm worried about the shading, I'm only making spaces of flat color, this step is called the flatting stage. I saved this image after I had tweaked the palette closer to what I thought I'd use, but my initial version of the flat colors had the turtles with a brighter green, the dinosaur grey and the sky blue-green. What colors I started with is unimportant when flatting. Once the color areas are all established, it's easy to quickly change the colors of any piece of the image.

The last step was the final rendering and adding special effect color-holds. Here is another look at the final cover:

Other TMNT in Time Cover Process Posts:

Issue 2

Issue 3

Issue 4

2014 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

2014 Bookplate Process

For the past two years I have released a 4" x 5" bookplate (You can take a look back at the process for 2012 & 2013). The purpose of a bookplate is to write your name on it and insert it (with photo corners, glue, or tape) inside the front cover of your book (doesn't even have to be a Mouse Guard book) so the book can be identified as coming from your bookshelf. In past years I've done relief printed & stained glass images. This year, I went with an embroidered image. You can see the final plate to the left and in today's blogpost I'll explain the process of creating it.

I started by thinking of something that would look good as an embroidered scrap from the Mouse Guard world. I'd done a tapestry image for a sketchbook a few years ago, and wanted to play with that imagery again. The tapestry is based on a real quilted wall hanging my friend's mother made for their church and I'd drawn my version as part of a commission (right) and also into the pages of the Black Axe. What I like about the tapestry is that it depicts an unknown past matriarch holding three key tenants of Mouse Guard in front of her: defense (the castle), diplomacy (the scroll), & aggression (the sword). The symbolism is perfect for a balance any matriarch of the Guard would need to strike. These also became the basis for the game the mice play in taverns called "Swords, Diplomacy, & Strongholds" (...though I may shorten that game's name to just "Swords and Strongholds"...)

 There were several false starts for figuring out how to do an embroidered look...everything from photoshop plugins and programs, to web-based cross-stitch pattern makers..and even the idea of really doing some embroidery. But I figured out a trick to get what I wanted manually in photoshop. So I needed a rough sketch to build on to start the work. The rough is just a small pencil drawing on copy paper that is a simplified version of the piece above. The right side of the image isn't well fleshed out because I ended up mirroring the left side since no part of this sketch would be visible in the final piece.

The process for making everything look like stitching is by making lots of strokes to simulate each thread. The different colors are each on different layers and each have a bevel effect on them. The various filters and programs I found that auto embroidered an image for you made everything too uniform and precise. I went with this manual way (using a wacom to help with making all those tiny digital brush strokes look like hand-drawn lines) so I could give it a more handmade feel...make it less even, a little more worn and imperfect. Upclose, the illusion fades a bit because this technique can only simulate so much (even with added fabric textures applied), but when scaled down to the final print-size, I think the effect is rather convincing.

Here again is the final image. These will all be signed and numbered limited to an edition of 750. The first convention I'll have this bookplate in-hand for is Emerald City Comic Con in March. After that I'll start offering them through my online store.

2014 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Mondo Poster: The Rescuers

As you may have seen, Mondo opened a Disney themed gallery show with new posters from a number of great Disney movies (Disney posted all the posters online here). I was asked to do a piece for the 1977 movie The Rescuers. I'd done a Mondo print before of Pixar's Brave, and was honored to be asked back. My Rescuers print, is available for purchase at the gallery and Mondo will release any remaining prints online. Today I'll run through the process for making the artwork for the print.

It had been a while since I'd seen The Rescuers, and while a few iconic moments came to mind, I felt I should re-watch the movie before drawing up anything. I'm glad I did. I knew I'd wanted to feature the main characters in the dragonfly-powered leaf-boat, but I had somehow forgotten about the scene with the alligators (Brutus & Nero) carrying off kidnapped Penny & her bear or that she was held hostage on a run-down riverboat. I sketched up all of these elements in my sketchbook and on a scrap of paper to try and hone in on what my versions of these things would look like (while still keeping the look of the classic Disney designs).

From there I did a digital composite of my drawings. I resized characters, changed the spacial relationships between them, and even used the liquify tool to warp some of the lines and features to get the image where I wanted it. Because this piece was ultimately going to be silkscreened, I had to limit the palette to 10 colors, so I was careful, even in this early stage, to be thinking about color usage & using repeating colors. This piece was then sent off to Mondo for approval. With the green light, I printed this off in a large format (took 6 sheets of legal paper to patchwork it back together), taped it to the back of some bristol, and warmed up my light table for the inking stage...

Because the final silkscreened print is 24" x 36" and I wanted to minimize the loss of line quality when getting enlarged, I inked the piece on 19" x 24" bristol. Some of the elements were inked separately (like the water splash & ripples as well as the title & type). This way, I could isolate them easier from the main illustration for their proper color treatment without having to do a lot of extra work.  Even though I have a large scanner, I did have to scan each large sheet of bristol in parts and then edit them back together in photoshop. The pieces were all inked with Copic Multiliners, a brush & ink bottle for the larger black areas.


To prepare a piece for silkscreening is a lot of work beyond the image-making process. Each color represents a separate screen that ink color is squeegeed through. The order in which the colors print is important, and so is if the colors butt up against each other, or if they overlap. If the seam between the colors isn't being printed over with yet another dark color (like the dark outlines), then the first color needs to be printed under where the edge of the next color will be (this is called "trapping"). I learned quite a bit about this on the Brave poster from last year, but this Rescuers piece was more complicated because my linework was more open and I was relying on color for more of the depth & design. This animated .GIF shows each color layer as if it were being printed in order.

Here are a few detail images of Bianca & Bernard, Brutus, Teddy, Evinrude, Penny, & Nero from the final version of the poster:

And another look at the poster in full.

Later this week, I will have some Artist Copies to sell through my online store ...I'll Tweet and Facebook update when they become available. *UPDATE* My signed artist copies are now up for sale (along with the original art pieces): http://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/mondo-rescuers-poster-signed-artist-copy

2014 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Hellboy's 20th Anniversary

Comic news website Multiversity Comics is helping celebrate Hellboy's 20th anniversary. And with Hellboy being my favorite comic character, and Mike Mignola being so important in my understanding of what comics can be (from both an artistic and professional perspective), I was thrilled when Multiversity asked me to do a piece for the month long-reveal of Hellboy artwork by other comic creators.

I decided to have Hellboy all dressed up with no where to go...walking down a hallway with painted images of his past in ornate frames covering the walls. Each one is a reference to something from a Hellboy story, and below, I've provided bigger images of each framed image & info on what it references.

The 'Drinking with Skeletons' from "The Island". I own a page from this story, the page just before this reveal shot when the sailors are still seen as alive. Not only is the reveal panel great (they were dead all along) it also leads to this awesomely quotable dialogue "Don't mess with me, lady. I've been drinking with skeletons"

The WWII era photo taken the night Hellboy arrived on earth and was adopted by Trevor Bruttenholm. I debated having a more formal portrait of Hellboy's adoptive father on the wall, but felt there were so many other bits to show in 20 years of stories, this tiny one would have to do.

Baby Alice and the Wee Fairy Folk. This scene is from the one-shot issue The Corpse, but fans who have kept up with Hellboy comics will know that Alice grows up and plays in important role in Hellboy's life before he dies and goes to Hell. Showing Alice as a baby gave reference to both stories in a way showing adult Alice might not have.

Pandemonium. Capitol City of the Hellboy version of Hell. I love how Mike shows Hell as a place of beauty...and that the hellish nature is in what goes on there and the disorienting feeling of time and space not syncing up properly.

The Bird from "Nature of the Beast". In the story Hellboy is reluctantly hunting down a worm/dragon in a wooded area covered in flowers. When he first arrives, a bird is chirping a song (shown by a word balloon with musical notes) but when the menacing dragon is slithering through the low floral coverage and approaching Hellboy, the bird's word balloon is empty. Birds going suddenly silent is used in prose and film as a warning...and Mike's trick with the balloons to use it here is such a great visual.

The Baba Yaga. Hidden behind the candelabra Hellboy is holding is the famous witch of Russian folklore with her collection of skull lanterns. 

:Looming over Hellboy's head are the Ogdru Jahad...the seven dragons of the apocalypse destined to destroy the world if unleashed. Hellboy's right hand has the power to un-imprison them.

Hellboy's Father 

Hellboy's Mother Sarah Hughes, a was a witch & also a descendant of King Arthur.

Cavendish Hall. The setting of the first Hellboy mini-series. looming over it is Sadu-Hem..the Lovecraftian monster in the series climax. 

This piece is not a direct reference to any specific Hellboy characters or story. Just a few of the impish demons Mike's been drawing in "Hellboy In Hell" carrying around Hellboy's crown (in case he should want to take it up)

The Troll Witch riding a goat wielding a wooden spoon into battle against an army of trolls. I really like this story for it's folktale quality and it's pacing. And the image of her riding a goat into battle with only a wooden spoon is too great.

Lastly, this sliver of a painting shows Excalibur set in the stone waiting for the rightful heir of Arthur to pluck it up and command all of England with it.

Because Hellboy is also one of the subjects celebrated in this year's Comic Con Souvenir book and that is a color-only book, I colored the piece and will submit it with fingers crossed it will make the cut. I'm a big fan of Mike Mignola and a big fan of Hellboy, so getting to celebrate 20 years of that work was an honor and a pleasure.

2014 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12