Reference Model: Shorestone Interior: 
Last week I showed you the exterior model of Shorestone. To celebrate Black Axe #6's printed release tomorrow, I'm sharing the model I made for the interior of the city of builders. Like last week, there isn't anything spoiler-ish  in this post. Everything you see is on page 2 of the issue. So enjoy the post without worry.

First off, you may be saying "What!?!?! he built this much of a model for what happens on ONE page of the issue!?!?!"...yes. yes I did. At the time, I figured I'd show the interior for more than the one page, but after I finished, I realized that the story had to push on and couldn't linger in this city's thorofare. And as I often come back to locations in the course of Mouse Guard (not to mention the cutaways and guides in the hardcovers) it was more than worth the time to build this model.

I already had the exterior facade model to butt this up to, and that model being locked in also gave me some detail aesthetic cues to use too. I wanted the city to feel detailed, huge, and organized. I repeated the same window design from the exterior for the archway doors and upper level windows. The floor is detailed tile work (designs taken from cathedral windows and some tiles in an Irish church) to again show the different types of craftsmice working & living here. Shorestone is like a city-sized resume for the mice there.

The walls and floor are cardboard skinned with printed paper designs. but each build modularly  so that I could access the model from different vantage points and also reconfigure it for other parts of the city if necessary. The image to the right is a bit of photo trickery. Locking down my camera on a tripod, I photographed the model walls in 2 different locations on the table. Then in Photoshop, I was able to composite them together into something even more big, echoy, and vast looking than my model.

The roof section for the main hall I filled it with banners. I'd made reference to a banner from a Legends of the Guard story being hung at Shorestone (eagle eyed fans won't have trouble picking it out), so I figured Shorestone could have hundreds of banners and flags in their possession ..perhaps they display the colors of the various cities, towns, and groups their laborers made structures for.

Finally, Here is how Shorestone's interior looks in ink & digital color on page 2 of Black Axe #6

Two weeks from now I'll have another model post...hopefully everyone will have had a chance to read the issue..because the next model & post could be spoilerish.

Watercolor Wednesday: Here's another look at last week's Watercolor Wednesday paintings (for those who are new to Watercolor Wednesday, I post a few original watercolors for sale in my online store each Wednesday. They are affordable and go quickly, so follow me on Twitter or Facebook for the quickest notifications of when they go live) First up is a green man, but in autumn colors.


The second watercolor from last week is some sort of goblin-like fey in a red hood. No particular inspiration for these two, just what came out of the brush on to the paper.

Third is what started as me trying to emulate Tony DiTerlizzi's expressions on a cliche Leprechaun. I added the scale mail cloak to try and de-cliche him, but I think now it just seems sillier.

Tomorrow I'll post more 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
Albuquerque Comic Expo June 21-23
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21
*more 2013 dates coming*

Reference Model: Shorestone Exterior:
A few weeks ago Black Axe #6 was released digitally on ComiXology and will be in print on-shelves next week (the 13th)! So, you may have already read the issue, but if you are waiting for the print version, this post won't contain any real spoilers and will only show the first page of artwork from the issue.

A new location is visited in the first scene of the issue: Shorestone. I've never shown any part of Shorestone before this, so I had to design its look for these pages. I took what I'd already put in the RPG book and what purpose I needed the city to serve as as my inspiration. Shorestone is a city that is known for builders, workers of stone especially, but also wood and metal.

I based the overall exterior design on a Romanesque church. The 1/2 hexagon main building facade is cardboard with basswood trim. The entry and towers are chipboard and cardstock clad in printed arch designs. When I got the structures built, I could measure them and make 'faces' or 'skins' for each piece in Photoshop using photos of arches and windows I have in my collections from my travels. The round windows were also printed designs simply glued on to the cardboard.

To beef up the trim on the towers I added a few layers of cardstock under the printed trim pattern. The 'roof' of the towers was achieved by wadding up aluminum foil and packing it so tightly that I could shape it by kneading it against a hard surface. I wanted the exposed facade of Shorestone to ooze skill and craftsmouseship. I added a lot more detail than I normally would with the repetitive trim patterns, edge trim & buttresses, the varied materials & shapes, and even the scale.

The roof of the front was also something I added more detail to than I normally would. I figured in a town of craftsmice know for their skill and talents with architecture, they would have a complicated and useful roof. With mouse cities being mostly underground or inside something (trees, rocks, etc) any extra ventilation and light would be welcome. For the model, the little cupola vents were made of basswood scraps (you can often find bags of bigger than craftstick sized pieces at your local hardware or craft store)


Here is the city exterior as it appears on page 1 of Black Axe #6. Having the model certainly helped me figure out the design of the building itself. I was able to design the place faster than I could have ever could have drawn it all just by trying things out. If I thought something was too tall or too short, I could swap out the cardboard for a different piece. I could design 1 detail and repeat it over and over in Photoshop and just have to glue it on. If I'd tried drawing it, I could have ended up spending the same amount of time and only had a single good drawing from 1 angle out of it.

With the subject of my book being the unbelievable caveat that mice walk, talk, use weapons, etc...I need everything else to be as grounded and as real as I can make it seem. Doing models like these are a time-saver for me (honestly!)  but also add the weight to Mouse Guard I feel necessary.

Oh...and the inside of this model? yes, I designed the inside of the entrance to Shorestone...but I also build a model for what lies beyond too.....That's for next week.

Watercolor Wednesday: In case you missed last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces, here they are for a closer look. First up is a Monty Python & the Holy Grail themed piece. This is one of my favorite movies and as I still lack the courage to nail liknesses, I opted to depict the knight characters using only their tunic designs.

The other two pieces from last week were a Satyr & a gargoyle...but I don't have too much to add about why or how I painted them...so just enjoy

Tomorrow I'll post more 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
Albuquerque Comic Expo June 21-23
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21
*more 2013 dates coming*

Black Axe #5 Matriarch's Room model:
In Black Axe #5 Celanawe enters a room just off of the Matriarch's office that is a private room of knowledge, memorial, and reflection for the leader of the Mouse Guard. You can see it here to the left in this collage of panels from the issue. This room needed to be special, it needed to be really special. I wanted it to have beauty and mystique. I had vision in my head of floating details, but not a complete room..so...I built a model.

My first inspiration source was from a visit to Christ's Church in Dublin I made a few years ago. The baptistery was surrounded by stained glass windows of various patron saints. When I was standing in that room in Dublin, I said I wanted to make a room like this for the Guard, but one that featured Matriarchs instead of saints. I photographed the saint windows (and compiled them here into a single image) and kept them in a folder for later inspiration. I also had photos of the floor (which I used a single tile as inspiration for the floor of this room) and the rest of the church (arches of which will appear in Black Axe #6).

I copied the border and layout design of the saint windows and then went about drawing up stained glass versions of important past Mouse Guard Matriarchs. To make them more unique, I came up with some iconographic symbol of what the were known for during their reign. While I had mentioned Allyson & Laria in past Mouse Guard issues, I needed to come up with more past Matriarchs. Two of them are Easter egg characters from Legends of the Guard volume 1: Ferruin from Jeremy Bastian's story and Moria from Mark Smylie's. The rest were inventions as I drew them, though Dorys is an homage to my paternal Grandmother, who was the inspiration for the Guard being led by strong women in the first place.

The model itself is modular. Each wall is a separate piece with it's own floor base. All of the surfaces are cardboard with printed 'skins' glued on that I designed in photoshop. The windows are recessed printouts of my above designs. I made a ceiling section out of cardboard, craft sticks, and hot glue. When assembled, the tile sections of the floor match up and the ceiling can be placed on top while still exposing one open end of the room for viewing and reference photos. I will make sure this room gets a nice detailed cutaway section in the extras section of the Black Axe hardcover, so it will be nice to get this model off the shelf again.

*Edit*

I've added a video tour of the room as well as it's exterior & construction:

http://twitpic.com/am4yfu

*Edit 2*
Also added more photos below of the model from more angles:

Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week's Watercolor Wednesday was a 2 part-er. The first piece was of the Auror Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody from the Harry Potter books. Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. I'm a big Harry Potter Fan (as evidenced by my original Harry Potter themed art collection). The rough for this painting was from a coffee shop sketchbook drawing seen here.

Because this sold so quickly, I decided to grab an older watercolor I had in the queue: An American Flag I painted in 2003 as part of the art for an invitation to our house-warming/my birthday on the 4th of July. Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the new art is available.




2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

Black Axe #5 Boat Model:
In Black Axe issue #5, Celanawe & Conrad decide to return home to the Mouse Territories. Since Conrad's original ship was destroyed in the storm that brought them to the Isle of Ildur (click here for that ship's model) They would have to construct a new one. In this page to the left you can see the final result of the boat and their work in gathering materials and building it. But before I could draw this page (and all subsequent pages with the new boat) I had to design it, which, as so often is the case, meant building a model.


The boat needed to be made of materials found on the Isle of Ildur and not be too 'worked'. The lumber needed to still look like stick and branches and twigs, not square hewn beams (though I gave myself some wiggle room here since the ferrets may have some spare building supplies around). I also wanted this boat to look very different than Conrad's first ship. For the Legends of the Guard #4 cover, I drew a boat made of a hollow turtle shell, and while I didn't like the idea of copying the boat from that cover, I loved the idea of that shell being the boat's hull.

Because I wanted to keep all the shell's details right, and because I didn't know how I was going to attach everything else to the shell, I started by making a card-stock shell model. I looked at a few reference photos and started cutting, gluing, snipping, and drawing on some scrap bristol until I had the shape and pattern I wanted. Then the fear set in. I had built a model shell I really liked, and I didn't want to start gluing more parts to it for fear I may not like the final result and not be able to salvage the shell to start over. So everything I made had to be modular and attach and detach from the shell without glue. This also made drawing the panels when the boat is being constructed easier.

The catamaran like pontoons and the stick trusses secure to the shell with some rubber bands glued to the shell's front and back. The mast, sail, and deck slide in to a bristol board groove along the back edge of the shell's opening. Speaking of which, the sail is modeled after Chinese Junks and has florist's wire along the top ridge so I could bend the sail into shapes like it was caught in a billowing wind or collapsed up for landing in port. When I was a kid I had a wooden model kit of a catamaran and I did my best to replicate the rudder design from memory. Sure I didn't need to make the rudders pivot and work in tandem for sake of the model...but I did.


Watercolor Wednesday:
Last week's Watercolor Wednesday piece was of the folklore trickster Fir Darrig. Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. Fir Darrig is a character I did a few short comic stories of in the past (found in the out-of-print Voices 1 and/or Ye Old Lore of Yore). The paper I did this on already had a mottled parchment-like tone watercolored on it before I started. I used the parchment watercolor piece as the digital background for this piece I did of Fir Darrig as a mock-cover to an eventual collection of his stories I'd like to do. So it only seemed fitting to honor the paper with a real painting of the character. Tomorrow I'll post a new original watercolor piece in my online store and I'll tweet and Facebook update when the art is available.


2012 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

2012 FCBD Story: The Tale of Baldwin the Brave:
My story for this year's Free Comic Book Day book from Archaia followed the tradition I set last year with the story being some sort of morality tale told to a younger version of one of my main characters. Last year's story was a bedtime tale being told to young-Kenzie, and I did a post about the process of creating that story last year. Saxon was the recipient of this year's story, but before we go further...in case you have not found a copy of the 2012 FCBD book or you didn't get around to reading it yet, you can follow this link to have it read to you aloud: http://vimeo.com/mouseguard/mgbaldwinthebrave

Not wanting to repeat the bed-time-story setup from last year's offering, I chose to tell the story to Saxon by having him watch a puppet show. The idea had come to me early last year when I drew this piece of a mouse puppet maker. I love puppets and puppetry, so I thought mice telling stories with puppets would be a wonderful way for them to tell tales, make art objects, and charming for the readers of my books. The fez & vest of this mouse puppet builder is an homage to the Fraggle I made as an analog of myself named Gib. So, I proceeded with the idea to tell the whole story using marionettes. As a side note, I did pause for a moment to realize, I wasn't planning to use the puppets as a gateway into showing the 'real' story, but would illustrate the puppets on stage as you would see them if you were in the mouse audience....it still seems like a gamble to have only drawn 'real' mice in only 2 panels of my story, but I liked the immersion into the storytelling method.

The story itself was all built around a way for me to impress on Saxon that he should become the mouse who doesn't pause and hesitate at the thought of danger, that he should be a mouse willing to leap into peril for the good of mice, and that this bravery and daring-do pay off in the end. I thought of the quote from Edmund Burke, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing". And mousified it to "Evil Prevails if Good Mice Do Nothing". And then it's easy to imagine Saxon perverting that into his leaping into everything wards off evil.

To prepare for drawing this story, I built a few props as guides for me. I printed out the stage proscenium from my cover art for the book (done in advance of the story) and cut it up adding a few basswood sticks and cardboard to create a paper-stage model. I made a few backdrops and flying walls to scale for the stage so that each scene would be playing out in new locations while still seeming like a believable stage play. I also sculpted a mouse marionette that I could pose for reference to get the joints and weight of the lifless limbs correct..

Baldwin (our puppet hero...and named after my Paternal Grandmother's Maiden surname) overcomes three obstacles in the tale. He saves the village from starvation by cleverly trapping a greedy goose as bait for a wolf, he has the courage to speak to a pretty mouse before she chooses death over loneliness, and finally, with his bravery as an example, he leads the town to triumph in battle over the same wolf from earlier. The pattern of three is a classic fairy tale device, and I wanted to make sure the three tasks were not all solved by brute force or just by the tip of a sword. Even though this story was for Saxon, I opted to make Baldwin a bit more well rounded and used bravery to outsmart, love, and lead.

Now to start thinking up NEXT year's FCBD story....perhaps it will be for Sadie's ears....


2012 Appearances:
Heroes: June 22-24
San Diego Comic Con: July 11-15
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28

Reference Model Ildur Hall:
Now that Black Axe #3 is out, I can share some of my model-madness. This issue has the mice inside a Ferret hall on the un-mapped island of Ildur. For the aestetic I wanted something Norse. Back when designing Darkheather for the Winter series, I had planned on using that influence as well. I found it difficult to imagine the underground Darkheather with the Norse visuals of the rooflines and carved beams. I found a book on Moorish architecture and abandoned my Norse ideas...until it was time to show the Ferret hall. I kept the idea that much of it would still be subterranean and underground, but the main hall could have exposed gates, shingled areas, and retaining walls.

The model is built from my normal materials: chipboard (the backs of discarded sketchbooks and bristol pads) paper, cardboard, and some balsa wood scraps. Using rubber cement, I was able to apply printed designs to the columns and shingled roof areas. The rest of the model is held together with hot melt glue (which I've started using over other adhesives because it doesn't dry out over time and lose its bond).

I know it seems obsessive to build something this scale for an issue's background, but I feel the issue goes quicker because of this prep work. I've explained in the past that model making helps me focus on design in a way drawing doesn't. Something about holding some wood up to a scrap of cardboard to estimate what scale the columns will be to the door, or how tall the ceiling will be seems a more intuitive way for me to imagine a space than to draw and erase architectural elevations for days.

Like other models of mine, this one is modular, meaning it both comes apart and sections can be reused in other configurations. The 'real' Ferret hall would be two lengths of my model. but by making sure that details like the fire pit, the chimney-cupola, the skylights, the gates, and the throne were not connected to the main hall model, I could set up the model to represent either end of the hall. The 'wings' can come off as well, but that was so I could view the model from the side without having to view it through the restricte lower roof line there and tighter columns.

Using a tripod mounted camera and some photoshop trickery I was also able to patch together an imagined complete version of the hall model:

Here is a sample of some panels from Black Axe #3 showing Ildur Hall:

Upcoming Appearances:
2012
London Super Con: Feb 25-26

Emerald City: March 30-April 1 

Boston Comic Con: April 21-22