August Mouse Guard 2023 Calendar Art

This year I'm releasing a Mouse Guard 2023 Calendar. I'll be taking copies with me to Baltimore and selling them through my Online Store. I created seven new pieces of artwork specifically for the calendar (even numbered months mainly). The new pieces were all drawn at 12" x 12" (the size of the Calendar itself)

To the left you can see the final art piece for August. Inspired by tomatoes growing in my back yard, I wanted something more pastoral and calm featuring plants and food.

Below in this blogpost I'll walk through the steps to creating it.

Reference:
In our back yard Julia grows a few different types of tomatoes. These were growing in a raised bed and while Julia was away dog-siting for her sister for a week I was watering them this summer. Unfortunately, we only were able to enjoy a few of them before critters started taking nibbles out of each one that was even close to ripe.

Well, I was starting work on the calendar project when Julia was away, and I liked the shapes and colors, thinking every time I watered it that it would be a good backdrop for a piece. Here's a pic I grabbed on one of those watering sessions.

Layout:
I started with re-drawing the photo using the reference. I needed to crop the image down and figure out how I was going to handle rendering the texture of the leaves. I then drew a farmer mouse with a wooden pitchfork(?) standing watch over his harvest. But the piece needed more, so I added a little band of musicians who I guess are celebrating the bounty. And then I still felt like it needed more, so I added three fur Karner Blue butterflies to help the scene. I do feel like this is an illustration that got away from me in terms of composition or focus, but then somehow worked itself out through no fault of my own.

Inks:
With the above layout all set, I printed out the image (onto two sheets of legal paper that had to be registered and taped back together). I inked this piece on my Twitch stream on a Huion lightpad. Using the lightpad I could see through the 12" x 12" Strathmore bristol to the printout below so I could use it as a pencil guide. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens.

I inked a lot of the mice with the 0.3 nib Multiliner rather than the 0.7 I do most everything else with. This piece is all about density of detail and texture distributed within some orbs of open space.

Flats:
When the inks were done I scanned them into Photoshop and started the coloring process. In this step I am filling in each area with a flat color (no rendering, no textures)–it's like a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines. TSome of the colors I was able to eye-dropper from the original reference photo. The butterflies were interpreted from photo references, and the mice were colored to not clash or blend in with the scene.

At this stage I also establish the color holds (areas where I want the lineart to be a color other than black) on the water droplets.

Final:
I rendered the piece using dodge and burn tools as well as a stock texture brush to add all the light, shadow, and texture. Getting the the tomatoes rendered was first priority since the amound of realism & volume in them would discate how far I had to push everything else. I had some fun using a freehand lasso tool (with a slight feather) and changed the color balance several times around the butterfly wings to give more color depth and a slight iridescence. 

The Calendar is available in my online store: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/mouse-guard-2023-calendar