Mouse Guard mice, pre-publication (2005)

It's easy to look at an artist's published works and forget that before those images were seen by the public, there were hundreds of thousands of steps to artistically get there. I've been lucky enough to be noted as having a 'style' that stands out with a confidence of textured ink line (I've done a few videos addressing 'style' and my inkwork 'Drawing like yourself' and 'Inking grey'), but I wanted to use this Blogpost to remind everyone that the look of Mouse Guard Issue 1 didn't just happen––nor did it happen quickly.

Below I've put together many images of my drawings of Mouse Guard characters when it stopped being the lots-of-species 1149 story, but before I'd drawn a single page of the comic. The earliest image is from 1996 when I was in my first year of college, and the last are from 2003-4 when I was newly married, bought a house with Julia and just before I started drawing issue 1 of the comic. I've tried to keep them in chronological order, and written some commentary for each.

This is the first image of Saxon Kenzie, and Rand––when I decided to add mouse characters to 1149.
These were drawn while sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom looking at the mice in Tom Pohrt's Coyote Goes Walking (a Michigan based Illustrator).

The images were drawn in pencil on copy paper, inked with a crow-quill dip pen, then painted with watercolor pencils.

Very soon after that first image I used a scrap of mat board to draw my patrol of Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand. I was still figuring out scale here––the 1149 characters were human-sized, but with animal features, and when I brought the mice in is when I wanted to utilize real-world proportions--this is still an in-between stage. The mouse bodies are wrapped in cloaks (later to be a distinguishing feature of Guardmice) because I didn't have good reference (real of from another illustrator) of a mouse standing on it's hind feet.

This is again crow-quill dip pen and watercolor pencils.

To try and make the characters more 'comic book style' I tried stylizing their proportions (I feel like I was influenced by real-life Kenzie, Jesse Glenn's drawings for a 1996 Cats Trio revamp.

Crow-quill dip pen and Prismacolor Markers 

Another ink & watercolor pencil on a scrap of mat board piece––this time trying to get a handle (poorly) of that fictional upright mouse anatomy. This may have been in preparation of a bronze statue you'll see in a few more images. What I remember about this piece was how many people commented on my 'rat' character...I made a concious decision I had to figure out how to stylize them so they looked 'cuter' to evoke the feel of mice.

In my second year of college I took a printmaking class around the same time I was actually writing down a story for my Guardmice characters. This was my second ever etching (a technique assignment all using softground). This may be the first time I'd drawn all three with their signature weapons. 

One of my last prints made in that first-semester Printmaking class. The assignment was more about the scale and printing an edition of your plate, but to note here is that I was doing this as a potential book cover when 1149 was going to be a prose book with illustrations. Much of what that story was got stored away and used as raw ingredients for what will be The Weasel War of 1149. But, at this stage, the other species of rams, a tiger, duck,  fox, opossum, etc. were still characters.
 

Around the time I was taking that printmaking class, I was also taking a sculpture class where we did a bronze casting. The piece had to be sculpted in wax first, then a mold (able to resist the heat of molten bronze) was formed around it, heated to melt out the wax, and then filled with molten bonze (I added the felt cloak later).

This isn't the only sculptural Mouse Guard piece from this pre-comic era. And I'd say at this stage that was partly because I didn't know what 1149/Mouse Guard was supposed to be. Was it a prose book? a comic? a stop-motion film? a puppet show? Exploring mediums as well as 2D & 3D here was all about trying to find what I wanted this thing to be and where I felt most comfortable.

Please excuse the poor quality of this image--it's actually a low-res photo of a slide projected on a screen of a watercolor painting, and while the original wasn't great, a lot of quality was lost here. This was from my one and only Watercolor class in college. It's also an era of internet where doing image reference searches wasn't really a thing...so for weasel reference I had one or two photos in a book on mammals to look at. But art-journey-wise, I think here I was exploring taking what I learned in casting the bronze statue and applying it back into a 2D format where I felt more at home.

To give a sense of dates, I think this was from 1998(?) I got into a groove with 1149 drawings at this point (I have a Ferret and a Fisher drawn around the same time) all done in rendered pencil. Still trying to find a balance in stylization and realism. 

1999-2000-ish(?) These mice were all drawn from some field guide that had several photos of mice I could reference. And while they are so based on real-mice, I think this is where the clearest turn to my stylized proportions and sensibilities of the comic arrive.

This was pencil in a sketchbook with some light watercolor wash.

Please excuse the low quality of this image. I'd nearly forgotten about it and then saw it online when I was gathering links and a few photos of the sculptures from Facebook. I'm fairly certain this was before I drew issue 1––but I'm not sure when. I placed it here because I felt the proportions more closely matched the piece above and the sculpts below. Note Ran'd shield being silver/grey metal rather than copper––something we see next...

Sculpy Sculpts from 2003-4.
I did these for fun, still not knowing I was going to start drawing the comic when I started them. The bases are broken tiles we used as coasters at our wedding reception, the weapons are mostly made from found objects (sticks, nails, metal fittings––AND a scrap of copper for Rand's shield from the hammered leaf centerpieces I made for our wedding). Their cloaks are all scraps of fabric I either had or bought as swatches from a fabric store.

And lastly, the 2003 inked drawings I featured in the earliest Mouse Guard sketchbook (that still pre-dated the comic by a few months...and is available in my Digital Sketchbook Collection). As I've told many times, these were after a 'breakthrough' drawing I did without any access to reference (of photos, other artists, or even my own work) while at a Family BBQ. I leaned into my memory of drawing, my training in art school, and my printmaking background to draw/ink as comfortably as I could (later the main tenant in my lecture Drawing Like Yourself)

Hope you enjoyed that look back. I know I've changed a lot as an artist since that first issue in 2005, and the mice look different now as a result. That's what should be happening though...an artist whose work looks exactly the same year in year out would be stagnating, not growing, not pursuing, and not exploring.

We never arrived fully formed, and we shouldn't think any form we take is meant to stay.