Usagi Pinup Process

Better Late Than Never: Usagi Yojimbo Pinup Process:
In 2006 I first met Stan Sakai, creator of the long running Usagi Yojimbo comic. Mouse Guard has just hit on a national level and Stan stopped by the Archaia booth at San Diego to offer very kind words and support of my work. His book is a perfect example of the kind of material I wanted Mouse Guard to be: talking animals, historic setting, a bit of humor, grounded in plots that have a weight and sincerity to them. Usagi also has a wide age readership and while it does show the consequences of death, it never glorifies it or shows the goriness it.

Stan asked to swap pinups for each other's books (Stan's appears in Winter Issue 2 and also in the Winter 1152 hardcover)

For my pinup of Usagi, I decided to go for a four seasons theme. It would allow me to draw the character a few times to show the range of storytelling Stan does...The spring kite flying shows some levity, the summer has a bit of action and focuses on Usagi's training, Fall is about how interesting a mundane task can be, and Winter is all about severity, focus, and mood. I sketched out the four poses on scraps of bristol board. At the time for Mouse Guard, I was trimming down 14" x 17" pieces into 12" x 12" pages, so I had scraps like these all over the studio as scratch pads.

I don't seem to have the file of the scanned sketches resized in a template for the pinup's final art size...but that's what I did..and then printed it out and inked the piece on bristol board using the printout as a guide behind the bristol on a lightbox.
I checked with a few folks to make sure the kanji for each season was correct before I committed them in ink to the piece. I also wanted each image to look like a Japanese woodcut, so there was a focus to add a decorative element and composition to each 'panel'...the kanji was part of that, but so were the choices for the cherry blossoms, the koi, the scallop pattern on the bowl, and the falling snow


The artwork was scanned in for digital coloring. Here I established the color areas, which is a fancy way for saying, without shading, I colored in the lines. I cheated here a bit and re-created this for today's blogpost. I did not save a version of the file just flatted at that time, so I went back in to the final color file and made this example of what the piece probably looked like before I started the final colors.


The final colors are seen here and were achived using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop with a textured brush. I probably over rendered and texturized the piece compared to what I would do today, but I think it still holds up pretty well. The pinup appeared on the back of Usagi Yojimbo issue 104.







Watercolor Wednesday:In case you missed last week's Watercolor Wednesday pieces, here they are for a closer look. I started by drawing one of these and I thought "This is Tough Pete, nobody messes with Tough Pete" And I decided he was one of several brothers all named Pete who boxed...or just fought. I then drew and painted Angry Pete and Strong Pete. I had a lot of fun playing with the shapes of their anatomy and making them so odd looking. There was a conscious decision to make each wear primary colored pants and hats...but not the same color on any one Pete. I was torn about the idea of selling these individually or as a group. In the spirit of trying to keep prices down on these, and hoping to make more than 1 person happy with a purchase each week, I opted to split the brothers up....

...perhaps down the road I'll have to paint their rival cousins..three scrapping brothers named Mad Pete, Crazy Pete, and Big Pete. Tomorrow I'll post a few 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
San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*

Baltimore Comic Con Yearbook 2012

This year for the Baltimore Comic Con, Marc Nathan is doing a hardcover sketchbook called the Baltimore comic Con Yearbook. He asked Frank Cho for permission to use Liberty Meadows as a theme for the book. Participating artists were invited to do a piece of original work of Liberty Meadows and encouraged to add their creator-owned characters to the piece as well. I opted to no do a literal Mouse Guard/Liberty Meadows piece, but rather a Liberty Meadows piece that has the hallmarks of a Mouse Guard piece: small adorable creatures in medieval warrior garb cascading over rock piles while riding animals.

I knew instantly I'd use Truman (the duck) riding Oscar (the wiener dog)...and the rest fell into place..well, sort of. The sketch seemed fine, but once I scanned it and place it in a template for the book's dimensions, I had to rework Truman's sword arm. Doing so meant cutting and pasting his arm in a few places, moving his leg, and replacing the word balloon (as well as a tweak to the length of the sword & scabbard). While drawing this, thought about the balance of copying or imitating someone's work and doing your own take on it. In this case, the character's needed to look like Frank's designs, so I didn't do too much interpretation. I printed out the layout and used a lightbox to lightly transfer the drawing to watercolor paper in pencil.

The finished piece is in watercolor. I did this because the original is part of an auction for the convention. If I had done the artwork traditionally, the high bidder would get an inked piece, this way that person gets a color one. I also figured that if I was going to try something different (like a full piece in watercolor) this would be a piece I could do it on without creating an inconsistency like if I had done a new Mouse Guard piece this way (though I'm not ruling that out either).The book will be available this weekend at the Baltimore Comic Con, and the original watercolor will be auctioned there as well.

New Limited Tee Shirt
With a few more conventions left for this year and the holiday season approaching, I saw that quantities of the Mouse & Crow shirt design are running low. So it's time for a new shirt! As with the last design, I plan to only do this print run with this design, and when it runs out, I'll do a new design/color/etc. The image shown here is a digital mock-up with the colors as closely approximated as possible. If everything goes according to plan, I'll debut these at Baltimore this weekend and then make them available in the online store once I get home from the convention. (We will have more sizes available than last time also)


Watercolor Wednesday: Last week's Watercolor Wednesday piece was this Oz themed piece of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman.Here is a better look at the piece in case you missed it. Brains & Heart...Kenzie & Saxon... 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

The Confederacy of Unprecedented Fellows:
For Jeremy Bastian's Birthday, I did this piece for him. A while back, he and I had fun thinking of who would be the members of an 'anti-Leauge-of-Extraordinary-Gentlemen'. In the cartoon Challenge of the Superfriends, the heroes faced the Legion of Doom, a group of supervillians where there seemed to be perfect match-ups for their superhero counterparts: Aquaman vs Black Manta, Wonder Woman vs The Cheetah, etc.

In coming up with foes or counterparts to Alan Moore's literary comic team we settled on three immediately. To face off against the brute of Mr. Hyde, we would have Frankenstein's Monster. For the sea battles, Capt. Nemo would square off against Captain Hook (and perhaps a bit of stolen Neverland Magic). And for the consummate hunter Alan Quartermain, who better than the villainous big game of Shere Khan.For counterparts for Mina Murray & The Invisible Man, Jeremy & I struggled for a bit. 

The Headless Horseman came up and so did the Wicked Witch of the West and for a long time it was what we settled on. But as I started to work on this piece, I didn't like those two figures. First off the comparisons were weak...The Horseman was missing a head so there was a bit of overlapping visual to the Invisible man...but the correlation ended there, and Mina and the witch were both female, but shared no other threads. And secondly, both characters were written into literature by American authors and felt as treasonous to the Leauge's sensibilities as the 2003 movie (with Tom Sawyer being added so that American audiences had a character to relate to).

With Mina, I thought of the parallels between her and Christine Daae from Phantom of the Opera. Both characters are engaged to seemingly perfect milk-toast men, are kidnapped & seduced by passionate & horrific strangers, and are returned to their lives somewhat changed for the experience. However, I couldn't bring myself to make Christine a villain in any light. But that track did get me to consider the Phantom as a counterpart to the Invisible Man. Both are manipulators and work best when unseen. For Mina I ended up going with Irene Adler, a love interest of Sherlock Holmes and an adventurer in her own right.

For the process of this piece, I followed my typical routine. I started with sketching bits in my sketchbook. I then scanned those and manipulated them in Photoshop into a digital composite image. At that stage I mirrored some characters, fixed a few proportion issues, and added text & some design elements. The layout was printed and using a lightbox I was able to see it through my bristol board where I inked the piece. The inks were scanned and I colored the piece digitally setting flat colors first and then rendering the image using the dodge (lighten) and burn (darken) tools.


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

Iron Pinup process:

Shane-Michael Vidaurri and I met several years ago at the New York Comic con. He was an illustrator who was starting to dabble in sequential storytelling. I really liked what he was doing with watercolor washes and subtle pacing. We have since stayed in touch and his first book is due out from Archaia this summer: Iron, or the War After. Shane asked me to do a pinup for the collection.

Shane contributed a pinup to Mouse Guard (which will be seen in Black Axe #5) and this piece was to balance the exchange. I like how he frequently uses inset panels, open space, and muted colors. So I intended to emulate these methods into my piece for him. He specifically asked for the Officer Tiger character, Engel. Using the first chapter's imagery, I honed in on one page from the book showing Engel in his office, uniform jacket removed, suspenders showing, with his important documents and intercom-radio on his desk.

I started with a sketch or two in my sketchbook (the tiger's head was drawn on a different page and at a different scale while looking at photo reference). The sketches were assembled and adjusted in photoshop. Some of the details didn't fit into the frame (like the radio or the desk papers) the way I originally drew it, so I sliced up the image and moved bits where they needed to be for this final composition. The inset panel was saved for me to draw a tree branch in ink, and the wall paper pattern was pasted together off of a sampling of a pattern from a historic wallpaper company.

Using a printed version of the digitally adjusted layout above, I inked the final art on bristol board using a light box to see my layout as a guide. Instead of just digitally inserting the wallpaper texture, I wanted to hand ink every little bit of the pattern. This allowed me to make subtle wear marks or differences between them so that in the end, the image doesn't look hand drawn with a computer generated/pasted pattern laying on top of it. The hand inking makes it all cohesive.

Scanning the image I layed in my flat colors. This is where I establish the color areas: his face & arms being a different color from his shirt, also different from the pants, and the wall...and where all those colors start and stop. I forgot to mention above that the pocket watch was something I added to give the character an interesting pose and also to suggest something about his character...a man who believes in rules and following them. Turns out Shane liked this character detail and incorporated it into the later chapters of the book.

After my flats were established (and we took time for the pocket watch segue) I rendered the image. To add the highlights and shadows I use the dodge (lightens) & burn (darkens) tools in photoshop. The color holds on the wallpaper and the tree branch were color tweaked and rendered as well. It was a pleasure to do this pinup, not only because of knowing shane, and it being for our mutual publisher, but also because it's an interesting animal story, where the animal species are cues to the reader about what type of personality that character has, and I would love to read more stories like that.

S.M. Viduarri's Mouse Guard pinup

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

ECCC: Monsters & Dames 2012 Process

For the last three years the Emerald City Comic Con has been putting together a charity book called Monsters & Dames. Guests of the show are asked to contribute a piece of PG-13 artwork featuring the very open-ended theme "Monsters & Dames". I did a piece for it back in 2009, the last time I attended the show.

I'm headed back to Seattle this year so for my piece I decided to do a genre mash-up. I love good dragon design and after seeing some of Corey Godby's,  and realizing it had been ages since I designed and drew a dragon, I made the Dragon my 'Monster'. Cory includes cool hair on his dragons, and I'd never done that. I also pulled inspiration from the feathers on the gryphon from the Storyteller episode The Luckchild. And the pose of the head was inspired by an upshot drawing Brian Froud did of the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal

For the 'Dame' I wanted her to be riding on the Dragon's head. I made a rough body pose on my dragon drawing, but wanted to flesh her out on another page of my sketchbook. Like I said, I wanted to mash-up the genres so instead of a fnatasy-type barbarian queen or lady-knight, I went for a WWII inspired military lady. "Perhaps she is part of some fantasy anti-aircraft-dragon-blitzkrieg" I thought to myself. I gave her a curvey bombshell frame and pin-up girl hair to set the idea of the era, but without details to really say one way or the other where or when this is.

I assembled the two sketches in photoshop. Because of the scale (both of the figures in relation to one another AND how large I drew the 'Dame') the 'Dame' lost a great deal of detail. The two figures are tinted so it's easier for me to distinguish them from each other when inking. The yellow and orange borders are there as guides. The yellow edge represents where the page will be trimmed (roughly). The orange represents the area called 'bleed'. When the artwork goes off the edge of the page with no border, bleed is extra artwork that goes beyond where the page is cut, so that if the page isn't trimmed to meet the exact edge of the artwork, there is still some spare and you aren't left with a white sliver of non-artwork exposed.

The layout above was printed at full size and then taped to the back of my bristol board for me to do the inks over a lightbox. I had fun with the textures of the various parts of the dragon: hair, feathers, boney horns & snout, and soft under-belly. My pencils were pretty tight on the dragon, so the real work came in inking in all the undefined hair I had scribbled in on the rough. You will notice there is no background to this image...I debated with a skyline or even search lights & zeppelins...but ultimately decided a murky night sky would set the tone and draw the focus to the Monster & Dame better.

The final color process was a bit different for me. Because this was something other than Mouse Guard and I could afford for it to look different, I colored this with a Cintiq & a Wacom Tablet (Thank you to Katie Cook for the use of both). I was able to do a lot of slow building and painterly effects with the tools that I can't get when I color with a mouse. I still found the process off-putting, and didn't prefer it for flatting the colors. At Katie's house I flatted the majority of the piece and then rendered the sky and a bit of the dragon's skin before it was getting late and time to leave. Katie sent me home with her Wacom tablet to finish the job. At home I completed the rest of the rendering and color adjustment using her loan.

After the convention ECCC usually offers the Monsters & Dames book for purchase online if any are left.

2012 Appearances:
Emerald City: March 30-April 1
C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22
FCBD: Jetpack Comics: May 5th
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

Mythbusters:
Next week I'm going to see the Mythbusters Live show in Detroit! I'm a big fan of the show and for what Adam & Jamie (and Tori, Kari, & Grant) have done to inspire kids to be more interested in science and math. I've made no secret at San Diego that one of my biggest goals is to meet Adam Savage. Anyhow, I'm getting off track from the artwork...I'm a fan, you knew that...time for me to move on. I did this piece a while back, when I had marionettes on the brain from designing the cover and interior story for the Mouse Guard Free Comic Book Day story.

I drew the sketches while hanging out with Nate Pride. We were the only two to show up to an event at my house, so I wrote it off as a lost work night and decided to draw for fun. The pencil sketches are much larger than I normally work each figure is about 12" tall. I looked at pictures of Adam and Jamie to try and capture a carved wooden caricature of them both. I scanned these in and combined them into one smaller piece. I also made edits in photoshop, I altered the scale of their heads as well as the marionette Busters. I also dropped in a stock photo of their logo.

Using a printed version of my photoshoped collage of the corrected doodles and logo photo, I inked the piece on a sheet of 12" x 12" strathmore bristol. The inkwork is all done with Copic MultiLiner pens (mostly using the 0.7 nib). I debated inking in the strings on the piece itself or inking them on an overlay so I could easily establish color holds on them later. I opted to get the stings in the original art, so that if I ever get the chance to give this to them, it will look complete.



The last step was to scan my inks and color them. The largest part of this job as editing in what areas of my inkwork would be a color instead of black. The rest of the work was in getting the subtle colors I wanted for the puppets so they looked like they were painted wooden puppets that have been dented and dinged around a bit. I was already looking forward to the show this weekend, and sharing this piece with you has only made me more excited.

I also think it would be a lot of fun to make these puppets....but that is for another day when Mouse Guard pages aren't calling...

2012 Appearances:
Emerald City: March 30-April 1
C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22
FCBD: Jetpack Comics: May 5th
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

Storyteller Pinup

I was lucky enough to be asked by the folks at Archaia to do a pinup for their Jim Henson's The Storyteller Anthology Graphic Novel.(This also marks the 3rd Henson property I have been fortunate enough to have done pinup/cover/promotional artwork for Archaia!) The show did a wonderful job of transitioning between the Storyteller character and his dog and the story he was telling. The characters from the tale would appear in the reflections of water in bowls, on the sides of decorative steins, and in the painting over the hearth. I focused much of my attention to a way I thought I could capture that transition idea in a single pinup.

The story I started with was called The Tinderbox by Hans Christian Andersen. The story starts with a soldier who, on the request of a old witch-like woman, climbs down the trunk of a hollow tree to a cavern where three giant dogs guarding piles of treasure dwelled, as well as a magic tinderbox capable of controlling the beasts. I only roughed-in these parts in my sketch and focused more on trying to get the linkess of John Hurt as the Storyteller and his Henson-furred dog. I scanned the sketches from my sketchbook and resized the elements (adjusting how close the Storyteller and his dog are sitting, where they sit in the frame, etc.) I also tinted the pencil work different colors to help me visualize what lines belong to which character or the window.

I printed that layout at full scale and used it as a template to ink the piece, I started with the characters choosing to focus on the stained glass last. With the inks I tried to translate the softer pencil lines as competent inks lines. While areas like the Storyteller's jacket, hair and his dog all benefited from the ink translation, I lost something in his face. I planned to put some of the volume back in at the coloring stage. I'm sorry to say that paper I did my tighter version of the stained glass on has vanished. I know I was layering paper over the top of the rough and tightening in pencil and then with another overlayed sheet of paper stylizing the lines into stained glass lead-lines.


For the coloring, I scanned the inkwork in as usual and then colored it in photoshop 7 (yes, I know it's old..it's pre-CS...but it works and I LIKE IT!). I tired to go a bit more painterly on the Storyteller's face than I do with my normal Mouse Guard coloring. Part of that was that the splotchy texture works on everything -Mouse-Guard-ish but not as much with people's skin tones.Lots of color holds (areas where I color my black inkwork instead of leaving it black) were applied to the stained glass window including an overall glow for the window.

I had fun with this piece. I struggle to draw people since I'm out of practice and never had a great hold on it even when I was taking figure drawing, but I do find that drawing craggy-faced old men comes very naturally to me.

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

Emerald City: March 30-April 1 

Boston Comic Con: April 21-22

Up too late coloring for a long post this week...

Gronk Guest Art:
Last week Katie Cook featured a pinup piece I did for her webcomic Gronk. Katie and her husband Ryan just brought home their first baby and Katie asked for a Guest piece to post for her strip while she is on self-employment-maternity-leave. Wished I had time to do a full strip for her...





Art about Art:
An Art History professor I had did an assignment on the concept of "Art about Art" where you were asked to do some piece of artwork based on another artists' work, or specifically one of their pieces. I made a variable puzzle based on the work of Piet Mondrian. The pieces were all wood, and two sided (sometimes with different colors) and they could be arranged to fit in the frame in a variety of ways. I cut a channel into the frame so that a sheet of plexiglass could be slid in once you had an arrangement you liked for display. I did all this, even though I never had the particular class with that professor that this assignment was given...but I heard him talking about it, and wanted to try my hand at it. The result (these two Mondrian puzzles) were Christmas gifts for my two sisters that year.



Mouse Guard Fan Art:
Denver Brubaker, cartoonist of the webstrip The Checkered Man sent me this great drawing of Kenzie. I really like the feet on Kenzie and also the watercolor background. Thanks Denver!



2011 Appearances
MSU Comics Forum: Jan. 22
C2E2: March 18-22
Phoenix Comic Con: May 26-29
Cherry Capital Con: June 12-13
San Diego Comic Con: July 20-24
Baltimore Comic Con: Aug. 20-21
New York Comic Con: Oct. 14-16

Runners Bad Goods Pinup Process

Since Sean Wang's Runners: The Big Snow Job just wrapped it's first issue over at runnersunivers.com, I thought I'd show the process on how I did the pinup piece for him (an exchange for the pinup he did for Mouse Guard Winter #5). I started with my sketchbook and the section from the first Runners Arc I wanted to tackle (the old crew's hijinks...see inset panel). At this point I'm doing some rough layout ideas, but also getting a feel for the characters and their poses.

After scanning the sketches I can manipulate them separately and tone them to make it easier to keep track of what lines belong to whom. The ships they are riding were based in part on an iPod recharger. I only sketched one half of it, but was able to just mirror it in photoshop. At this stage I can also fix anatomy errors, like heads being to small or needing to be tilted. This composite technique allows me to get a final layout without having to do much (if any) redrawing.

I printed out the composite and used a lightbox to ink straight onto the bristol using my printout as a guide. As I mentioned in a previous post on lightbox use, I tend not to re-pencil, but to ink directly off my roughs. This helps keep the paper clean of pencil, and cuts out a step where I may tighten up and lose some life from my sketch. Inking is where a lot of the look of the final artwork comes into play. I focus on textures and line weights to make sure the forms are readable and that fabric is moving like fabric, fur like fur, etc.

Then after scanning it, I work with 'flatting' the colors in. This means picking rough colors and assigning where they go (where a shirt ends and an arm begins for example). Then I started adding the shading and painterly touches and light effects. Lastly I wasn't thrilled about how the palette turned out when I used the 'real' colors and since the 'old crew' were shown via flashbacks in the first Runners arc, I opted to go with a toned/muted palette for the final art.

Muppet King Arthur #1:
Due to art not being ready on time, Many fans may have seen my Muppet #1 cover solicited in Diamond on various sites online as the #2 issue cover. To my knowledge this cover will be printed on issue #1 (I'm now working on #2 so it can be in on time for it's printing). With Arthur's symbol being a dragon, I opted for Uncle Deadly to be the masthead of his boat and a small bearded dragon to be the design on his shoulder armor. Dave Alvarez (artist on the series) went with a La Choy Dragon homage for his cover.


Happy Thanksgiving:
For us here in the States, Thanksgiving is this week. I have a great deal to be thankful for, chief among them my Wife, family, & friends. However, I wouldn't have the success I do without you folks out there who are fans of my work, so Thank You. I mean it. I have a career because people enjoy my work and I don't ever want to take that for granted.

Fan Art:Should have posted this for Halloween, but better late than never. Fans of the book brought their baby dressed in a Mouse Guard costume to the Windy city con back in September. Pretty adorable!
and remember, if you have Mouse guard fan art you want to share, email me through the mouseguard.net contact info to send me your work.

Upcoming Appearances:*
Live reading: Holiday Walk at Flint Public Library: Dec. 8 (6:30 & 7:30pm)
----2010----
Alaska Library Confrence: March 4-7
CGS Supershow: March 27-28
C2E2 (Archaia Booth): April 16-18
Motor City Con: May 14-16
San Diego (Artist Alley): July 22-25
Baltimore Comic Con: August 28-29

*more 2010 dates may be added

Dames & Monsters '09 & Muppet Peter Pan #2

Dames & Monsters:
For the 2009 Emerald City Comic con, I was one of several artists (Frank Cho, Stuart Immonen, Bruce Timm, Scott Morse, Ted Naifeh, +42 other very talented folks) who did a piece of art in the Dames and Monsters convention book. (From what I understand there may be a few left if you e-mail the convention organizers). The original artwork is being auctioned off for the Seattle Children's Hospital. So bid bid bid people (hey it's for charity!)
All the auctioned artwork is on ebay here or
you can bid on my piece here

Muppet Peter Pan #2:I saw that Boom put up the cover for the 2nd issue of Muppet Peter Pan. I still am having a really great time doing these covers and I'm thrilled to be able to draw the Muppet characters in all these locations/costumes/story scenarios. "Thanks Boom! I'll keep drawing them as long as you will have me!" For this cover, I was happy to flourish up Gonzo as Captain Hook. Gonzo is my favorite Muppet, so I take even more pleasure in drawing him. I thought about having the feather in his hat be the tail feathers of a chicken that sat on his head under the hat...but I decided to go more traditional (and since I don't think that's in the story it was just embelishment for my own glee) However, note the chicken motif on the ship's railing and the pommel of Gonzo's saber.

Mouse Guard RPG wins 2009 Origins Award for best Role Playing Game!!

Luke Crane did a wonderful translation of my Mouse Guard world into a playable and fun game. He and I talked early on that the game had to be something more than just an RPG where you happen to be mice, one that really took the scale and the lifestyle of my characters and made the mechanics focus on it. So thank you Luke! And now it has won RPG of the year 2009 upsetting Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. Even though Mouse Guard uses only 6 sided dice, I think it just rolled a natural 20.

You can find out more about the Mouse Guard RPG at:
Burning Wheel's Mouse Guard RPG forum or Archaia




Social Networking:
I am excited about the use of social networking and its relationship between fans and creators (being a creator who also is a fan of other creators). I now use Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and this Blog (and that's not counting regular ol' e-mail.) I want to invite all of my fans to use the Blog, MySpace, and Twitter to keep in touch and connect/comment/question/compliment/or complain. However, I'd like to keep Facebook as a more personal site for friends and family I know personally and keep in touch with. I'm not trying to complain here, I just want fans to know that if I have ignored a Facebook request it's not a snub, just please contact me through one of the other venues.



Fan Art Redux:

A few posts back I mentioned how Walter Harris did a great job on his Mouse guard action figures he made from Ewoks. Well, he's been at it again and now has 3 'waves' (1: Saxon, Kenzie & Lieam. 2: Sadie, Celanawe, & Midnight. & 3: Rand, Conrad & Gwendolyn.) Take a look at his site for detail photos of all the characters. Thanks again Walter!

Upcoming Appearances:
San Diego Comic Con: July 22-26
Wizard World Chicago: August 6-9
Signing at Paradise Comics Toronto: Aug. 22
Dragon Con: Sep. 4-7
Windy City Con: Sept. 19
Long Beach Comic Con: Oct. 2-4
Baltimore Comic Con: Oct. 10-11
Mouse Guard Live Readings in the Michigan Area: TBA



Next Time (or soon thereafter): SDCC info...