Gwendolyn, Sadie, & Sienna Trio Print

For SDCC last week I decided to create a new 20" x 14" print featuring the Matriarch Gwendolyn and two of her Guardmice: Sadie & Sienna. It was a last minute decision, and a crazy rush to draw, ink, & color it in time to get off to the printer and arrive at the hotel in San Diego. But I managed to get it done in time. Here is the finished 20" x 14" print and below I'll go through the steps to create it.

The goal was to create a companion print to the Saxon, Kenzie, Rand trio print I did a few years ago. But instead feature some of the female characters like Gwendolyn, Sadie, and (though she hasn't had much page time––she is a playable pre-generated character in the Mouse Guard RPG)

Julia and I agreed that the mice should face the opposite direction to the previous print and I worked on sketches for each character before doing separate tight drawings of each on copy paper. Those were all scanned in and assembled in Photoshop with some blocked in color for the characters. I painted in rough shapes for the landscape before printing that out and on a light pad drawing a penciled version of the rocks, moss, and plants.

And for the blue bird...I looked at several photos for reference to be able to accurately draw the one seen here. Julia and I were looking at Sarah Suplina's work on Instagram and enjoyed the blue orange contrast of her bluebirds. 

The plants are referenced from the Astilbe and Azalea growing in the garden beds in front of our house, which is very handy to be able to just walk out the front door if I wanted more reference that was closer or from other angles. 

The plant life ended up getting stylized a bit, and I went with the coloring of late summer early fall when the Azalea goes more red in the leaves.

When I was happy with the digitally assembled and color-blocked layout, I printed that out (over the course of 4 sheets of copy paper I had to trim and align into one big piece) and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series 14" x  20" bristol. 

I inked the whole piece on a light pad with my Copic Multiliner SP pen––I used the 0.7 nib exclusively. Because it was a big piece, it took a long time to ink and I spread it out over two days. Getting the density of stippling on the rocks correct (enough but not too much) was the thing I fussed over the most on this piece, but there certainly was a lot to concentrate over with the delicate moss, feather patterns, and mouse details.

The inks were then scanned in two passes and re-assembled in Photoshop to begin the coloring process. This early coloring stage is known as flatting because it's all about painting in flat colors to mark out the color areas (what parts are what base colors).

At this stage I also established the color holds (areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black) for the background plants, the veins on the leaves, and some of the mouse clothes.

The last step was a long process of rendering a bit with the paintbrush tool for the sky, but mainly using the dodge and burn tools with a textured brush to give all the forms light and shadow. The 20" x 14" print was available at SDCC and now in my online store: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/bluebird-trio-print-20-x-14