Barkstone Approach

With the new sketchbook now available, I'm continuing a series of posts about Mouse Guard illustrations I've done that are included in that new release: 'Past Whereabouts' available in my online store: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/

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 it's Saxon, Kenzie and Lieam approaching Barkstone. In this post I'll break down the steps to creating the illustration

One of the 'Past Whereabouts' I wanted to journey back to was that walkway up to the gates of Barkstone from Fall 1152. The location was based on a real tree behind the antique store I worked for when I started Mouse Guard. I still had reference photos to look at as I drew the tree and rotted root walkway. On another sheet of copy paper I drew the characters, and then in Photoshop assembled them all with some light color blocking while adding in a photo of the door reference from Fall as well as a stained glass window with references to 'strength' and 'home' I felt was appropriate for thiscity on the western edge of the mouse territories.

The digitally assembled 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)

The inking focus was on all that texture of the tree bark and fallen ground cover and debris. I tried to keep some of the tree bits open as well as to not flood the characters with too much line density so the eye has somewhere to rest.

With the inks scanned, the color flatting (painting areas of flat color to establish all the color areas) started. The colors were based on the colors from Fall, but darkened and muted down a bit. The door is much more red than it was in the Fall book––I wanted it to have a bit more identity and not just blend in as another shade of brown. 

At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I wanted the lineart to be a color other than black) flag/banner design.

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, is in my NEW sketchbook 'Past Whereabouts' available in my online store: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/