Dewberries colored Commission

 

Last year for the August 2020 ONLINECON I took a few inked commissions. I don't tend to do these any more because of how much added work they are compared to my toned commissions. But, they are something many fans still ask for, and if they are mouse-themed, I can color them for my own use for later publication in a sketchbook.

To the left are the finished colors of one of those commissions (one I will eventually collect in the next Mouse Guard sketchbook). And below I'll run through the art process of creating the art.

The layout/pencils for this piece started as several sketches on sheets of copy paper. The fan asked for a Mouse-family portrait of he, his wife, and their boys doing something outdoors. With a little more chat, I found out they enjoy picking dewberries in their back yard in the summer time. With five family members to fit into a composition, drawing each one separately so I can scan them and arrange them independently of one another until I get something that works. Tinting the drawings different colors helps me see those forms more easily. The bulk of the dewberry vines were quickly digitally painted in to help me work with masses and distribution of berries and leaves.

I printed out the above digital composition and taped it to the back of a sheet of 12" x 12" Strathmore bristol 300 series. On my Huion lightpad, I'm able to see the printout and I can use it as my 'pencil' lines as I ink. This way, at the end of the inking process, there are no actual pencils to erase and the artwork is as clean as I can possibly make it for the commissioner. 

I inked the lines with Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 and 0.3 nibs mainly)

Then the inks were scanned before Julia shipped off the original art to its new home. With the high-res scan, I could start the digital coloring process to be able to use it later for publication. This process starts with establishing where all the colors go––like a digital professional job of coloring-in-the-lines. I also used this step to paint in all my color holds (areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black). In this piece the holds were limited to the outlines of the berry stains.

Here again is the finished colored image. The rendering was all done using the Dodge and Burn tools in Photoshop while using a stock textured brush. I added some extra layers to simulate the light pushing in from the background.

I most likely won't release my next sketchbook until 2022, but this piece is already a guaranteed page in the publication.