Gilkey Warlocks RPG – Pius Westcombe

This year is the ten year anniversary of the short story I did for Gotham Academy issue 17 titled 'Whatever Became of the Gilkey Warlocks". It was a tale about four friends at the boarding school who find a hidden room to play the RPG Serpents & Spells in 1984 during whatever the Bat-verse's version of the satanic-panic was. (past blogpost about the tale here: http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2016/04/gotham-academy-short.html)

As a fun exercise I decided to do character portraits of each of the Warlock's RPG personas since they were never seen in the story. For this post I'll be breaking down the art process for Davey Kurtz's Serpents & Spells character: Pius Westcombe.

The Gilkey Warlocks are based on my friends and I back when we were younger and more active as RPG-ers. Davey Kurtz is the Gotham version of my friend Mike Davis. His character Pius Westcome (a name arrived at using a school he attended and his street name) is described as 'tiny gnomish illusionist' and it's his incantation of the spell 'animated shadows' that causes the trouble for the friends when unknowingly under the effects of Jonathan Crane's fear toxin.

I started with a pencil sketch on copy paper that I scanned in to Photoshop to add some color blocking as well as pasting in a few stock shapes to become his staff and poof of magic.

Like the original Gilkey Warlocks pages, I decided to do these in pencil. Though I did opt not to do as much rendering and tone to keep it less messy and quick since it's just a fun exercise. A printout of the color-blocked sketch was taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol and on my Huion lightpad I was able to do a clean drawing using a mechanical pencil with HB lead.

The shading and texture was added to certain areas like his striped pants, boots, and quilted harlequin cap. The poof of magic got the most value range of rendered pencil to try and make it something more etherial and not just a 2D shape.

With the drawing finished I scanned it into Photoshop to start the painting process. The first step of that is called 'flatting' where flat colors are laid in to establish all the color areas. On a more technical level, the pencils were on a layer set to multiply (which treats white as transparent, black as opaque and any % in between as that % of transparency) The colors were all put on a layer underneath that one.

Pius's colors were inspired by the purple and gold school colors of Whittier Middle School where Mike and I first met. They also seemed to be a good wizardy palette.

For the final colors, I tinted the pencil art to be a warmer sepia (except the magic poof which I color balanced to be purple) and did some painting as well as some dodge and burn tool work (Photoshop's holdover tools from being a photography retouching program that allow over and under exposing areas with a brush). 

To get the magic to be more flashy I added a few painted layers on top of everything set to various layer modes to get that glow effect.

That's one Gilkey Warlock RPG character down––I'll share another in about a month's time...

Sienna under a mushroom in the rain

I'm continuing a series of posts about Mouse Guard illustrations I've done that are included in the new release: 'Past Whereabouts' that made its debut at Emerald City Comic Con and is now available in my online store.

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 Sienna taking mushroom shelter in the rain. In this post I'll break down the steps to creating the illustration

This illustration was the result of checking several boxes I felt the sketchbook needed: rain, an insect, a character from the comics who doesn't get much panel time. So, I started drawing a series of mushrooms (looking at some reference) with Sienna (Orange cloak, mace, tender of the Lockhaven hives) taking cover. This is one of the rare times where the bits I drew weren't drawn separately and then assembled––the pencils were all done-in-one.

But I wanted to reference a mace, a bee, and a lantern which were photos, 3D models, or photo collages I pasted in. Then I digitally pained in the rain on top of a light blue-grey base tone.

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 rain. In the comics I've done rain as an overlay, but after seeing Gabe draw rain on the page in Dawn of the Black Axe, I thought I'd give that a try, at least for this sketchbook piece.

With the inks scanned, the color flatting (painting areas of flat color to establish all the color areas) started. I kept that cool grey-blue as the base sky, and then chose colors around that. I had to paint the rain on it's own layer and fade out any areas where the linework didn't close it off. This way I could adjust the opacity of that layer to get some of the colors underneath to come through and make the scene look wet.

It's also at this stage that I established color holds (areas where I wanted the lineart to be a color other than black) on rain, the bee's wings, and the lantern glow.

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 lantern's light would hit that had to be selected using a lasso tool with a soft feather.

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

Creator Commentary: Baldwin the Brave

I've recorded Creator Commentary for all the short stories that appear in Baldwin the Brave and other Tales hardcover.

Many of these short stories were released for Free Comic Book Days and are short morality tales where the lesson of the story is being learned by a mouse we know as an adult in the main Mouse Guard series...what childhood story made Saxon Saxon or Kenzie Kenzie?

Here is the second video of that series with behind the scenes info, writing notes, and art details for: Baldwin the Brave

Watch on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/Xl-c98LTnlk

 A reading of this story is available here: Mouse Guard: Baldwin the Brave

Watch on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/6NIAVo7qfZI