David Petersen's Blog: The Tick for Baltimore Yearbook 2024

Every year the Baltimore Comic Con has published a convention art book called 'The Baltimore Yearbook' that features a character or property, where that creator is a guest of the convention. Selected guest artists are asked to contribute a piece of fan art for the book to celebrate the creator and property. It allows us to play in someone's world, and offers a chance for attendees to meet new creators as they go around the show floor collecting autographs in their yearbook.

This year's subject is Ben Edlund's The Tick! To the left you can see my finished art, and below in the blogpost I'll walk through my process.

I started with a drawing of The Tick––and then started realizing how difficult it might be for me to include the sense of humor and parody to the piece. I looked up all the other characters that appeared in the comics and animated series, even thought of including characters from The Plotmasters...but none of those spoke to me.

We are always encouraged to include our own characters into our Yearbook piece--to create a cross-over image that might not have otherwise happened. I'm always hesitant to add mice from Mouse Guard into these pieces, but it dawned on me that I could parody my own characters with a close-but-not-quite version called Vole Patrol. That's when the line 'No more Mr. nice mice' came into my head. I drew vole versions of my characters on copy paper along with the banner and digitally added them in to the pencils I had of the Tick and blocked in some colors.

I then printed out the digital assembly above at 14 x 17 and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol board. On my Huion lightpad, I can see through the surface of the bristol down to the printout to use it as a guide to ink by. I used Copic Multiliner pens (mostly the 0.7 nib) to do all the inkwork.

I debated inking in the balloon and text, but to make the original art more salable (available at the auction in Baltimore), I opted to ink it in. I kept Tick open linework mostly, only adding a little bit of weight/texture to the contour lines. The voles I inked like I'd ink my mice and the groundcovering became my dark anchor visual.

With the inks finished it was time to start coloring the piece. I scanned the inks and began laying in flat colors. This part of the process is called 'flatting' where the color areas are all established with flat colors (no shading, no rendering, no textures, no effects). While the Tick's colors are closer to correct here, I flatted in false colors for everything else––sometimes having bold wrong colors helps you see that you're staying in the lines.

In this step I also established all the color holds (areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black) like the text, banner stripes, lantern glow and fading the ground covering.

After I quickly switched all the bold vole colors to the correct ones, the last step was to do the final rendering and lighting effects for the piece. I did this mostly using the dodge and burn tools and a stock Photoshop brush.

This piece will be published in the Baltimore Yearbook later this month. That book will be available for purchase at the convention and through the con's website afterwards. The original inked piece will also be for sale in the art auction at the con on Saturday.

Past Baltimore Yearbook pieces & blogposts: