January Mouse Guard 2023(24!) Calendar Art

This year I'm releasing a Mouse Guard 2023 Calendar. I'll be taking copies with me to Baltimore and selling them through my Online Store (**SOLD OUT**). I created seven new pieces of artwork specifically for the calendar (even numbered months mainly). The new pieces were all drawn at 12" x 12" (the size of the Calendar itself)

To the left you can see the final art piece for that 13th month January 2024! I wanted to do something more geometric and stylized, some art the mice would have.

Below in this blogpost I'll walk through the steps to creating it.

Reference:
I started by searching for 'Medieval Calendar' imagery (things with moon phases or intertwining circles)––when this odd 1974 plate came up. It's a collectable piece of porcelain with a medieval art style to the design. And, well––I really liked it, so I decided to interpret it and resize it in my own way for my own needs. It took a lot of resizing this photo's elements before I could even start swapping out elements. By enlarging the center and eliminating the month calendars I had room to widen the outer ring for a better illustration space.

Layout:
I redesigned each shield to be an emblem of a mouse city (many of these were already established and hinted at in the extras pages of Winter & Black Axe) I used the month arches to hold the names of those settlements. The center became a mouse-sun and zodiac symbols became a twelve step moon phase.

The last part was to recreate that bayeux tapestry-like ring with mouse figures. I tried to stylize and simplify my version of that, which gave me freedom to use hares, birds, a frog, and a turtle as mounts without worrying about scale.

Inks:
With the above layout all set, I printed out the image (onto two sheets of legal paper that had to be registered and taped back together). I inked this piece on my Huion lightpad. Using the lightpad I could see through the 12" x 12" Strathmore bristol to the printout below so I could use it as a pencil guide. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens.

The detail was so tight, that I did need to use my smaller 0.3 nib Multiliner rather than the 0.7 I normally use (though I certainly used the 7 on the larger circular borders). I was a trick to get the outer characters to look good and to not want to add texture. Oh! and I messed up and forgot to switch out 'Shorestone' above the shield with the black circles to 'Dawnrock' I know the layout above has it right, but that's because I had to fix it so I could ink a patch of the correct letters onto the back of this piece in the corner to scan and swap out.

Flats:
When the inks were done I scanned them into Photoshop and started the coloring process. In this step I am filling in each area with a flat color (no rendering, no textures)–it's like a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines. It took me a while to decide on the color choices here. I didn't want the look of the 1974 reference plate. So I started with the known: the shield emblems. I then pulled from those as I filling in the other design elements around the piece, altering them sightly when needed.

At this stage I also established all the color holds (areas where I want the lineart to be a color other than black) Everything is a hold in this piece––the dark linework is a dark brown, then it was a matter of establishing from a design point-of-view what colors worked best for each other element

Final:
I rendered the piece using dodge and burn tools as well as a stock texture brush to add all the light, shadow, and texture. This piece is an oddity in that I was able to do very little rendering to just add a bit of scuff and focus texture so the piece didn't look so digital.