King Fisher & Guardmouse

Earlier during this year's 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 just an earnest drawing of a belted Kingfisher. I looked at a few photos for reference as I worked. The fan's request was that a Guardmouse would be spear fishing while rinding on the back of the bird. So, atop a lightpad on a second sheet of copy paper placed over the King Fisher pencils, I drew the Guardmouse and all the gear associated with fishing and riding a mount.

I then scanned the two drawings and assembled them in Photoshop and blocked in a rough landscape with a quick digital painting.

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). The background was all inked while leaving a white gap between it and the foreground/character lines. This helps add some depth, but also with the next part of the coloring stage.

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) like the background trees and the water. Leaving the gap between the inks for the foreground and background made isolating those colorholds easier.

Here are the final colors all rendered and textured. I do most of this work only using two tools in Photoshop: Dodge and Burn. These are tools that date back to when Photoshop was a photo retouching tool and emulate part of the development process to over and under expose areas––ie: make areas darker and lighter. So with a stock textured brush I add shadows and highlights.

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