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/