Happy 2026 Guardmice

Fellow Guardmice:
Aim high & stay on target in 2026!

 

Small Wooden Spoons

For family Christmas gifts this year, I made small wooden spoons. Most are the size you'd use for a pinch of salt or a scoop of sugar or tea leaves or ground coffee, but a few were larger for more universal purposes (though I stopped making those because I found the little ones so much more fun to make. 

The wood species were oak, rosewood, teak, leopard wood, zebra wood, paduk, bubinga, and bocote mostly from scraps I had when I made wooden utensils a few years back (see further down)

It started with being inspired by the carvings of Giles Newman, a UK woodworker who does a variety of leaf shapes as-handles for spoons like these. And for Julia's birthday, I tried my hand at making one. T

hough the handle is an oak leaf, the wood species is rosewood (a scrap piece that I was given for free by a woodworker who had filed chapter 7 bankruptcy and wanted a fellow woodworker to have nice material before the auctioneers came to liquidate everything)

Since Julia is a cook, she uses her spoon for her specialty sea salts. I used mineral oil (which is food safe) to protect the wood and bring out the beauty of the grain.

And for many a December night in sub freezing temps, I was out in the garage woodshop bundled up with space heaters running as I cut blanks, bored out the starts of the bowls, and then carved and sanded and sanded and sanded until I couldn't feel my legs or fingers or until it was too late to be running power tools for my neighbors.

I broke several that were 70%-90% finished, but I still had enough finished so every family member I was gifting got two.

To read a post about the wooden utensils I made family for Christmas in 2022:
https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2023/01/wooden-utensils.html

Guard Induction

As I work toward a new sketchbook in 2026, I'll be doing a series of posts about Mouse Guard illustrations I've done that will be included in that new release: 'Past Whereabouts' that will debut at Emerald City Comic Con and be available in my online store soon afterwards.

Sketchbook illustrations are often a chance to explore corners of Mouse Guard that I haven't gotten to yet. Whether it's certain locations, characters, or just ideas or thematic tones. For this illustration we have a guardmouse being inducted into the Guard by a Matriarch. and in this post I'll break down the steps to creating the illustration 

The Matriarch shown here is one who is depicted in the stained glass of the Matriarch chamber: Allyson, who spoke the words 'It Matters not what we fight, but what we fight for'.

I was able to draw her more completely here on copy paper than the stained glass honoring her in The Black Axe volume. The Guardmouse being inducted was also drawn on copy paper and the two were assembled in Photoshop along with another drawing of a ruin based on some architectural model I found online. I blocked in some colors to help me see the forms of the two characters a bit easier.

The digitally assembled pencil layout was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore Bristol and placed on a light pad. With the light shining up, I was able to see through the bristol surface to the printout to use as a guide as I ink the artwork. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens to do the inking (the 0.7 nib mostly)

I kept the density of the inks mostly to the textures of different brick, stone, and ground cover, though the shapes on Allyson's tunic were pretty bold here, I knew they would be toned down in the final colors.

With the inks finished, I scanned them and started on the coloring process. This first step is called flatting and is about establishing all the color areas (fur, skin, clothing, ground, sky, etc) with different flat colors––a professional version of coloring-inside-the-lines.

Most of the color choices for the characters were established in the layout (though I wish I'd kept the Guardmouse's cloak more orange to avoid confusion with Saxon...who wouldn't even be born yet) and the environment's color were about making something cohesive and warm. 

It's also at this stage that I established color holds for all of the Matriarch's clothing details as well as the plants growing on the other side of the ruin.

The last step was to render the colors with dodge and burn tools and a stock textured brush. Dodge and Burn are tools based on photography terms (and from when Photoshop was a photo retouching program) having to do with purposely over or under exposing areas––or in other words darkening or lightening them.

I use these tools to create shadows and highlights to my base colors while giving a bit of a pebbly texture with that stock brush.

This illustration, along with many more, will be published in the sketchbook 'Past Whereabouts' which will debut at Emerald City Comic Con in March 2026 and will be available in my online store soon afterwards: mouseguard.bigcartel.com

 

Winnifred Cloverdale: Daggerheart RPG Character

My RPG friends from childhood have reunited to roll some dice again. Jesse Glenn got inspired to run a newer RPG from the folks at Critical Role called  Daggerheart. We've had two sessions so-far, a character creation session and then the first part of the adventure. After we made characters I drew my character and posted about the art process here: http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2025/09/caledon-spargan-daggerheart-rpg.html

For this post I'm sharing my drawing and the process of making the art for Mike Davis' character Winnefred Cloverdale.

Mike's character is a halfling war wizard. Mike had done some quick doodles of her with a punk pixie haircut and a houndstooth scarf. I asked him about what other details I should incorporate. He told me about her hallowed axe, a leather strap armor skirt, and a pouch of cards she uses to cast her spells. 

Taking all of those bits into consideration I started drawing her on copy paper. It took a few drawings of her head/face before I was happy to merge them into another drawing or two of her body and gear, all assembled in Photoshop and tinted different colors to keep the drawing bits clear from one another. I warped a houndstooth pattern into the forms of her long scarf. 

The above layout was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of 300 series Strathmore bristol. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the bristol surface down to the printout to use as a guide as I inked. The inks were done with Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 nib mainly).

Beyond the struggle I have with drawing/inking any human face the other challenge was the houndstooth pattern. I decided to isolate part of that pattern almost like a rune on Winnifred's hallowed axe. Most everything else was rather straightforward inking-wise.

When the inks were scanned into Photoshop I could start the coloring process. That first step is called 'flatting' and just about filling in the various areas with flat colors (no rendering, gradients, or textures). Mike told me Winnifred's hair was blonde and that he always loves green/olive incorporated into his character designs. 

At this stage I also established color holds, which are areas I want the inkwork to be a color other than black. They are on the houndstooth, here eyes, freckles, axe runes, and the smoking magic trail (though by the end I also did some on her eyebrows to soften them up a bit.

The last step was to do all the color rendering adding highlights, shadows, and textures to the base colors. This was done with Photoshops's dodge and burn tools.

Drawing your RPG character (as well as the other players in your party, if you happen to be the 'artist' of the group, is one of the real pleasures of playing an RPG and part that I certainly missed. I still have yet to share Nick's character: a Drakona (Dragon person) Seraph which I hope to share soon along with all of the characters together. 

Wind in the Willows Quartet gears up Illustration

My illustrated edition of Kenneth Grahame's classic Wind in the Willows published by IDW has been released in paperback (order here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796673/the-wind-in-the-willows-with-illustrations-by-david-petersen-by-kenneth-grahame-david-petersen/)!

This book took me years to complete the illustrations for when it was first released, and I'm so pleased to have it back in print, so for this week's post I'm going to share the art process of one of the inked illustrations from the book: Gearing up.

"Rat, with an air of excitement and mystery, summoned them back into the parlour, stood each of them up alongside of his little heap, and proceeded to dress them up for the coming expedition. He was very earnest and thorough-going about it, and the affair took quite a long time. First, there was a belt to go round each animal, and then a sword to be stuck into each belt, and then a cutlass on the other side to balance it. Then a pair of pistols, a policeman's truncheon, several sets of handcuffs, some bandages and sticking-plaster, and a flask and a sandwich-case."

This is one of the main visuals that I always wanted to tackle when daydreaming about someday drawing an edition of Wind in the willows. Before this Rat has gone around making piles of weapons; pistols, swords, etc for each of his friends so they can storm Toad Hall and take it back from the weasels. It's also from one of the few chapters where all four of the main characters are together. Here you can see I've put all the drawings above together, edited in Toad's weapons, and color coded each character to make them easier to see apart from one another.

I inked the final black and white illustration on Strathmore 300 bristol by taping a printout of the above layout onto the back of it and placing it on a Huion light[ad where I could see through the bristol to use the layout as a guide. For pens I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 & 0.3 nibs).

The textures on each of the character's clothes is where most of my focus was so that there were different densities of grey and the illustration wasn't overly muddy with clarity of each character's body language.

My illustrated edition of Wind in the Willows is available NOW for purchase:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/796673/the-wind-in-the-willows-with-illustrations-by-david-petersen-by-kenneth-grahame-david-petersen/

The book has Grahame's original text, with over 70 illustrations by me as well as a new cover (blogpost about that art process: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2025/09/wind-in-willows-2nd-edition-cover.html).

Lower Port Sumac Model Video

The model of Lower Port Sumac used for issue/chapter 2 of The Black Axe. It's made of print-&-assemble medieval village papermodels, basswood sticks, strips of bristol board, and a sheet of styrofoam.

In the video below, I talk about building it, what Mouse Guard city the house models were used for before this one, the real-life inspirations, and how building the model helped creatively imagine what kinds of merchants bought and sold in the sea-level port sumac.

Direct YouTube Link:

https://youtu.be/Zg6vTfvuuC8