Discordant Fellowship 'Cover' & live reading

I have written and illustrated a new Mouse Guard short story titled 'The Tale of the Discordant Fellowship'. It's an 8 page story, like Baldwin the Brave, The Owlhen Caregiver and, King Knight Fool Villain'

Like those other tales, I drew a 'cover' for the story even though there are no plans to publish it as a single issue, but more on the release plans in a bit...

The story ties in nods to the pre-history of Mouse Guard back when there were no mice and it was titled 1149: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2012/04/pre-mouse-guard1149-before-mouse-guard.html

This story will 'debut' at Baltimore Comic Con in a few weeks where I will be reading it aloud as the panels are reveled on the screen during the Comics Aloud panel that Sunday at noon (the panel will also have readings of their works by Jeff Smith, Derek Kirk Kim, Mark Buckingham, & Jeremy Bastian). As for print––with Diamond's collapse, I don't know when there will be another Free Comic Book Day, but this tale will eventually be collected in a hardcover of those types of tales (I'm only 1 short away from enough to collect them). In the meantime, I plan to make a recording of my performance and post it to my paid subscribers on Patreon next month.

For this post I wanted to break down the process to create the cover art. I drew it after completing all the art pages for the story. The six characters were all drawn separately on sheets of copy paper and them assembled with each being tinted a different color to help me see which lines belonged to which characters. The rock, log, and plants were drawn after I'd moved the mice into a composition that felt balanced.

The other major element was to add in the heraldic shield emblems I designed last year for those 1149 animals: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2024/04/1149-shield-heraldry.html

I digitally blocked in colors to make sure the layout worked with the base colors and quickly threw in some grassy weeds shapes in the background to fill the void.

The layout was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore bristol 300 series. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the surface of the bristol to use the printout as a guide to ink from.

I used a Copic Multiliner SP 0.7 for the linework and the weed silhouettes were inked with a Pigma brushpen.

Because I wanted the inked art to be complete, I inked those heraldic shields into the final art despite having them all inked and colored from before.

The inked artwork was scanned and I started the coloring process. This first step is all about establishing color areas so they can be easily isolated as the rendering goes on (the fur color is different than the cloak, is different from the skin, is different from the stone, etc.) it's a professional version of coloring inside the lines digitally with just flat colors. And as you can see here, it doesn't even matter what colors are used, just as long as they are different from one another. 

At this step I also established color holds, areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black. I added color holds to the shield emblems, details on some of the characters, and on the background weeds.

The last step was to do the final rendered colors...well actually first I had to swap out all those wrong colors above with closer-to-correct base colors based on the finished pages from the story. The rendering was almost entirely done with the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop (with a stock textured brush). 

I worried the emblems and the background were fighting the characters for focus, so I pushed back everything behind the characters and muted it out with a soft warm light.

I hope you are either 1: attend Baltimore Comic Con and come to the reading, 2: subscribe to my Patreon at any tier to watch the reading next month, or 3: have patience for an eventual printed version.