David Petersen's Blog: May 2020

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Black Axe #2 Creator Commentary

I've made a Creator Commentary video for the second issue/chapter of Mouse Guard: The Black Axe! Please feel free to follow along in your copy of the story in either issue form of from the hardcover as I talk about the behind the scenes details, art notes, and my head-space as I go page by page and panel by panel. Enjoy!

Direct link to watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dxtXU6WX5NA

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Mouse Guard Daffodils Process

Though I don't usually do inked 8" x 8" commissions any longer, a long-time fan made a special request that I was happy to make happen. To the left you can see the finished piece, which I also colored for use in my next sketchbook.

Two young girl mice enjoying the spring daffodils.

Below I'll walk through the process I used to create the finished artwork.

Reference Material:
The fan emailed me a photo of his daughters in a field of daffodils and asked if I could illustrate the scene but with his daughters as young mice from the Territories. He also referenced the cherry blossoms in the far distance. The problem with 'recreating' a photo like this with mice is scale and focus. The Daffodil blooms would be enormous--so it becomes harder to show the mice as central character while still getting enough flowers in the image to imply a field--and that pretty much also means the cherry blossom element had to go too.

Along with the family photo, I also sourced a few closeup photos of daffodils to draw from.

Pencils/Layout:
Knowing the scale problem, I drew two young mice on a fallen dead branch. I then drew multiple daffodils. All of these were drawn by hand separately on different sheets of copy paper. After I had a pile of drawings, I scanned them into Photoshop and started arranging them into a composition. With the each being drawn separately, it was easy to tint them different colors, keep them on different layers and slide them around or resize them. I also noticed in most of my reference that daffodils tend to all face the same direction, so a few of my daffodil drawings either had to get mirrored, rotated or scrapped to make sure my composition looked correct.

Inks:
When I had adjusted the pencil drawings in Photoshop into a composition I was happy with, I printed out that image on my home printer. I then taped that printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol board. On my Huion lightpad, I was able to see through the surface of the bristol down to the printed image that I could use as a guide for inking the final art. I inked this using Copic Multiliner SP pens, the 0.7 and 0.3 nibs.

Flat Colors:
Once I finished the inking, I scanned my artwork into Photoshop to start the coloring process. At this stage, I'm not concerned with any texture or lighting or rendering--just adding flat colors to establish what areas are what colors.

I went with the clothing color cues from the fan's family photo.

Final Colors:
The last step was to render the colors to add highlight and shadow and texture. I did this almost entirely with the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop and I also added a color hold (areas of the ink work that I don't want to be black but rather a color I can shade and manipulate to push distance or reinforce lighting effects)

This piece will be eventually collected in my next sketchbook tentatively titled 'Dawn, Daye, & Dusk' later this year.

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Mouse Guard Covers

In the 15 years I've been doing Mouse Guard, I've drawn 58 published 'covers' for the series––most of these were for the comics and hardcover collections, with a few Free Comic Book Day pieces (some were not used as the cover), and a handfull of game cover/box images. In this blogpost I'm sharing all of those cover pieces sans-logos & text. Enjoy!

FALL 1152