It's made of bristol board, cardboard, basswood, paper, and a drinking straw.
In the video below, I talk about building and using the model for drawing that watering hole for 'the filthiest, crookedest, and greediest mice in the territories'.
So-far our group (which happen to be the same friends I made into The Gilkey Warlocks) have gotten together to make our characters. Here is mine Caledon Spargan. And below I'll break down the character art for him.
The character is a Fungril (mushroom person) Ranger (specifically one who specializes with an animal companion). I struggled a bit to find the balance between humanoid and fungus in the face especially, and while searching mushroom types I found turkey tail mushrooms a great inspiration and used them to inform a beard as well as the feet of Caledon.I drew his body on one sheet of copy paper, and then on a Huion lightpad, I placed another sheet of paper over that one to draw his clothing. The owl was drawn last and was done using reference of a great horned owl photo. The drawings were assembled in Photoshop and I added in a grappling hook (listed as my secondary weapon on my character sheet) with a photo and some quick digital rope drawing.
When I was happy with the layout drawing, I printed it out and taped it to the back of a sheet of Stathmore 300 series bristol. On my lightpad I was able to use the printout below as a guide while I inked on the surface of the bristol. I used a 0.7 nib Copic Multiliner SP pen for the whole thing.There was a lot of little detail that I probably should have used a smaller nib for, but I wanted the challenge of using a light touch with the 0.7 on the face and lichen details on his clothes.
The other trick was to add just enough texture to each garment or his skin to make it a different material without overwhelming the piece and focusing the heavier handed ink to the feet.
I scanned the inked art into Photoshop and started the color flatting. This is just to separate the different parts of the drawing as different colors, a professional coloring-in-the-lines. To the left side I just used whatever fake colors I quickly selected to get the flats established.Then on the right you can see where I landed with my final base color choices. There were many variations in between (going with red/orange for the mushroom bits and green for the armor. Then back to green mushrooms with warmer brown leather...until I got to this blue and green combo I was pleased with. At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black) for the mushroom spots on his skin and for the outlines of the armor lichen.
Drawing your RPG character (as well as the other players in your party, if you happen to be the 'artist' of the group, is one of the real pleasures of playing an RPG and part that I certainly missed. I hope to draw the other two player's for this adventure: a Drakon (Dragon person) Seraph and a Halfling War Wizard.
Back when I first illustrated the book about a decade ago, it was a bucket list project for me. Getting to return to the book and create a new cover for the new edition was a delight and offered me a chance to update the cover. Here you see the cover with title, spine treatment and back blurb, but below I'll go into the process of revisiting these riverbankers and wild wooders.
One of the troubles I had with the first edition cover (which will be included as a 2 page spread illustration in this edition) was a scene that included all four characters. I see this book as a true ensemble cast, but the number of times they are all together are very limited and mostly occur at the end of the book. So for this cover I went with circular portraits of them over a scenic view of the river with drapes of willow branches hanging down.I'd already drawn versions of these portraits for bookplates that were never produced for the first release, I cobbled those together with branches in one of the existing interior illustration, redrew Rat and Mole messing-about-in-boats for the back cover...and drew a new version of Toad Hall...which I heavily based on this photo of the back of Mapledurham House, a location long used by other Willows adapters as reference and what I used my first go-around.Wind in the Willows will be in stores October 7th 2025 published by IDW
And you can pre-order it here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796673/the-wind-in-the-willows-with-illustrations-by-david-petersen-by-kenneth-grahame-david-petersen/