Extending art for a new banner

A few years ago I did an image for a print of Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand (https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2024/07/saxon-kenzie-and-rand.html) and since it's one of my favorite Mouse Guard illustrations I wanted to have it featured on a new banner for my booth (seen here at ECCC '26).

But, the horizontal format of the initial image didn't work with the vertical banner shape. And when cropped to fit, important elements didn't end up in the printed area. So, I did an art edit and extension to reformat the piece. Below you can see the steps.

I started with the original piece and then in Photoshop started digitally painting extensions on the top and bottom to rough in the forms of plants, roots, rocks, etc. It took a few attempts to extend the forms in a way that didn't look like there was an obvious seam or without blending in by inking too far over the top of what already existed.

I also moved Rand in toward the center more, so there was a gap where he used to be that also had to be filled in.

The overall size of this piece was already sized to fit the dimensions of the banner size and I left enough room at the top for the text.

With the rough done, I printed out the sections I needed to extend and taped them to the back of some Strathmore bristol so I could ink the linework for the new bits on top of my Huion lightpad. First off were the weeds above the characters and the patch for filling in the root where Rand used to be.

You can see I made some pencil marks of existing bits of lineart from the original to help me register the new art back into the digital file when it was time.

The larger bit of inking was the bottom section. Same process with a printout of my digital mockup taped to the back of some bristol and inked on a lightpad. There was so much going on for this bit with the detail of the ground cover but also how those lines needed to feed back into the existing linework that this patch was much more time consuming.

Inks scanned in and registered in place with the existing inks (I had to do some layer masking on both the new and old inks to get everything to flow perfectly) I colored the new tall version of this piece. There was a lot of eye-dropper color selections to try and blend the new color with the old while trying not to overpaint any of the old work where I could help it.  

The original version of this image is available as a print: 
https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/trio-print-14-x-20

and I've also now offered it as a playmat/deskpad: 
https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/playmat-mouse-guard

Below you can see the final version for the banner with the text and logo: