Dawn of the Black Axe Print

The Mouse Guard: Dawn of the Black Axe hardcover is OUT TODAY!
You can pick it up from your local comic/book shop or various online retailers (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/813486/mouse-guard-dawn-of-the-black-axe-by-david-petersen/)

I entrusted Gabriel Rodriguez with the visuals of my world of mouse adventure as we told the story of Bardrick, the first Black Axe and he did nothing short of a masterpiece of illustrating.

I'm offering a 8"x8" print in my online store mouseguard.bigcartel.com I drew of Bardrick with the axe and the five snakes who surrounded all that was. Below I'll walk you through the process of creating the artwork (and another bonus FREE papercraft at the bottom of the post)

The piece started with rough sketches for my ideas for Gabe to draw for the hardcover collection's front cover. It was based on my original drawing of Bardrick (in the Axe Wielder's Sketchbook) and a panel Gabe had drawn in the issues. The concept of the snakes as a celtic knot appealed to me to tie into the illuminated manuscript illustrations I typically use to show Black Axe history. Gabe's cover certainly has this vibe and tone, but with his own sensibilities in his own artistic voice.

Something about that loose sketch with the more tangled snake knot wouldn't let go of me. I wanted to see my version of that drawing to completion and figured if I offered it as a print, we could put it in the online store and take it to conventions. I tightened the pencils of Bardrick on one sheet of copy paper (lightboxing a blowup of the original loose doodle)

Then over the course of several sheets of paper and digital blocking in of colored stripes overlapping each other, I was able to do tighter stylized versions of the five snakes: Gammeltan, Dødfare, Skalaknute, Streikrask, & Langtspyd where I tried to infuse details into their patterns that are special to each snake's appearance, build, and abilities.

The layout (a combination of pencil drawings and digital compositing and color blocking) was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series 12"x12" bristol so I could ink it on my Huion lightpad. 

I inked this using a Copic Multiliner SP 0.7 nib pen. On the lightpad I'm able to see through the surface of the bristol to the printout to use as a guide as I ink––which means no erasing away pencils or digitally adjusting away blueline.

Even though I'd done so much prepwork on the snake designs, keeping all of the patterns and lineweights and details on them straight as I inked around Bardrick was the trickiest part.

When in the inks were finished, I scanned them and started the coloring process. That first step is called 'flatting' and is basically establishing flat color areas for each part of the illustration. No textures, no lighting––just flat base colors. Much of the color choices were already established either from the comic issues (which I colored) or my rough starting sketch...though lots of the colors needed little adjustments for hue, saturation, and value before I felt like I had a place to start rendering.

It's also at this flatting stage that I established all the color holds (areas where I want the inks to be a color other than black) on the snake outlines and their inner details.

Here again are the final colors all rendered out mainly using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop to get all my shadows and highlights and the textures are achieved by using a stock textured brush in Photoshop.

The Hardcover book (out today!) collects all three issues (including all the variant covers) of Dawn of the Black Axe, and this print is available right now as well in my online store: mouseguard.bigcartel.com





Also available for FREE is a PDF print & assemble papercraft of Bardrick I designed on the Mouse Guard website:

https://www.mouseguard.net/s/Bardrick-Papercraft.pdf