Farrer Forging the Black Axe

For a new Mouse Guard Sketchbook titled 'Axe Wielders' about the past wielders of the Black Axe, I created a new piece of Artwork of Farrer forging the ebon blade itself.

Axe Lore was fresh in my mind from the Dawn of the Black Axe mini-series Gabriel Rodriguez and I did together, and it felt only fitting that rather than feature one wielder above another for the cover of the sketchbook, I'd show Farrer creating the mythic weapon.

The sketchbook debuts at SDCC this weekend, but will be available in my online store shortly after. And below is more info about the process of creating the artwork.

Pencils started with a drawing of Farrer himself with his hammer and tongs. I watched a few blacksmithing videos showing axe forging to get the idea of how the Black Axe would have been made. His Hammer and tongs were designs I'd made long ago (and Gabe used in Dawn of the Black Axe for one flashback panel)

Other drawings of the anvil, the axe's barley-twist handle, and Farrer's shop were assembled together in Photoshop (in fact I took a few stabs at the shop environment before I was happy). The Celtic knot-work around the forge was inspired from the illuminated page from Fall showing a stylized illustration of this same scene.

With the above pencils in shape, I printed them out and taped them to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the surface of the bristol down to the printout to use as a guide while I inked. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 nib mostly).

The texture is mostly in the environment around Farrer and his linework is fairly open. What felt odd to me as I inked this was leaving so much of the normally almost entirely inked in axe open for the lighting effects of the forge glow and the hot ore being hammered.

When the inks were finished I scanned them and started the coloring process in Photoshop. The first step of digital coloring is establishing color areas with flat colors (this process is known as 'flatting') and is basically a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines.

With so much of the environment being about lighting and glow that would be added via painting and rendering later, the flats were very hard to make look right––just base colors. At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I want the linework to be a color other than black) on Farrer's tears, the coals, flame, glow, water ripples, and the hot axe head.

The last step was to render the piece. Normally most everything I do in this step is with Photoshop's Dodge and burn tool, but for so many of those glow transitions I used a paintbrush to softly blend in my color transitions.

The dodge and burn tools with a stock texture brush still did do a lot of the heavy lifting to add shadows and highlights with some pebbly texture.

The Mouse Guard Sketchbook 'Axe Wielders'

will be available in my online store shortly after I return from SDCC

mouseguard.bigcartel.com