Baltimore Yearbook: Strangers In Paradise

As an annual tradition at the Baltimore Comic Con the organizers put together a 'Yearbook' typically celebrating a creator owned comic property that the guests of the show pay homage to with a piece of artwork. This year (the seventh year of the tradition) The work of Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise, Echo, Rachel Rising, and Motor Girl) is the theme.

To the left you can see my finished piece of the main Strangers in Paradise characters playing the Mouse Guard board game Swords & Strongholds.
Below I'll walk though the steps to create the piece.

So, you may be as surprised as I was about the piece being human women. No animals in clothes, no creatures, no craggy dwarves...but pretty (I hope) ladies. I wanted to do Terry's characters justice and as they appear in his works...and I wanted to stretch my wings a bit and force myself out of my comfort zone....but again, I don't normally draw stuff like this...so I looked up reference. I had an idea to exemplify the romantic & friendship tension between the characters by having them play a board game or cards...I searched for 'women playing chess' and found this stock photo.


I then reoriented the image so it fit the book's dimensions. On my lightpad I worked out the anatomy basing it on a printout of the stock photo...but I needed it to look right in my type of linework as well as for the features & clothes to look like Katchoo & Francine. And to add in a bit of that Mouse Guard feel, I replaced the chess bits with Swords and Strongholds (and filled in some negative space with the cards strewn around).

The Swords and strongholds bits look like finished artwork because I was able to paste in my digital files for the cards as well as the diagram from the instructions sheet for the game.



With a layout drawn and digitally composited together of Mouse Guard gaming components, it was time to start inking.

I printed out the above layout and then taped that printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my lightpad I can see through the surface of the bristol to the printout to use as a 'pencils' guide to ink from. I used Copic Multiliner pens (the 0.7 nib mostly) and added all the lineweight and texture I could to make the piece as 'David Petersen' as possible.

Note: I did ink all the cards and board by hand instead of just digitally paste them in...this way the original art is complete (and will be up for auction at the convention) and the line quality/scale matches the rest of the piece, instead of looking like it was resized and digitally added.


Once the inks were finished I scanned in the original art and started the coloring process by painting in flat colors.

These flat colors help in the next step when I needed to isolate one area (like the floor or Francine's dress) and render it with light and shadow independently of the other areas. So, the flatting stage is basically digitally coloring inside the lines.

I also established all the color holds here (areas where I wanted the lineart to be a color other than black) on Francine's dress & necklace, Katchoo's nose, and all the cards.


The last step was to render the color fully and add shadow, highlight, and texture. I use Photoshop's Dodge and Burn tools with a stock textured brush to achieve this.

The finished piece (seen to the right) will be one of many artist homages to Terry's work. The Baltimore Comic Con Yearbook will be for sale at the convention (and usually online from the convention afterwards) and as I mentioned above, the original art will be auctioned off on the Saturday of the convention.

For more info about the 2018 Baltimore Comic Con Yearbook:
http://baltimorecomiccon.com/baltimore-comic-con-yearbook/

2018 Appearances:
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 28-30
New York Comic Con: Oct. 4-7

Beneath the Dark Crystal Varaint Cover #1

Archaia has a new Dark Crystal comic mini-seires coming out called "Beneath the Dark Crystal". And I've been asked to do a series of variant covers for them! As a huge fan of the Jim Henson company in general, but specifically in The Dark Crystal, it was my pleasure and honor to be asked.
This is the first variant cover, with many more to come.

To the left you can see the finished variant for #1, but below I will walk you through the art process & creation of each step it took to get there.

I started with the concept of a Skeksis & urRu (Mystic) facing opposite, almost like a playing card deck's face cards...but without anything upside-down.

Throughout the film it's noted that the Skeksis & Mystics were once the same beings who split, and that they are each linked to a counterpart in the other species. I chose for this image to feature SkekZok the Ritual Master and his counterpart UrZah the Ritual Guardian. I luckilly have a lot of sources for reference with the World of the Dark Crystal book featuring Brian Froud's art, Behind the scenes photos from Henson of the puppets themselves, and the movie. Here are my sketches for SkekZok & UrZah each on different sheets of copy paper as well as a circle design of Froud's I copied for an element in the background.

Once scanned I can place the figures just right in relation to one another in Photoshop, even making some digital adjustments to proportions and rotations of heads and hands. Each element was tinted differently to help it read better in layout form. To see more of the background ring, I mirrored each figure so that the important parts of the design were visible. To add some more complexity and texture, I overlayed a subtle version of another of the cosmological magical symbols of Froud's over the entire piece.

This layout was then sent off to Archaia and Henson for approval before I could start the next step.


When the layout came back approved by both companies, I was able to get into the inks. I printed out the layout and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I inked the piece on a light pad with Copic Miltiliner SPs (I think I used the 0.7 & 0.3 nibs here). On the light pad I can see through the suface of the bristol to see the printout and use it as a guide to ink from.

The real trick in inking this piece was how to get all the texture in without over-doing it and ruining any subtlety. The overlay pattern inks (not shown) were done separately to be added in at the end.


Once the inks were completed (and approved by Archaia and Henson) I started the coloring process by mapping out the flat colors. This is a process of establishing what areas are what colors in a way that when it's time to render them (shade/highlight/texture) I can isolate any different part at any time.

Very lucky to have access to all the reference because other than making adjustments for an overall color tone/gamut and value range, most of the work was dictated by photos, puppets, and art that already existed.

Knowing the circle pattern needed to be pushed back to the background I added a color-hold (area where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black) to all of its linework.


The last step was to render the piece. Adding in the right amount of highlights and shadow and texture to the piece without overworking it and fighting the linework was not easy.

I found that muting everything out and lightening it helped it to read better, got those lines speaking their share of the image.

The last step was to add in the pattern overlay and adjust the transparency on it so it was visible but not fighting with the finished piece.





This cover will also be included in the Dark Crystal Artist Tribute book which features illustrations and testimonials from Jae Lee, David Petersen, Mark Buckingham, Cory Godbey, Jeff Stokely, Benjamin Dewey, and the film’s original concept artist, Brian Froud.

Available from Archaia in June.

2018 Appearances:

San Diego Comic Con: July 18-22
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 28-30
New York Comic Con: Oct. 4-7

Tellos: Baltimore Comic-Con Yearbook 2017 process

The Baltimore Comic Con has an anual tradition of publishing a Yearbook, each year featuring a comic property or title, and asking the guest artists to contribute a pinup in their own style (or also mashing in their characters). Two years ago, I was fortunate enough for Mouse Guard to have been the focus of the Yearbook. This year that honor has gone to Tellos. It is the 10 year anniversary of Mike Wieringo's passing. The book will be available at the Baltimore Convention and probably on their website afterwards.

 On the left you can see my finished  piece, but below, I've gone through and shown the process and steps.


The first issue I had was what character(s) from Tellos would I focus on or use for my piece. Obviously I wanted to draw Koj, the Tiger character, but I figured everyone for this yearbook would be drawing him as well. So I just started drawing all of the characters, Jarek the boy, Tom the turtle-wizard, Rikk the fox-theif, and Brad the dragon. Not being great at drawing human characters, I opted to draw Hawke (who's an elf) and Serra as characters further away in the distance on airships or riding dragons. All of these were drawn on copy paper separately using the Tellos Colossoal collection for reference as I went...

I then scanned all of my sketches and started assembling them into a composition. This took a lot of puzzle-work, adjusting, re-adusting, scaling, leaving out character drawings, mirroring...until I had a layout that worked for me where somehow all the characters fit, there was a focus, and their scales, relative to each other, made sense.

The background skyline & zeppelin silhouettes were drawn quickly in Photoshop based on architecture & ship designs from the first 2 page spread in Tellos.


I then printed out the above composite layout (onto two sheets of legal paper taping them together to form the entire 14x17"piece) and then taped that to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series Bristol. On a light-pad (I use a Huion) I can see through the surface of the bristol to the printout and use it as a guide as I ink on the bristol. For pens I used Copic Multiliners (SP, the 0.7, 0.2, & brush nibs here).

To help the background not feel as flat, I left a gap between it and the character outlines, which also helped me in the next step isolating them as color holds...

After the inks were done, I scanned them for the start of the coloring phase, 'flatting'. This is a term that simply is about laying in flat colors (no rendering, no lighting, no effects) like a professional version of coloring within the lines. I established color holds (areas where I wanted the inkwork to be a color and not just black) for the skyline, zeppelins, and background characters, as well as a few details on Koj's sleeve.

With the flats finished, it was then just a matter of rendering everything. To add the highlights & shadows I use the Dodge & Burn tools in Photoshop using a textured brush.


Here again is the finished piece which will be included in the 2017 Tellos yearbook sold at Baltimore Comic Con

I look forward to signing these in a few weeks there.

See you in Baltimore!

Past Baltimore Yearbook process posts:

2016: Archie:

http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2016/08/baltimore-yearbook-2016-archie-process.html

2015: Mouse Guard:

http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2015/09/baltimore-comic-con-yearbook-cover.html

2014: Grendel:

http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2014/08/baltimore-yearbook-grendel.html

2012: Liberty Meadows:

http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2012/09/baltimore-comic-con-yearbook-2012-this.html

2017 Appearances: 

Rose City Comic Con (at the BOOM! Booth) Sept. 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 22-24

New York Comic Con: Oct. 5-8

Mouse Guard: Art of Bricks

Tomorrow sees the release of Archaia publishing's Mouse Guard: The Art of Bricks showcasing the wonderful LEGO display put on by ARCHLUG (the Seattle LEGO Builder Club). The display was originally built and displayed in 2015 and then was updated and shown again in 2016 at the Emerald City Comic Con. For the fans of LEGO or Mouse Guard who couldn't make it to those events, or want to admire the work again, this photo art book is a full look at Mouse Guard in Brick form.

I have written a foreword for the book. And to accompany it, I drew a pinup image of the Guardmice in Brick-form.  Today's blogpost will go through the steps in creating that piece. I started by pulling down my LEGO model of the Matriarch chamber given to me at ECCC'15 by Alice Finch. I used the Mouse Guard mini-figs that Guy Himber at Crazy Bricks sent me to set a scene of familiar mice gathered around Gwendolyn.

After I took a photo of the diorama model, I cropped and enlarged it to suit the format of the square book, and then printed it out to-scale. On my light box I traced over the printout on a clean sheet of paper to get my drawing. Normally, I don't like blatantly tracing reference photos. I've done it in the past, and it's a shortcut that often does more harm than good (it sticks out like a sore thumb, you don't usually have photo reference from other angles, and it's a crutch that is easy to grow accustomed to.) However, because of the precise geometric nature of LEGO and the deadline on this piece, I did exactly that.
(Note: I still had to figure out the vanishing point to make some corrections as I went)

The next step, once I had a clean line drawing, was to ink the piece. I taped my pencils to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. And seated at my lighbox again, I started inking with Copic Multiliner SP pens. I made an effort to add some texture, dings, dents, and line weights so that the end result didn't look like a traced technical drawing.

I also made an effort to not use a ruler and draw every line straight. For the floor I tried to emulate some of the LEGO tiles poping up a bit.

After the inks were completed, I started flatting the colors in Photoshop. I pulled up a color chart for the official LEGO brick colors to use for my palette, but found it a bit too restrictive and used it as a guideline instead. You'l notice the weapons, books, and some miscellaneous items are drastically the wrong color. I'll often do that with all the little fiddly bits of minutia so make sure I got it all flatted. I then will desaturate that later and color each item as need be.



The last step is to do the final rendering. Because these are supposed to be like LEGO, I went a bit more drastic on the highlights than I normally would. I used the Dodge tool to add those highlights and the shadows were applied using the Burn tool (I used a textured brush with both). For the weapons, I didn't follow the LEGO tendency to have a single color of molded plastic (only getting multiple colors with stamp printed details) in favor of making the items look more like their Mouse Guard comic counterparts.


This pinup, along with my foreword and some special brick endpapers (see in-process image below) will be included in Mouse Guard The Art of Bricks out this June.

On Sale: June 29 2016

-Price: $34.99

-Page Count: 240

2016 Appearances:

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

Spongebob Comics #50 Pinup Process

I was aksed by Spongebob Comics editor Chris Duffy to contribute a pinup for the Spongebob #50  issue. I watched some Spongebob shows back when my nieces were very little, so the job sounded fun and I took it. To the left you can see the final art, but in this week's blogpost below, I go through the step-bystep process to create the artwork for this pinup.








Sketches & 1st Layout: Chris asked that I make sure I included Sandy Cheeks (the squirrel character) since I'm known for drawing furry woodland creatures. I'd been planning on doing Squidward, but decided to go for his suggestion of including Sandy, and while I was at it, include the entire main cast. I only had the rough idea that the characters would be piled up perhaps 3 people high, in some underwater, friendly-rivalry game of chicken. I drew Sandy more like I would in Mouse Guard, though still stylized, and then all the other characters closer to on-model from the show.

I assembled these sketches in Photoshop into a composition. I tinted each character to help me see who was who in a mess of overlapping grey sketches. I didn't know how all the characters would stack, but fooled around with it until I had something that worked. Luckily there even seems to be a bit or a narrative: Spongebob is trying to catch a jellyfish, Patrick is eating a Krabby Patty, Sandy is having fun with her friends, while Mr. Krabs is angry at Patrick for eating an unpaid-for meal, and Squidward wants nothing to do with the antics of all involved. Oh and Gary the Snail is meowing...I just didn't add a word balloon.

Turned this in for approval and......

Got a note back about the characters. The problem was two-fold. The characters were close to on-model, but not close enough...so that it looked unsettling....and that was also because I'd drawn Sandy purposely off model, so she didn't match. Chris was hoping I'd really let my style show with the characters and not even try to draw them as they'd appear on the show. So I went about redesigning each character tracing over my 1st layout on a lightbox to keep the character poses and shapes about the same, but altering the characters to look something more like a blend of the cartoon designs and their real-world counterpart creatures/objects.

I scanned those redesigns back in and re-assembled the layout. I'd drawn Spongebob like he was made of kitchen sponge, but not that he was a kitchen sponge, but a creature with eyes and teeth and life. Same held true for Patrick, Squidward, Gary, and Mr. Krabs. In fact Krabs was the hardest because I had to fit a crab into pants and a shirt and get him to roughly fir the same space the original drawing occupied in my 1st layout.

I sent version 2 off for approval AND....



ALMOST!...but I didn't know that while the character's name is Squidward....he is actually an octopus (an inside joke often referred to on the show)...so a quick change to the shape of Squidward's head, and I had an approved layout! I think the final version is a better piece than the original, it just took a lot of re-drawing to get there.

I printed this out on my home printer on copy paper and then taped that printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore bristol to start inking.


The inks, all done with Copic Multiliners (the 0.3 & 0.7 nibs mainly) took a bit longer than I'd expected. All those new details in the Petersen-style redesigns added to that process. I also wanted to carefully think out what lines I knew I was going to color hold (like Spongebob's pores, Squidward's spots and eye details, inside Sandy's helmet, the floating flotsam in the background, the sand, etc. so that I wouldn't have too many places they intersected with lines I wanted black in the color art. Planning ahead like that can save a great deal of time when isolating the lines for color holds in the color stages.



I scanned the finished inks and started the flatting. Most of the color choices were made for me by the designs from the cartoon, but I did have to make some alterations and a lot of minor saturation/value changes so the piece still worked together and in my style. Like the thinking ahead for the color holds, flatting is a lot about prepping a file so that as you render it, you can easily re-isolate separate parts to give them the right shading and texture without affecting the area next to it.

the last step was to render the characters using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop with a textured brush. To the left again you can see the final artwork which is in Spongebob Comics #50!

2015 Appearances:

Art-Bubble Comics Festival: Copenhagen: Nov. 14-15

2016 Dates coming soon.

Table Titans Volume 1 pinup

I'm a big fan of Scott Kurz & Co.'s Table Titans web comic. Back in May, I did a piece of fan art purely because I enjoyed discovering the series. Well, the folks over at Table Titans are putting together their first printed collection and they wanted to use my past piece as a pin-up...but the versions of the cast I drew is from what will-be Volume 2. So I offered to not only let them use that piece when they were ready for Volume 2, but also to do a new piece for Volume 1.

Table Titans is a comic about playing Dungeons & Dragons...but it's more than that, it's about a group of friends co-authoring a fantasy adventure together through the mechanics of an RPG system. We get to see the players interact, talk about their choices for their characters as well as seeing the fantasy story cinematically come to life. For this week's blogpost I'll show the process of making this new piece.

The roughs started out like the last piece, portraits of the characters in-game. In volume 1, the players are assigned pre-made characters, and so the costumes and roles are different than the piece I already had done. Darby's character Draziw the mage was just starting out and didn't have his robes and beard. Val, normally a barbarian was crushed to learn she'd be playing a bard. For the sketches I also drew some elements from the story to try and fit in like the displacer beast, the Caraway "eyepatch" the guardsman, and their adopted pet blink dog pup. I sketched these out on a few sheets of legal sized copy paper.

I then scanned those sheets of sketches and started trying to arrange them into a composition I liked inside the format of the Volume 1 book page measurements. I tinted each character to help me distinguish them and make better sense of the layout. In this step I found that I had to lose Caraway, but my idea for the displacer beast to be a stylized looming set of eys, nose & jewel with the tentacles framing the composition was achived by playing with scale, rotation and mirroring of my sketches.




I printed this layout composite and then taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. In a quick time on the lightbox I was able to copy the linework lightly in pencil so I could begin watercoloring the final artwork. I used a travel tray of Sakura watercolors (the 18 cake set) and slowly built up the layers of color (starting with the lightest tones first and working the darker areas with each revisit as areas dried). Once I had the painting where I wanted it, I went back in with Copic multiliners to ink the linework and add a bit of texture and detail. The last touch was to use a white gel pen and white correction fluid to add some texture and lighting detail over top of the watercolor and pen.

BONUS! After finding out the page format of these volumes, I went back and added a few story element borders to my original Table Titans piece so that if Scott & crew would like to use it in their eventual physical release of Volume 2, my art would fit the page dimensions properly.

The borders were done the same way as the pieces: sketch, digital manipulation, printout, lightbox pencils, watercolor, and then ink.

Both high-res files are in the hards of the Table Titans crew and I look forward to seeing them release these great stories physically...but in the meantime you can read them all online for free at www.tabletitans.com 

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

Baltimore Yearbook: Grendel

This year marks the third year for the Baltimore Comic Con releasing an art book for their convention featuring guests of the show doing their rendition of a pre-selected creator-owned character. In past years the book were centered on Frank Cho's Limbery Meadows and Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo. This year it's all about Matt Wagner's Grendel.

To the left is Wagner's cover (with book design by Thom Zahler) of the art book. Unfortunately, I didn't get my piece done in time to be included IN the book, but if you collect enough signatures at the convention, you can collect a print of my piece from the Baltimore Con folks.

  More info here: http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Baltimore-Comic-Con-s-Annual-Yearbook-Returns-in-2014-with-Matt-Wagner-s-Grendel-.html?soid=1101956786023&aid=xtcfN8WGoOA

Here is my finished piece. I didn't know much about the character, but in doing research I found that his original secret identity was a writer named Hunter Rose. So I did a stylized layout featuring an antique typewriter with it's brand name replaced with the comic title "GRENDEL", a Hunter Rose letterhead, and a quote from the epic Beowulf. The info on the bottom of the typewriter include a Wagner's manufacturer logo made to look like Wagner's signature and the location of the company his home state. 

I'll be donating the original inked piece to the art auction that takes place at the Baltimore Con.

Happy Bidding!

2014 Appearances:

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Lucca Comics & Games (Italy): Oct. 31-Nov. 2

Table Titans Fanart Process

Table Titans is a webcomic by Scott Kurtz & Bryan Hurtt (colors by Steve Hammaker). It's about a group of friends playing D&D, and while that may sound like a very narrow story, it's a really fun and accessable comic more about adventure and friendships and personality-types than anything game-specific. It also drives home a point I think is important with RPGs...that the rules are only there as structure so the players and GM can have fun telling a memorable story together. Because I enjoyed the strip so much, I did this piece of fanart for Scott. Today's blogpost I share the process of painting the piece.

The first step was to sketch out all the characters and come up with a composition that looked good. I decided to have each character appear as their in-game persona because the costumes are more fun. Each character was drawn separately in my sketchbook (each taking up a page). The scanned sketches were then tinted in photoshop and shuffled around until a usable layout appeared. At this stage I was also able to do some digital fixing of my drawings by mirroring the images and making sure the eyes were at the same height on the face, while also making subtle tweaks to get expressions the way I wanted.

The plan for this piece was to watercolor the characters rather than do my normal inks & digital colors. I printed out the layout and then on a liughtbox traced the lines in pencil onto a sheet of 300 series bristol board. I then start with the light and subtle areas of facial tones in watercolor. I use a travel kit of Sakura Koi Watercolors, and the orange cake is a really good stand alone base for light-skinned color tones (though tinting each with a bit of other tones to mute and offset that orange makes for more realistic colors)

For the rest of the piece I work around usually going from light areas to dark areas, and moving over to dry areas while wet areas dry. Here's a shot of each character in-progress:

Here is the group after I had done all the watercolor work. And as much as I like painting, and subtlety, I rarely feel like one of my watercolors looks 'finished' without line added. I am a line guy...and fighting it would be silly. So the next step was to go back over the pencils an ink in the line work adding some minor details and textures.

So here again is the finished piece with inkwork. If you enjoyed it and/or like Roleplaying, consider reading Table Titans from the beginning, it's really fun and well made.

2014 Appearances:

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