TMNT 30th Anniversary Tribute

For the 30th Anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, IDW is doing a special 48 page book featuring new stories by past TMNT artists including a new cover by Eastman & Laird! I was asked by editor Bobby Curnow to do a pinup for the book. I've mentioned before what a special and influential part TMNT played in me understanding storytelling, comics, and wanting to be a creator (it also was the link that started my friendship with the real life-Kenzie to my Saxon: Jesse Glenn). To the left you can see the finished piece, but below are the steps of creating it along with some though process as I worked.

The newspaper concept wasn't my first idea. I originally was going to do something with the four turtles each lugging along all their earthly possessions (in an abandoned shopping cart, milk crates, patched duffles, etc,) down a sewer tunnel as just around the corner NYC sewer workers were doing work in that branch of their home. It proved to be something I saw more as a story and had a hard time summing it up in a single image. Instead I focused on just drawing each of the turtles in a cool pose where I might be able to group them together well. As I did that the concept of a newspaper came to me and I drew a 'photo' of Shredder too. Each of these are on separate sheets of copy paper, which give me mental freedom to make a mistake and pitch something that's not working because it's not on 'good' paper or bound in a sketchbook.

I scanned the sketches and composited them in Photoshop into a layout.I asked Bobby if I could use NEW YORK TIMES for the paper, but he advised copying their masthead design could be a legal issue, so I opted to make up my own that felt like the times, but was different. I tried other newspaper names like Sentinel and Journal...but liked Herald best (There was in-fact, a New York Herald which stopped publication in 1924). The type (though much of it is blocked or goes off the edges) was all written like a newspaper article. It was about a crime wave that police had few leads for, but after a botched subway hijacking, police may have found links from "The Foot Clan" to Oroku Saki pinning him as the masked "Shredder" crime boss. The date is an approximation of when Kevin & Pete first created the TMNT (they say it was late Oct. or early Nov.)

I printed the composited layout you see above onto copy paper (it was larger than one sheet so I had to patch it back together with tape) and then taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series Bristol. I had toyed with not inking any of the newspaper elements of then the Shredder 'picture' and just use my digital type and layout to save me time inking, but I tend to find that when you try and blend type and art together that isn't dialogue or a sound effect, it always sticks out like a sore thumb. So tracing over the printout I was able to hand letter the masthead and all the article, giving it a bit of imperfection as I went to replicate printing errors on newsprint. You will also notice I added heap of dead/unconscious foot soldiers around the TMNT. My original plan was to fade the turtles out to white, but opted to give them a more solid base and help sell the story about the Foot Clan crime wave.

As I started the 'coloring' stage, I knew I wanted to do something special for this piece celebrating the origins of the TMNT. Back when I discovered the turtles, they all wore red masks, and with Eastman and Laird being heavily influenced by Frank Miller's Ronin, I thought it would be fun to carry that over to spot color accents like in Sin City. The masthead got a bit of red too for balance. For the rest of the cover, I wanted everything to be in greyscale. The newspaper text & Shredder photo I made all grey to help push it back behind the turtles. After a bit of rendering and then applying a faux-halftone screen (to pay homage to the old duo-tone pages from the original TMNT run) the final piece was done and can be seen again below:

2014 Appearances:

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

Rocket Raccoon Cover Process

I was pleasantly surprised in the spring of 2013 to receive an email from Steve Wacker at Marvel seeing if I was interested in doing a Rocket Raccoon cover (this was before I did my Animal Avengers cover). I was given a lot of creative freedom and leeway for the composition. Steve said that it should be a cool shot of Rocket with his guns. I offered up that he could be on an alien planet and I went from there. This is a digital composite of three or four drawings in my sketchbook. I drew Rocket separately from the landscape (towering mushroom-trees). And I drew the guns on a different sheet of paper as well. Working with a piece in sections allows me to quickly scrap something if I don't like it without having to erase around the parts of the drawing I like. Once the sketches were all scanned and pasted together, I threw in a little color to get an idea of the final colors and mood.

With the above composite printed out and taped to the back of some Strathmore 300 series bristol, I inked the cover on my lightbox. I'd done lots of drawings of anthropomorphic Raccoons in the past with the Cats Trio comic my friends and I did in high school...and I'd even done a more recent inked and colored piece of Rocket Raccoon for a friend's blogsite. This being a cover, I spent a bit more care with the fur textures and tones. I also went a little nuts on the background mushrooms under the mantra "if ten are good then three-thousand are great!". The plan was to recede the background landscape by using a color hold and making the mushrooms seem to be way off in the distance...

However, when I was coloring the cover, I found that I was doing a lot of pushing and pulling to get Rocket and the ground he was on to come forward. When the background was lighter, the sky had to be light too, and that meant the foreground and Rocket were dark (just by the relative tones, not by me adjusting them). I opted to darken and lower the contrast on the further landscape and make sure Rocket was the lighter focus.

This cover will appear as a variant on the recently announced ROCKET RACCOON #1 written & drawn by Skottie Young! On-Sale This July!



*6-4-14 UPDATE: Bleeding Cool reports that the pre-orders for the issue are reaching 300,000! (I do not know  what percentage will have my cover). Exciting for a talking-animal book to get this kind of attention: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/06/04/rocket-raccoon-1-by-skottie-young-to-sell-300000/http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/06/04/rocket-raccoon-1-by-skottie-young-to-sell-300000/

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

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

Turtles in Time Cover #2 process

The second issue in the IDW Turtles in Time series will find the four brothers in feudal Japan. The cover required all four turtles again and I decided to have them on horseback to continue the theme of the turtles riding a mount since I'd already had them all on the back of a running triceratops for the first issue. Even though I knew the idea of them on horseback in samurai armor had already been done in the third live-action movie, I felt there was someplace new I could go with it. For today's blogpost, I'll break down my process for creating the final cover art.

Not knowing how to get all four turtles...on horseback...in armor, into a single composition, I started with just drawing each turtle as they would appear seated on horseback. I then drew horses I thought would match their position. I didn't draw them touching, because I knew this way I could adjust their final positions. In the image to the right you can also see the armor designs...I waited to draw them until I had a rough composite placement of all the turtles and horse (next step). The armor pieces were drawn on a lightbox over top of the resized and placed characters. 

After scanning all the sketches I was able to tint them (to help see which turtle was which...and to see where one horse stopped and the next started) and place together a composition. The background was designed to be very 2D to emulate a bit of Japanese woodblock printing and to not compete with the chaos that is 4 turtles in ornate armor on horseback. I did some research into the armor, but certainly made each suit my own. I tired to match some design qualities to each of the turtles. Leo's armor is the most elaborate and complete. He takes this very seriously. Raph's helmet and headpiece has sharp agressive angles and looks more worn. Don's armor pattern is organized. And Mike's is more flexible & comfortable looking. Each drawing was tinted for an easier who's-who for my editors.

The inks were done by printing out the digital composite of all my sketches and taping that printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore Bristol. On a lighbox I'm able to see through the bristol surface to the printout and use that as a guide for inking. This means I don't have to erase pencil on the final image (though I did make a few tightened corrections in pencil before inking the whole piece). I used Copic Multiliners (the 0.7 and 0.35 nibs and a brush tip for the trees). It was tricky to make sure I wasn't adding details to the armor that wouldn't show up when the final piece was reduced for printing. In the inked version, the trees come out much stronger than my vision of the final art, but I needed a solid inked shape to manipulate in color, so it unbalances the inked piece a bit.

I scanned the inked piece into Photoshop (I use an old version: 7.0 because it still works for me and has all the bells and whistles I need) and started isolating color areas. This is called flatting where you are only painting in areas with flat colors (rather than focusing on shading or lighting effects). These Other than the background, most of these colors are wrong, and were picked on purpose to be garish and wrong. I wanted to make sure I was making all the details on the armor and horse rigging pop. To help me isolate these areas, each color you see is also a different layer (for the most part, a few times different colors are on the same layer if they do not come close to touching) For the final color scheme, I tried to incorporate a touch of each turtle's bandanna color into their armor detail.

Here is the final cover again with all the proper colors rendered and shaded and with all the lighting effects:

Other TMNT in Time Cover Process Posts:

Issue 1

Issue 3

Issue 4

2014 Appearances:

FCBD: Harrison's Comics: May 3

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

Moonflower Mouse Print process:

Every year I release a new limited edition square Mouse Guard print. The past two years pieces (affectionately nicknamed "Peacock" & "Raspberry") were done with my wife's instructions to make the images "pretty". For this year's print, I continued the "pretty" edict and will be releasing this "Moonflower" print at C2E2, at shows for the rest of the year and in my online store in-between. Today I'll show the process of creating the print image.

The idea didn't come to me in a dream, but while I was very very tired and taking long blinks at my desk hours after I should have gone to bed. A mouse at night with nigh blooming flowers around her, framed by the moon, and clothed in beaded spider-web silk. I think I also figured there might be a moth in the image, but a few days later when I was starting the drawing, I decided to omit the animal companion. For inspiration I looked at Queen Amidalla's wedding dress and photos of Moonflowers. This series of pencil sketches (digitally composited together) features the same 3 closed blooms copied and mirrored for placement purposes.

The above digital composite sketch was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol. On my lightbox I was able to ink the piece using the printout as a guide (an image I tweeted of the piece in-progress). I modified each of the closed blooms as I inked them so thery were similar and took up the same space, but had variations of folds and wrinkles. The "beaded spider-web silk" was inked as a series of dotted lines (following a rough pencil web layout I taped to the back of the bristol). It looks a bit funny as an inked image because so many of the details are inked black, though I planned on altering them to all be lighter values in the color version.

I scanned the inked piece and started flatting in the colors. In this process, I'm less concerned about getting the right color values and more concerned with getting each area colored differently than the other parts around it: mouse fur, clothing, sky, flowers, moon, etc.). In-fact, in this earlier version of my color scheme (when I thought I was getting close to the right colors for each thing) the mouse had yellow toned attire. I was worried doing a cooler overall palate like I'd originally envisioned would feel too monochromatic and not give any sense of depth. But as I was working, Julia came down and convinced me to cool it all down again.

Here is another look at the final version of the print art. All of the rendering was done with a stock textured Photoshop brush and the Dodge and Burn tools. I used the inkwork to make a new layer of light stars, beading, and the moon's rim.

The edition of prints will be in the 300 range and debut at C2E2 this weekend. I'll have them up in the online store shortly after.

2014 Appearances:

C2E2: April 25-27
FCBD: Harrison's Comics: May 3

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

Beyond the Western Deep Pinup process

Alex Kain, who wrote the Legends Vol 1 story "Potential" has been writing a talking-animal webcomic for a few years. The series is called Beyond the Western Deep and is drawn by Rachel Bennett. This year Alex and Rachel are going to be publishing their first collection of the series. The physical book will be first released at the Boston Comic Con in August and available online afterwards (To the left is Rachel's work-in-progress cover)
I contributed a pinup for the collection, and today's blogpost is the process of how I went about making the artwork.

My first step was to decide what to focus on for a pinup. There are several characters, and while I was tempted to do a piece featuring the less prominent ones, I did in the end decide to feature two of the main cast Quinlan & Dakkan. With the Legends of the Guard connection between Alex and I, I thought it would be nice to have this pair in a tavern setting. Each of the characters and the background were drawn on separate sheets of copy paper, then scanned into Photoshop, tinted, and placed into a template for the pinup's specs. This allows me to shuffle around the pieces individually, resize them if needed, and get my placement just the way I want it. The Celtic knot was a low-res pattern I found online, modified and repeated as top and bottom borders.

With the layout set, I printed the piece out (on two sheets of legal paper that I taped together) and taped it to the back of a sheet of 12" x 12" Strathmore 300 series bristol. On a lightbox I'm able to see through the bristol to the printout and use it as a guide while I ink. For pens I used Copic Multiliners (the 0.7 & 0.2 nibs). I can't take credit for the character, costume, or tavern design since I really just followed Rachel's work, but I did try to make sure I was drawing my piece with my own voice, my own line quality and texture sensibility.

The finished inks were then scanned and in Photoshop I started flatting the colors for the piece. Flatting colors is all about establishing color areas. Making one character's fur a different color than the others or than their clothes or than the walls. It's a grown-up version of coloring-within-the-lines. In some cases, I use really garish and wrong colors when I flat because I don't want to get bogged down with color choices when I just need to establish the different areas. In this case though, most of the palate was already there for me in Rachel's art in the series.

The last step was to render all the color. I added highlights, shadows and texture for the piece using the Dodge and Burn tools with a textured Photoshop brush. A few color holds and special effects layers were added to make the lanterns glow and Quinlan's sash look embroidered.

You can go now and read all of Beyond the Western Deep now for free on the website, but the physical copy (with pinup material etc) will be coming to print at Boston Con.

2014 Appearances:

C2E2: April 25-27
FCBD: Harrison's Comics: May 3

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

ECCC Commission process

A few weeks ago, I opened up 5 commissions spots for Emerald City Comic Con. My goal was to get all 5 done before we left for Seattle. I managed to get 3 done, and took my portable lightbox to finish the other 2 at the hotel. I sketched all 5 out and printed digital composites of my sketches for each piece then inked them on Bristol a lightbox (using the printout as a guide behind the Bristol). Below you can see process images for each.

Mouse riding a Northern Saw-whet Owl

printout of pencils scanned, sized, & tinted

Inking on the lightbox

Finished inks!

Groot & Rocket Raccoon:

Printout of tinted pencil sketches

Inking Groot on the lightbox

More Groot inks (hard to know where to stop with this guy)

Finished Inks!

TMNT: Donatello & Splinter sparring:

Printout composite of tinted sketches, a quick sewer model, & a perspective grid

Donatello getting inked on the lighbox at the hotel

Splinter getting inked on the lightbox at the hotel

Finished inks!

Frenzied Rocket Raccoon:

Printout of composite sketch with star-burst stock art background 

Inking Rocket on the lightbox

Finished inks!

Celanawe & Conrad on a ship of Shell & Timber Scrap:

Printout composite sketches of each mouse & model photograph

Celanawe getting inked on the lightbox at the hotel

Finished inks!

For those ready to ask, here's the way I handle commissions: I do not have an open list and no not take commission requests by e-mail. I do inked 7" x 7" commissions like these in conjunction with conventions only. In the week before a convention, I open up a list in my online store for pickup at the convention.

2014 Appearances:

C2E2: April 25-27
FCBD: Harrison's Comics: May 3

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