David Petersen's Blog: Mouse Guard Coloring Book

Archaia & I have decided to publish a Mouse Guard coloring book! Fans have asked for it, and now one is on the way.

Mouse Guard Coloring Book:
-On Sale: October 2016
-Price: $14.99 US
-96 pages
Preorder on Amazon.com
Or through your LCS using order code JUN16 1233

For this week's blogpost, I will show the process of creating the cover, a piece I designed specifically for the coloring book.

My plan was to to something of a vertical image, with mice and architecture that would be flanked by a design pattern on the left and right (but more on that later). Because the details and little open spaces are what make one of these coloring books, I wanted the mice to have lots of specific clothes and accessories. And the architecture needed to be made of multiple building materials. Here are my pencils for the center section of the cover where on one sheet of copy paper I've drawn the architectural background of a round building with a beehive cupola, and on the other a musician mouse and a Guardmouse with some bees.

After scanning those drawings, I set about making a layout within a template for the cover's measurements (and keeping a space open for the title and text). I assembled the two drawings together, tinting each so that they were easier to 'read' visually as I worked out the design and later when inking on a light box. For the pattern designs up the side, I disassembled a stock stained glass window design, filled the gaps with honeycomb hexagons, and replaced the center floral motif with bees.

I printed out the above layout (I had to do that onto two sheets of legal paper because it was too large to fit on one sheet of anything my home printer can handle) and then taped that layout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol.

I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (0.7, 0.5, 0.3 nibs) to ink in all the linework and details. I was so focussed on overdoing the details for the coloring book, I didn't think about how tight the linework was and if it would reduce well for publication, so I went back over several areas with white correction paint to open up some parts.

Below you can see several in-process images I posted on Twitter as I worked: