David Petersen's Blog: Legends of the Guard Vol. 3 #1 in progress preview

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Legends of the Guard Vol. 3 #1 in progress preview

For this week's blogpost, I'll be sharing some previews of in-process work for Legends of the Guard Volume 3 #1 (in Previews this month: Order Code JAN151140). To the left is my wraparound cover for the issue (process post on that cover here). The issue will also be a first for Mouse Guard with variant covers from Humberto Ramos, Ramon Perez, & Eric Muller...but I'll share more on those as we get closer to release. Below are process pages for the three contributors for this issue:

Mark Buckingham:
I chose Mark to be in Legends for obvious reasons. Besides his talent and a delightful person, the body of work he's most known for is Fables which features all manner of talking animals. Mark and I chatted about what he'd like to do for a Legends story sometime early last year, and then again at Baltimore Comic Con towards the end of 2014. I seemed to recall Mark saying something in our earlier talk about doing a story with a goose, at Baltimore, he didn't remember saying that, but liked the idea of drawing a goose. Mark added

"The reason David and I discussed using a goose in my story was due to my inclusion of a goose in medieval costume in the illustration I did for the Fabletown and Beyond Convention poster/T-shirt design, which I remember David telling me he was quite fond of during the show.

I took inspiration for the story title from the Anthony Phillips ( the original guitarist of Genesis) LP "The geese & the ghost" (1977) which has long been a favorite of mine, with beautiful artwork by Peter Cross (Anyone familiar with my work on Fables will immediately spot his influence on me)."Below are Mark's pencils, inks with inkwash, and final art colored by Lee Loughridge for his story The Gosling and the Ghost."

Hannah Christenson:

Hannah falls in to the category of artist/storytellers who are not "names" but do work worthy of much larger attention. I first saw her work online (Hannah's Blog) and kept her in mind as someone to tap as a Legends artist at the first opportunity. After drafting up 5 (!?!) different pitches for Legends, I asked her to pick the one she would be most excited about drawing (since they were all good). Hannah had been taking some blacksmithing classes with her husband and chose to do her pitch that involved a blacksmith for her contribution The Armor Maker. Below are her digital roughs, inks, & colors. Hannah Added:

"Ever since I was a little girl I loved armor, warriors, and knights, and I'd even told my mom I wanted to be a blacksmith when I grew up. I also love stories about "side characters" or the support people outside of the traditional hero who sort of rise up and help in a way they thought was beyond themselves (thus becoming one of the heroes, I suppose).

The process was really awesome on my side of things, from pitching all the stories to working on last edits. I loved all the stories I pitched but I had hoped to get to do this one. I really like armor. "

Skottie Young:
Skottie had originally been tapped for Volume 2 of Legends, but due to a communication error, we thought he was unable to contribute. But we are correcting that with this volume. Skottie loves folklore..so much that his first creator owned series is all about fairy tales (more info about it here)
I don't want to share too much of Skottie's story yet, but it draws from his real life experiences with fatherhood and the wonder of a child. Below are the inks to Skottie's 1st page as a well as a Mouse Guard Daily Doodle of his from back in 2011.

My pages:

I'll be linking the stories together through the storytelling competition at the tavern. So I've been working on designs for the storytellers/inn patrons as well as dusting off my model of the June Alley Inn so I can get my pages turned in on-time.