Mouse Guard: The Tale of the Wild Wolf reading video

The 2017 Mouse Guard Free Comic Book Day story is one of my favorites, and I realized that unless you happened to pick up a copy of it on that day, or heard me do one of two live readings of it, you may have never read 'The Tale of the Wild Wolf'

So, I have done a reading of it for you all to enjoy and put it on YouTube for a limited time.

Enjoy the video below!

Direct Link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lqZ3ipLmG4c

2019 Schedule TBD

Free Comic Book Day 2017

Free Comic Book Day is THIS SATURDAY!
In case you are unfamiliar with FCBD, on the first Saturday in May, you and everyone you know, can go to your local comic shop and they will have a selection of comics that are FREE (most stores limit how many each person gets). The comic shops buy these comics, specially printed (and in some cases with content created specifically for) FCBD at print cost and then use it to spread goodwill about the artform of telling stories with words AND pictures panel by panel.

I have a new Mouse Guard short story in the BOOM! Summer Blast issue.


This story is 8 pages long, and like my past 6 years of FCBD stories, features a folk-tale/parable that ties into a lesson a member of the Mouse Guard learned. This year's offering is titled "The Tale of the Wild Wolf" and you can see some teaser panels to the right.

I don't want to say much more about the story, because I don't want to spoil anything, but eagle-eyed fans may catch a few clues in these panels that tells them which Guardmouse is featured...



While stores nation-wide will have the BOOM! Summer Blast book with my new Mouse Guard story inside, I will specifically be at ISOTOPE: The Comic Book Lounge in San Francisco, CA signing books (anything a fan places in front of me that I've worked on) and in the afternoon delivering a talk about Mouse Guard. That evening ISOTOPE will host a Mouse Guard cocktail hour. So if you are in the SF area, please come out for what is sure to be a great event celebrating the artform of comics.

If you already know about FCBD and have people in your life that DON'T read comics, take them to your local store's event and help them find something they might like. I truly believe that there is a comic out there for every person regardless of age, gender, interests, etc. Also, please consider purchasing something from the store you visit in addition to picking up some free issues. Something for yourself you'd already planned to get, something for that non-comic reader that fits their tastes, or something you already enjoy but plan to donate to your local library.

2017 Appearances: 

Heroes Con: Jun. 16-18

San Diego Comic Con: July 19-23

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 22-24

New York Comic Con: Oct. 5-8

FCBD 2016

This Saturday is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!!! It's the perfect day to go down to your local comic chop and try something you've never tried before, and ALSO to take along someone in your life who has never stepped foot in a comic shop, never read a comic, or is a lapsed fan of the sequential storytelling. FCBD is such a great way to share what we comic fans love about reading comics. It's free, and most stores put on some kind of promotion, sale, or party too. So it's really fun and worthwhile for new or existing comic fans.

I'll be set up at Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, MI for the day, signing Mouse Guard books (including the FCBD offering this year), and doing free quick Mouse head doodles in anyone's sketchbook.


Like I mentioned, I'll have a new Mouse Guard story in the BOOM!/Archaia 2016 Summer Blast issue (again FREE). And for today's blogpost, I wanted to run through the process for creating the 'cover' image for the story (this image is featured on the cover of the BOOM!/Archaia 2016 Summer Blast where one of the Lumberjanes is reading a Mouse Guard issue, but the image also appears on page of its own inside before my story starts.




For the layout, I featured my main character for this story 'Piper' front and center.  I surrounded her with knotwork and animal icons with the plan of making this look like illuminated manuscript drawings (like the book of Kells) in the final art. The drawing of Piper was done on copy paper and scanned in to Photoshop where I added in the stock knot-art and some little animal drawings I did separately as well. It looks like I didn't have the stock circle knots around the animals in this saved version of the layout...but I must have added them in at some point before inking.


To ink the piece, I printed out the above layout on standard copy paper, and then taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Then, on my lightbox, I can see thorough the bristol surface to the printout to use as a guide as I ink. For my pens, I used the Copic Multiliner SP pens with 0.7 and 0.3 nibs. You will notice that the knot designs never tough Piper, this is to not only push them to the background, but also to make it easier to isolate them when I color so that I can pint the linework as a color (a color hold)



When the inks are finished I scan them and start the coloring process. The first step when digitally coloring (other than scanning and cleaning up the scan) is called 'flatting'. The purpose is to establish color shapes (the mouse's fur, the cloaks, the leaf, the animal circles, etc) so that as you render areas you can isolate the parts of the color you want to without affecting the parts you don't want to touch. When flatting, you can use any colors you want, they don't have to be anything close to the final color choices, just so long as the neighboring colors aren't too similar to one another.


Once the tedious job of flatting is done (which is grown-up coloring in the lines), it's time to render, make final color adjustments and finish the cover. To add shading and highlights and texture, I use the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop with a textured brush.

To the right is the finished rendered color cover.
Below you will see pencils from a few of the panels from the 8 page story and a un-lettered sample of page 1:

The Tale of Piper The Listener appears in BOOM!/Archaia's 2016 Summer Blast comic FREE this Saturday at your local comic shop.

To find a local comic shop near you:

http://www.comicshoplocator.com/Home

2016 Appearances:

Motor City Comic Con: May 13-15

Heroes Con: June 17-19

San Diego Comic Con: July 20-24

Boston Comic Con: Aug 12-14

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 2-4

New York Comic Con: Oct 6-9

Free Comic Book Day 2015 Cover

This year for Free Comic Book Day, BOOM! & Archaia will have a joint anthology publication featuring stories from all their various imprints.  I was asked by my editor, Rebecca "Tay" Taylor, if I'd be willing to do the cover art! A daunting task to represent the full contents featuring 10 different stories/properties (including Mouse Guard). The cover to the left is the final publication art, but below I'm sharing the process for developing this cover.

Tay said the staff had been tossing ideas around for the cover concept (and how to show off all 10 stories). This year is a double celebration as it's both Mouse Guard and BOOM!'s 10th anniversaries, so a party theme with either cake & candles or balloons were suggested. Of those options I preferred the balloons. Each balloon would then have art from each story placed on it. I'd wrestled about showing Mouse Guard mice with balloons when it was a commission request, but I opted for floating paper lanterns in their place, so I did the same here. Below are the 2 variations I came up with, one featuring a close up of the mouse and jam-packing the rest of the cover with balloons...and the other a more illustrative scene. BOOM! chose the first, but I campaigned for the second and we ended up going with it in the end.

I printed out my layout of the cover and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I inked the piece on a lightbox using the printout as my pencil lines to follow. I gave a lot of texture and weight to the stairs partly because I knew I couldn't add much linework to the balloons since they were going to be filled with the art for the stories.

The color flats on this cover were fairly straightforward since I'd already made a lot of color choices in the rough I sent over to BOOM!

And the final rendering was done in Photoshop using the Dodge & Burn tools and a textured brush. To the left you can see the cover art without the other story art and logos.

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

FCBD 2014: The Axe Trio

In case you missed it last Saturday, Archaia released a new Free Comic Book Day Hardcover anthology book. I contributed a cover piece and an 8 page story. This is the 5th year I've done a FCBD story and the 4th in a row of this type. After my first offering, I started the tradition of opening each story with a younger version of a Mouse Guard character being told a morality tale which shows the audience a bit of insight into how that character became who they are as an adult mouse. This year's story is being told to Rand, and it deals with some mythic lore about the history of the Black Axe: The Tale of the Axe Trio:

**UPDATE**

Story Notes:

As I said at the top of the post, this story is a tale told to Rand. He hasn't been a major player in Fall or Winter, but he will be in the upcoming (and as-of-yet unscheduled) Weasel War of 1149. So, this story gave me the opportunity to introduce readers to him a bit more. At the start of the story we see that as a child he and his father (and mother too) lived in Shorestone, a city I featured in Black Axe and is a building trade craftmouse den as well as having secret ties to the mythic Black Axe itself.

In past years, I used a few objects as lead-ins for the stories: stained glass, marionettes, and storybook style illustrations. This time I chose cards. In my blogpost about the cover, I described the visual influence for these cards. I've got all my notes for how a complete set of them work (with their own versions and counts of suits and numbers) The cards we see for the story are 3 axes (each with a different Haven Guild founder 'suit' and a pair of acorns. The acorns were chosen as the other symbol because I'd already drawn the cover with the characters standing on a pile of acorns and didn't have a way to visually explain it beyond that it looked cool.

As the tale within a tale begins, the readers are introduced to some Black Axe lore. Orren as the 4th wielder of the Axe was covered (in pictogram) in The Black Axe book, but the story of his death and children are new for this story. The location of Nettledown, is from Nate Pride's Legends of the Guard story "The Ballad of Nettledown". I studied Nate's pages to try and be consistent with the visual depiction of the location. And while it's never appeared on a map, I have a suspicion if I ever draw a much older map of the territories, you may find it listed there.

The idea of having three young sibling mice take over the role of the Black Axe was something I'd come up with back when writing the end of Fall 1152. I shared the idea with Mark Smylie over breakfast at the Baltimore convention that year, and we both agreed that while fun, seemed too much like a light hearted children's tale compared to the tone at end of the Fall book. So I stuck it away in my back pocket until the time was right.

The three sisters are obviously analogs for Kenzie, Saxon, and Rand. Beyond personalities I added a few visual cues: Omaira's tied sash-belt echoes the tied knot of Saxon's cloak, Lynea's hood is ment to remind you of Kenzie's hood in Winter and the long ribbons in front are to symbolize Kenzie's longer slender frame as well as the verticality of his staff, and Celandine's scale armor is symbolic of Rand's shied both in function and shape. Part of my goal was to pre-explain how Rand, as a mouse who mainly ever carries a shield, functioned with a Saxon and a Kenzie.

2014 Appearances:

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Special Edition NYC: June 14-15

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

2014 FCBD Cover Art

Archaia is once again doing a HARDCOVER release for this year's Free Comic Book Day! And Mouse Guard will be on the cover (making this my fifth straight year of being the cover image for Archaia's FCBD offering). To the left you can see the final art I did for the cover. And for today's blogpost I'll do my best to break down my process...all while trying not to spoil the subject of the story. I can share that this year will follow the tradition of a younger version of a Mouse Guard character being told a morality story that somehow helps shape who they are as Guardmice in the series.

I started off my process of designing this cover by thinking about the visual lead-in the morality tale would use. In the past I've had stained glass windows, puppets, and book illustrations as the delivery system. The idea of using playing cards struck me as a fun way to get in to a story, but it meant I'd have to design my own cards. These early Swiss playing cards I found in doing some research became my inspiration point for how I'd like to treat my design aesthetic.

Like readers of my blog will know, I tend to obsess over the details of the Mouse Guard world, and making up playing cards proved to be no exception. I thought that not only may I need to draw these cards again in another story, but also what if I ever wanted to make a real set with real Mousey rules? I won't bore you with the details, but I created a 50-55 card deck (still debating part of it) with what amounts to 5 suits (trades) and 10-11 numbers (objects) along with another card notation thrown in so that if I ever make a game, I'll have more variables to play with.

With the cards designed, I started on my three main characters. I can't tell you who they are or what the represent, or why they all are holding Black Axes...but I can tell you that they were originally all male, and I changed them to female after a talk with my wife, Julia again about the story. To the right are the sketches of them.

I scanned those sketches and placed them in a new 12" x 12" document (the size of the original cover art) along with the designs of my cards. I tinted each mouse and the acorn pile just to help me clarify all the rough pencils into the various characters and horizon. When I'm putting together a composite like this, I can play with the scale of the characters, their physical relationship with one another, how close or how far apart they stand, check for tangents, odd negative shapes, etc. It's a great way to work on layout without having to redraw anything or sacrifice the feeling of drawing traditionally.

Once I get the digital composite layout the way I want it, I'll print it out on regular printer paper (this one took two sheets of legal paper taped together). I tape the printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series Bristol (their 12" x 12" pads come in handy) and ink the piece on a lightbox (I have  a 24" 18" lightbox and an even larger light table). The inkwork is all done with Copic Multiliners (mostly the 0.35 & 0.7 nibs) with a bit of brush & ink for the larger fill areas. A lot of my inkwork tends to come down to a series of repeating forms (the acorns, the pattern on the acorn caps, the scale-mail armor, the twist of the axe handles...) and textures like cross hatching and stippling  that end up forming small positive and negative shapes of repeating forms.

The last step is to scan the inked piece and color the artwork. I do this all in Photoshop 7.0 (pre-CS). This cover was an endless cycle of changing colors until I arrived at the palette seen here. Color and value are relative to the colors next to them. a midtone can appear dark when next to lights, and then light when next to darks. Greys can look green next to reds and blue next to oranges...this was the case with every change I made for the cover...if I darkened the background, I needed to lighten the mice, if I made the cards more yellow, I need to adjust every character's clothes. Once I had the color choices made, I rendered (added texture, highlights, and shadows) using the dodge & burn tools.

The Archaia FCBD Hardcover featuring this cover, a Mouse Guard story, and several more from Archaia's stock of quality storytellers and titles, will be FREE in comic book stores on May 3 (First Saturday in May). I encourage you to go to FCBD and take a friend who doesn't know about the day ad/or doesn't read comics...because there is a comic out there for everyone, and on May 3rd the first one's free.

2014 Appearances:

MSU Comics Forum: February 22

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Free Comic Book Day 2013!!
Today was Free Comic Book Day. In case you were not able to get out and pick up the Archaia offering with a Mouse Guard/Rust cover, here is a video of me reading the story to you.

 
Mouse Guard: The Tale of Thane & Ilsa from David Petersen on Vimeo.

I've done videos like these for the last two FCBDs and can still be viewed online:
The Tale of the Wise Weaver: https://vimeo.com/34828777
The Tale of Baldwin the Brave: https://vimeo.com/34828956


The Tale of the Thane & Ilsa Story details:
For this year's story I wanted to continue the tradition of a younger version of a Mouse Guard character being told a morality story. This time around, it's Sadie. I'd drawn Sadie's father Thane once before for a commission, which was later included in a sketchbook. Sadie's Mother I had only listed in the RPG, but I had a real person in mind for what kind of person I'd imagine Sadie's mother to be. A family friend named Bonnie Venn  is a renaissance woman. I've known her my whole life and think of her as an unofficial Aunt who I'd see each summer (at their cottage on an inland island lake here in MI). Bonnie can do some of everything, she's a potter, a painter, a mechanic, a business woman, a welder, a decorator, a cook...you name it, and Bonnie is probably good at it, and a really lovely person to boot. That's the kind of woman (mouse) who would have raised Sadie...and taught her to do well at some of everything as well.

So now that I've explained the Isle of Venn & the character of Ilsa, I need only tell you where the story and visuals came from. I had originally thought of a story where Sadie is taught to get in there and play just as hard and well as the boys, but I thought that message was too obvious and predictable. Instead went in the direction of parents trying to explain a better path for what to value in love...I could also make the 'just as good or better than the boys' as a part of explaining Ilsa's (and in turn Sadie's as well) character in the story. I was also inspired by the part in the part in the 6th Harry Potter book where Fleur Delacour, upon seeing her future husband's scars and disfigurement says "What do I care how he looks? I am good-looking enough for both of us...All these scars show is zat my husband is brave!" I thought I'd borrow that sentiment from JK, to examine what the woman who 'has everything' will use as a litmus test for quality of love.

For the visuals, I wanted to do illuminated manuscript illustrations, but stay away from the style of the book of Kells and similar real world examples, since I'd already used those in Mouse Guard for other stories and documents. I looked at Moorish & Islamic illuminations and thought the stylization would give a clear distinction to this story and also make it a bit more of a fairy-tale quality over a historical-document quality.

The original pages are available for sale in my online store: http://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/category/original-pages

Hope you all enjoyed the day, tried new books, encouraged non-comic readers to try something new, and had fun with the new Mouse Guard story: The Tale of Thane & Ilsa!

Green Brain Free Comic Book Day shirt:
Today in the Headspace Gallery at Green Brain Comics tee shirt artwork was featured & could be purchased as a shirt printed on-demand. The gallery exhibition will be up through August 31st and shirts can be printed on-demand by visiting* Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, MI. For my design, I went with a Mr. Toad style animal character reading not just comics, but graphic novels as well.

*These will not be available by mail-order, but only by purchasing in person at the Dearborn, MI location.

FCBD 2013 Cover process

This year's Free Comic Book Day offering by Archaia will be an 8" x 8" flipbook (like years 2010 & 2011). My contribution is a Mouse Guard cover for one side and an 8 page story. I had teased a bit of working on this on Twitter, but was told that Archaia preferred to keep it hush-hush until their official announcement last week.

This year's story of mine will follow the tradition of the last two: a morality tale being told to a younger version of a character we know from the Mouse Guard series that helps explain who they grew up to be.  Sadie is the mouse who will hear a story this year.

I don't want to give too much away about the story itself, so I'll skip over that and just say that I had a picture in my head of a beautiful mouse swinging carefree on a swing held by a goose. I looked at the Rococo painting Fragonard's "The Swing" (or "The Happy Accidents of the Swing") for inspiration and to help me imagine the correct body language for the swinging mouse. I sketched the swinger, the goose, and the viewing mouse all separately in my sketchbook and then composited and resized them into this single image. I dropped in ghostly version of the logos to make sure I was keeping my composition in the view-able area.

Next step was to print out that composited rough at actual size (in this case 12" x 12") and tape it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol. On a lightbox I was able to see the printed image and use it as a guide while I inked the piece. I used Copic Multiliners for almost the entire image (the 0.7 nib mainly) other than the water ripples that I inked with a brush. knowing I planned on using a color hold on the landscape inkwork (to help it recede into the background more subtly) I carefully left a white gap between the foreground subjects and the background. That made it easier to isolate them in the next steps...


The scanned inkwork is ready to be digitally colored and have its color areas established. Laying out these flat areas of color...or coloring in the lines...is called Color Flatting. Here I kept it close to my final color choices, but since the idea here is just to make the goose's feathers a different color than the sky and the vines a different color than the goose's bill, I could have used any colors: a red feathered duck with a green bill and pink vines. The final color choices can be altered at any time easily once you've established color flats. Part of the reason to flat colors is so you can easily move between different areas when you want to render them or alter the colors without effecting the color or rendering of the part next to it.

The final color rendering is done by adding texture, shading and highlights. I use the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop for this and a textured brush to give it the right look as I go. Because this cover has more of a fairy-tale romantic feel, I also designed a new retailer-stamp area that fit the mood (and is based on some stained glass from the antique store I worked in when I started Mouse Guard.

Free Comic Book Day is the first Saturday in May each year. I've yet to announce my 2013 FCBD plans, but in any case, tell your retailer now you want the Archaia Mouse Guard flip book, and then take a friend who has never read a comic next May and introduce them to worlds of stories with a free issue of something.

Black Axe Replicas:
Skelton Crew Studio has started their Mouse Guard weapon replica line (at mouse-scale) with the Black Axe! The Axes are available for pre-order (shipping in January) for $30 through their online store. Axes come with a debossed leather pouch and the first 400 ordered have tags I signed. Israel Skelton did a fantastic job interpreting  sculpting, & casting the mythic axe of black. So, as a gift for that Mouse Guard fan in your life, consider a mouse-sized replica of the Black Axe (you can print out a photo and wrap that until the axe arrives)

As Israel started working on the Axe, he asked for 'control' art, but not only did I not have a perfect & clean master drawing of the axe, I also hadn't drawn it consistently over the course of 3 series. I drew a new piece for Israel to use as a guide for his sculpt. Knowing that some of the stylistic elements of the axe in the comic would need to be more believeable as a 3d object for this project, gave me some license to push my design a bit away from past drawings. The two biggest changes were the barley-twist handle and the slightly more curvy shape of the axe's head. Israel took all of this and ran with it to make a wonderful art object for me and my fans.


Holiday Sale Reminder:

In my online store you can use promocode MOUSEGUARD to receive 10% off your order! The discount is good on Original art, Shirts, Non- Mouse Guard art pieces, Prints, and the Winter B&W edition. The sale runs through the end of the year, so whether you are buying a gift for a Mouse Guard fan, or something for yourself, If it's still December, you can get a discount. I'll be updating the store with more items as the sale goes on (check Twitter or Facebook for updates)

Watercolor Wednesday: In case you missed last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces, here they are for a closer look. Both are a bit fairy tale inspired (but not meant to be literal illustrations of) The Beast of Beauty and the Beast and a Sea Hag like the one in Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid.

Tomorrow I'll post a few more fairy tale inspired paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances:
Emerald City: March 1-3
Fabletown Con: March 22-24
C2E2: April 26-28
Spectrum Live: May 17-19
Heroes Con: June 7-9
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*