Dawn of the Black Axe Hardcover

Dawn of the Black Axe, the three issue Mouse Guard mini series about the first wielder of the Black Axe is coming out in hardcover in early 2026. The miniseries was written and colored by me and drawn by Gabriel Rodriguez (Locke & Key).

To Pre-Order: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/813486/mouse-guard-dawn-of-the-black-axe-by-david-petersen/

For the hardcover collection, I did all of the book design and asked Gabe to do a new illustration for the cover. Here you can see the final cover design, but below I'll walk you though the process Gabe & I went through to create it.

I sent Gabe some reference and a sketch of the type of image I though the cover needed. Specifically Bardrick with the Black Axe (referencing an old print of mine and a panel of Gabe's from the book) along with the concept of some kind of knot of the five snakes behind him.

Gabe was worried about making the background too chaotic and unreadable and opted for a more geometric and stylized version of the snakes (he told me he was inspire by Thulsa Doom's symbol from the Conan movie). Here are his pencils:

Gabe then inked the artwork in his expert way of knowing how to play with line weight and pattern. And he sent over a high-res scan. 

I then did the color flatting on the piece establishing flat colors for everything and also creating color holds (areas where I want the linework to be a color other than black) on the snake circle and then on all of their eyes. Most of the color choices were established in the issues already I needed just to sample them.

The final colors were done using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop to render shadows and highlights and add some texture with a stock brush.