Darkheather Weasel & Bat

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 A weasel in Darkheather with a bat companion. In this post I'll break down the steps to creating the illustration

In the epilogue for Winter 1152, I included a few panels showing a weasel in a boat in the distance with a candle on their head and a bat hanging from their arm like an upside-down falcon on a falconer's arm. I think I had a clever idea of what that was going to be some day for a future story––but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. No worries, I can still go back to it whenever I have a clever idea of how to tie it in.

The weasel, bat, and room were all drawn separately on sheets of copy paper and then digitally assembled. I was looking at reference for the bat, and certainly am referencing a photo of a Moorish tunnel room for the location (though I flooded it and added a boat)

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 the stippling of the stone bricks so the candle offered a bit of halo glow, but also so the tone of the background pushed the more open figures forward.

With the inks scanned, the color flatting (painting areas of flat color to establish all the color areas) started. I went with a very purple base (much like the Darkheather pages in Winter 1152) and shifted base colors of the weasel and bat in that direction too. 

It's also at this stage that I established color holds (areas where I wanted the lineart to be a color other than black) for the cobweb shawl, candle glow, tile symbols on the staff, and the water ripples.

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. There was a lot of adjustment to color balance wherever the candle light would hit that had to be selected using a lasso tool with a soft feather.

This illustration, along with many more, is in my NEW sketchbook 'Past Whereabouts' available in my online store: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/