David Petersen's Blog: Motor City Comic Con Tee/Hoodie

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Motor City Comic Con Tee/Hoodie

I'll be returning to Motor City Comic Con this year––a special year as it was 20 years ago at that very convention I launched Mouse Guard with the self-published first issue (which later was republished in color by Archaia and collected as chapter one of Fall 1152). As part of celebrating that occasion, I designed the Motor City Comic Con tee shirt (which they also wanted to make a hoodie of).

They will be available for purchase at the con, but also in their online store: https://mc3.bigcartel.com/

In this blogpost I'll run down the process to create the art for the MC3 merch.

The first bit was talking with the folks over at Motory City Comic Con to see what the printing/color situation they planned for their con-tee. They liked some recent Mouse Guard pieces of mine (like the trio print) and wanted it to be a full color photo transfer tee. They also provided me with logo reference.

I penciled Lieam standing on a mossy rock with a snake behind him (echoing the issue one cover from 20 years ago) and added in some cascading parchment ribbons to frame the piece.

The quick color blocking was to show them my intentions for the overall palette.

Motor City showed the piece around internally as well as to their printer to check for any potential technical trouble. It was given the go-ahead from all involved and so I printed the rough artwork out and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol.

On my Huion lightpad I was able to see the printout through the bristol's surface to ink from. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 & 0.3 nibs)

The inking was rather straight forward, but I did try to limit the texture and not go overboard with ink details on the cloak and rock.

With the inks finished I scanned them, cleaned them up (adjusting levels and getting rid of any dust/hairs caught by my scanner) and started the coloring process. Normally when doing colors for a tee shirt design I have to get clever by limiting the colors for silkscreening, but since Motor City wanted to do a full color photo transfer style printing, I could color this just as I would any other Mouse Guard piece.

I blocked in flat colors, mostly based on the ones I'd chosen from the rough layout) and added in color holds (areas where I want the lineart to be a color other than black) to the text, the logo, and the background weeds. I'd also been provided the final color choice for the tee material, so I dropped that in as reference.

The last step was to render the color using my normal Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop to add shadows, highlights, and textures as seen at the top of the post.

Here you can also see the mockups of the art on the tee shirt and hoodie as they appear on the Motor City Con's online store (available now for pre-order) https://mc3.bigcartel.com/