Happy 2025

It's New Year's Eve––and just in a matter of hours, it will be 2025. While, as I always do, I have concerns going into this circuit around the sun, I'm also pleased that this year will mark the 20th anniversary of when I self-published the first issue of Mouse Guard.

To the left you can see a little illustration I did between Christmas and New Years of a very David Petersen-eque mouse riding a frog. May we be the mice atop a frog mount leaping into 2025 and hopefully hopping over as many of our obstacles as possible.

Below in this blogpost I go through the art steps to create the piece.

Rough:
I decided it would be nice to have a mouse on a mount, and I've done a fair number of mice on birds in recent years, and somehow I arrived at the alternative for a frog. I looked at reference for a leopard frog (native here in Michigan) and drew it on a sheet of copy paper. On a lightpad I then placed a new sheet of copy paper overtop to draw a mouse with some sort of basket-saddle.

The two drawings were scanned and assembled in Photoshop (tinted different colors). I then did a little digital drawing and warped both the Mouse Guard emblem and '2025' to fit the banner.

Inks:
I printed out the above layout and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series Bristol. On my lightpad I could see through the bristol surface to the layout beneath to use as a guide as I inked. I used a Copic Multiliner 0.7 SP pen.

The reason I inked the Mouse Guard emblem on the banner was so I could use this art piece again at some point (as well as sell the original without the date connotations) The 2025 was inked separately on another small piece of bristol. The little lines above the numbers were there to help me register them back up to the crossbar of the banner.

Flats:
With the inks scanned I started the process to color this piece called 'flatting' Flatting is basically a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines to establish with flat colors where all the color areas are (the fur is different than the hat is different than the frog is different from the banner, is different from the other banner, etc). I flatted this with the 2025 numbers properly registered back in place.

Also at this stage I established color holds, areas where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black like the numbers and the frog's eye and spots.

Final colors:
The last step was to render the finished colors. I do so using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop while also using a stock textured brush. The colors here are very different from the flats, and I did get them all adjusted closer to what you see here before I started adding shadows and highlights.

So, Happy 2025––Happy 20th Anniversary year from Mouse Guard, which is as much a celebration of all you fans who have enjoyed and supported it!