Dawn of the Black Axe #1 Montes Cover Process

Goni Montes provided a variant cover for Mouse Guard: Dawn of the Black Axe #1. His involvement was part of BOOM!'s 20th anniversary program for each month to have #1s all drawn by the same variant artist, and Goni, who has done numerous Power Rangers covers for BOOM! was their artist for March.

To the left you can see his final cover (with logo--though there was also a version released without any trade dress).

Below are images and a video showing Goni's process.

As the cover was being created I somehow only saw the rough options and then the final (which I only had notes with regards to color/brightness for printing complications)

I reached out to Goni to share process images and his thoughts about creating the cover. Here's what he said:

GONI: "I kinda work as if it were gonna get silk screened, which is my background, so that’s why it’s kinda easy to layer things this way and then take a look at every single layer independently.

The linework is drawn digitally. My brushes are my own. I make them by scanning in ink marks that I make on my sketchbooks. The textures in the backgrounds and the cracks and all that stuff are done on analog paper and inks in this case. It’s just faster and a hell of a lot of fun to just ink
grungey stuff on paper and then scan it in at ridiculously huge size"