Legends of the Guard Hardcover art process

The third Legends of the Guard Volume will be collected in hardcover later this year. Like all Legends of the Guard cover, the images are Legends themselves. To the left you can see the cover as it will appear on the book, but for today's blogpost I'll go over the process to get there.

I started with the idea of the Legend, which was a story seed I'd jotted down (with about 5 others) for contributors who needed some ideas to get them started. A story about a mouse who rode a snake as a mount had never been claimed, so I used it for myself. The snake and mouse were drawn on copy paper for me to scan to resize and place in a cover template file to make sure everything fit with logos, spine location, etc.

After I composited the subjects and digitally painted in some color to help establish the horizon line, I printed out the layout (on several sheets of printer paper and then aligned them and taped them together.) On the printout I started penciling in all the clover and grasses that would make up most of the landscape of this cover.


Here you can see my pencils on the printout. This is something that looks very detailed and chaotic, but since it's organic repetition of shapes, it's not as complex as it appears. I just keep doodling the same shapes over and over overlapping some, filling in gaps with back, and drawing a blade of grass or a clover flower popping up very so often to break the monotony of shape. The only downside with this was that I so tightly penciled the clover that there was less to do in the inking step and it made me feel like I'd lost some of the life and detail in my pencils.

After adding in the clover on the printout, I decided I needed more background...the sky was missing something. So I went with a mouse city. For inspiration I looked to James Gurney's painting for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara of the Windmill Village.  I drew my mousey dwellings on copy paper aligning them to the printout on my lightbox to make sure I was drawing the buildings only in the open spaces.

With the various printouts and sketches taped to the back of Strathmore 300 series bristol at different times, I was able to ink the cover on my lighbox. I used Copic Multiliners to ink with. I prefer the 0.7 nib for most of my lines, but I drop down to the 0.3 or 0.2 for really fine details or lines like the mouse's eye.

Below are some process shots I took with my phone and shared on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as I inked.

After I finished the inks I scanned them in and started to color the piece with flat color in Photoshop. I added a color hold to all the village inkwork to help it recede into the background. I'd already established most of the color palate for this cover back when I did my digital mock-up/composite, so this was just a matter of coloring inside the lines.

To render the color and get the shadows, highlights and texture, I use the dodge and burn tools with a textured brush. In areas like the clover (or when I do shingles or a forest floor of sticks) I select groupings of the shapes and then make them darker, lighter, or shift the color compared to a few around it...and I keep doing that until the clover all look a little different and not like they were painted on a computer.

Here again is the final cover art sans-logo and border. The book is due out this Fall and you can read about the legend of this mouse and snake inside its pages.

2015 Appearances:

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Boston Comic Con July 31- Aug. 2

Long Beach Comic Con: Sept. 12-13

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

Art-Bubble Comics Festival: Copenhagen: Nov. 14-15

Legends of the Guard Vol 3 #4 Cover Process

This week I'm sharing the cover to the final issue of Legends of the Guard Vol. 3 (I still have 1 cover to do for the Hardcover collection, but that's for a later blogpost). The final cover is shown to the left, but below is the process for the piece from concept to pencils through to colors. 

My original note to myself when I started this volume of Legends was: "#4: Insects crowning a mouse". The visual I had in mind then was much spookier and moodier, with misty dark blues in a foggy forest with a floor of scattered bones. But when it came time to draw this cover, I felt more whimsical and wanted the piece to feel more like a fairy tale. The mouse would be wearing a long cloak held up by some flying insect (I quickly thought moths were the right choice).  On copy paper, I sketched out the elements, doing some Google-fu to research types of moths and their markings as well as fireflies and even a caterpillar of one of the moth species.

I scanned those pencil drawings into Photoshop and started composing the cover's layout (keeping in mind where the fold between front and back cover is as well as where the logo is placed). For the background, I had a checkerboard pattern in mind already (I was thinking of is because of Edmund Dulac, one of my favorite illustrators, used it in his fairy tale illustrations often). I went in search of stock photos of stone arches that I could decorate with a checkered pattern and found an islamic facade that fit the bill. I modified the proportions, re-built the pattern and used it in several places the original photo didn't have it (including as the tile floor)

After that digital composite was built up with all the characters placed an background set, I printed it out at full size (8.25" x 16.25") and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my lightbox, I was able to see the printout and use it as a pencil guide to ink on the bristol surface. Because I knew I wanted to push the background wall back with color to separate its business from the characters, I left a little space between the subjects and any of the background inks (other than where they meet the floor).

I scanned the inked artwork and started the process of establishing color areas called "flatting". The palate for the background was partly established by the original stock photo, but also by a few of Dulac's pieces I had in mind while working on this piece. The other colors were just put in as place holders as I filled in the spaces on the characters differentiating them from one another.


The final colors were achieved (after altering my flats to the palate that worked to keep the characters visible but looking like they belonged in the scene) by using the Dodge & Burn tools in Photoshiop and a textured brush. I added some effects to the fireflies to make them glow and some subtle rendering on all my color holds on the background and tilework.

Legends of the Guard Vol.3 #4 will have the full "legend" of this image on the inside front cover. And will feature stories by: Aaron Conley & Fabian Rangel Jr, Becky Cloonan, & Ryan Lang.

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

FCBD: Jetpack Comics NH: May 2nd

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Long Beach Comic Con: Sept. 12-13

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

Art-Bubble Comics Festival: Copenhagen: Nov. 14-15

Legends of the Guard Vol. 3 #3 cover process

In this week's blogpost I'm sharing the cover to Legends of the Guard Vol.3 #3 and the process I used to do the artwork for the cover. With the covers in this series being legends themselves, they give me a chance to explore imagery I wouldn't normally do in the Mouse Guard books. In this case: an under-sea mouse...

I'd done a commission for a fan a while back who originally wanted "Aquaman as a mouse", but that was at the time I'd stopped doing commissions of mice as things outside of how they would appear in my comics (no more mouse Batman or Boba Fett). I drew that commission in the spirit of an Aquaman type character, but as they would appear in a Mouse Guard legend. I went back to that piece for inspiration while sketching out the elements of this cover. The seahorse, coral crown, seaweed cape, and trident stayed, but I wanted to do more with the mouse's costume and also add some menace with the eel.

Putting the patchwork of sketches together into a viable layout that works with where the cover fold is as well as the book's logo is a job to be done in Photoshop. I tinted the various sketches to help make it easier to see them as separate elements. I mirrored the mouse & seahorse to fit around the logo, I also had to cut apart and distort the seahorse to get the posture right. The image shown is a printout of my digital layout, but all the undersea landscape you see I roughed in in pencil on the printout itself.

I taped the printout (with drawn landscape elements) to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Then using a lightbox, I can see through the bristol to the printout and use it as my 'pencils' to ink from on the bristol surface. Texture & pattern became a big part of this piece. I looked at photos of real seahorses & eels as well as lots of coral formations and sea floors to get inspired about the types of lines & marks I'd use and how dense to pack them.

After scanning the inked piece, the longest part of setting up the color file was establishing the color holds (areas inked black I want to be a color instead). There were a lot of them on this cover: the bubbles, the fish, the eel dots, the seahorse pattern/dots, and the coral. The rest of the setup is laying in flat un-rendered colors (which may or may not be my final color choices) The goal is to establish the various color areas, that the eel's eye is different color than his body, that the one type of coral will be a color other than the coral piece next to it, etc.

The last step is to render the image and add shading, texture, highlights and special lighting effects. I use the dodge (lighten) and burn (darken) tools to get most of the work done, though I did use a paint brush and isolated areas with the lasso to give some subtle color shifts on things like the eel's body. The colors are muted a bit compared to my initial color flats, but this is a case where I was pretty close with my gut instincts.

Legends of the Guard Vol.3 #3 will have the full "legend" of this cover on the inside front cover, and will feature stories by: Mark A. Nelson, Ramon Perez, and Jake Parker

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

FCBD: Jetpack Comics NH: May 2nd

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Long Beach Comic Con: Sept. 12-13

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

Art-Bubble Comics Festival: Copenhagen: Nov. 14-15

Legends of the Guard Vol 3 #1 Variant covers

Legends of the Guard Vol 3 issue 1 will not only have my cover (seen left) but the first issue will also have variant covers by Ramon Perez (Tale of Sand), Humberto Ramos (Fairy Quest), and Eric Muller.


Retailers must place their final orders TODAY for this issue. Diamond code: JAN151140

The Ramon Perez cover will be a retailer incentive cover of 1/10

The Humberto Ramos cover will be a retailer incentive cover of 1/20

The Eric Muller cover will be an intermix cover of a 10% ratio IF the total issue run gets above 10,000 copies.

Like my traditional Legends covers, the inside of the issue will have a one paragraph story of what the "Legend" is depicted on the cover for each of these variants. And for the interior? Legends told by Skottie Young (Rocket Raccoon), Hannah Christenson, & Mark Buckingham (Fables) with intercut tavern scenes of the storytellers at the June Alley Inn by me.

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BONUS!

Below are the roughs/pencils for the variant covers by Humberto, Ramon, & Eric!

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

Legends of the Guard Vol 3 #2 cover process

About a month ago I shared the process for the first Legends of the Guard Vol.3 cover...today I'll share the process for issue 2 of that series. I've been asked why in Mouse Guard I've never really shown other mouse-sized mammals with societies....why no chipmunks or squirrels. To be honest, I'd only left them out because of my wanting to focus on the mice...but decided that someday I'll need to fold them in and explain their absence in the books-so-far. 

While I'm not ready to explain all of that in a single cover, or even reveal what the story of this covers is, all you need to know is that I thought it would be fun to show 1 mouse who joined the fray of a battle between chipmunks and squirrels (who I've now decided had some long-standing feud). Referencing photos of those species, I did drawings of the players involved on various sheets of paper. Jeremy Bastian & Jay Fosgitt helped me with a suggestion squirrel 'armor'. I'd originally sketched it in as cloth, and they mentioned using found objects like leaves would be cool.

I scanned all of these characters and, in Photoshop, arranged them into a composition. This arrangement took some time. I'd drawn several of the character imagining which counterpart they square off against...in some cases I was able to do that, but in others I couldn't puzzle piece it together that way. Also the squirrel who I thought would be on the cover, ended up being the taller one on the back cover. But it was all to serve a greater layout and composition with room for the logo and keeping in mind where the crease marking the front and back cover lay.

The composition is then printed out (on two sheets of legal paper and taped at the seam) then taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I ink the piece on a lightbox where I can see the printout through the bristol. I use Copic Multiliners for the inks. I added in the tree branch as well as the leaves (loosely in pencil 1st, then with ink) as I worked on the cover. This cover has a lit of the same kind of lines for almost every detail, so thick and think outlines and densities of those marks help establish one form from another.

After inking, the piece is scanned to begin the coloring of the piece. In Photoshop I use flat colors (not the final color choices) to establish where one figure ends and the next begins, where the clothing  varies from fur and even from other adjacent clothing. Putting in these flat placeholder colors is called 'flatting' and it amounts to an exercise less bout artistic choice and more about the technical of coloring in the lines.

For the final rendering of the cover, I honed in on the final colors and started rendering. I'd not planned on making the squirrels grey squirrels...but since the chipmunks were all brown and much of the squirrel clothing was going to be earth-toned, I needed to give them some other hue to contrast. The rendering was achieved not through the paintbrush tool, but using the dodge (lighten) and burn (darken) tools. 

Legends of the Guard Vol.3 #2 will have the full "legend" of this cover on the inside front cover. And will feature stories by: Dustin Nguyen, Nicole Gustafsson, & Kyla Vanderkulgt

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

Legends of the Guard Vol. 3 #1 in progress preview

For this week's blogpost, I'll be sharing some previews of in-process work for Legends of the Guard Volume 3 #1 (in Previews this month: Order Code JAN151140). To the left is my wraparound cover for the issue (process post on that cover here). The issue will also be a first for Mouse Guard with variant covers from Humberto Ramos, Ramon Perez, & Eric Muller...but I'll share more on those as we get closer to release. Below are process pages for the three contributors for this issue:

Mark Buckingham:
I chose Mark to be in Legends for obvious reasons. Besides his talent and a delightful person, the body of work he's most known for is Fables which features all manner of talking animals. Mark and I chatted about what he'd like to do for a Legends story sometime early last year, and then again at Baltimore Comic Con towards the end of 2014. I seemed to recall Mark saying something in our earlier talk about doing a story with a goose, at Baltimore, he didn't remember saying that, but liked the idea of drawing a goose. Mark added

"The reason David and I discussed using a goose in my story was due to my inclusion of a goose in medieval costume in the illustration I did for the Fabletown and Beyond Convention poster/T-shirt design, which I remember David telling me he was quite fond of during the show.

I took inspiration for the story title from the Anthony Phillips ( the original guitarist of Genesis) LP "The geese & the ghost" (1977) which has long been a favorite of mine, with beautiful artwork by Peter Cross (Anyone familiar with my work on Fables will immediately spot his influence on me)."Below are Mark's pencils, inks with inkwash, and final art colored by Lee Loughridge for his story The Gosling and the Ghost."

Hannah Christenson:

Hannah falls in to the category of artist/storytellers who are not "names" but do work worthy of much larger attention. I first saw her work online (Hannah's Blog) and kept her in mind as someone to tap as a Legends artist at the first opportunity. After drafting up 5 (!?!) different pitches for Legends, I asked her to pick the one she would be most excited about drawing (since they were all good). Hannah had been taking some blacksmithing classes with her husband and chose to do her pitch that involved a blacksmith for her contribution The Armor Maker. Below are her digital roughs, inks, & colors. Hannah Added:

"Ever since I was a little girl I loved armor, warriors, and knights, and I'd even told my mom I wanted to be a blacksmith when I grew up. I also love stories about "side characters" or the support people outside of the traditional hero who sort of rise up and help in a way they thought was beyond themselves (thus becoming one of the heroes, I suppose).

The process was really awesome on my side of things, from pitching all the stories to working on last edits. I loved all the stories I pitched but I had hoped to get to do this one. I really like armor. "

Skottie Young:
Skottie had originally been tapped for Volume 2 of Legends, but due to a communication error, we thought he was unable to contribute. But we are correcting that with this volume. Skottie loves folklore..so much that his first creator owned series is all about fairy tales (more info about it here)
I don't want to share too much of Skottie's story yet, but it draws from his real life experiences with fatherhood and the wonder of a child. Below are the inks to Skottie's 1st page as a well as a Mouse Guard Daily Doodle of his from back in 2011.

My pages:

I'll be linking the stories together through the storytelling competition at the tavern. So I've been working on designs for the storytellers/inn patrons as well as dusting off my model of the June Alley Inn so I can get my pages turned in on-time.

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11

Legends of the Guard Vol3 Cover #1 process

Legends of the Guard Volume 3 is going to be a return to the June Alley Inn where tavern mice sit and tell tales to try and clear their bar tabs. As with the previous two volumes, those tales will be written and drawn by creators I've handpicked. However I'll still be writing and drawing the tavern scenes as well as the covers for the series. For today's blogpost I'll share with you the process for the cover art of issue #1.

The concept for this piece started with the idea of a larger animal in Mouse Guard perhaps having a mouse city or even just a single dwelling on it's back. I wondered what animal would be able to carry that load and not risk shaking the whole dwelling apart in it's rapid footfalls or writhing route through the forest: Turtles. I drew each turtle separately on paper and then on a lightbox and a new sheet of paper, drew houses to match up to their shells. I also drew the inhabitants this way. Over the course of 8 scraps of paper I had the cover assets.

I scanned each of those paper scraps, tinted them and reassembled them in Photoshop. This allowed me to make easy alterations within the framework of the template of the cover. I could rotate turtles or shift their house-loads, or re-size mice, or move entire turtle-house-mouse combos around on the cover until I found a layout I liked.

The above digitally-assembled layout was printed out on several sheets of printer paper and then taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my lightbox I was able to follow the layout image as a guide or instead of "pencils" as I inked. For inking, I use Copic SP Multiliners mostly a 0.3 & 0.7 nib. As always, I tried to get a varying amount of grey in the piece and used different textures to get there: stippled rocks, thatched roofs, and various turtle scale patterns.

After the inks are scanned, the next step is to start the coloring process. This is refereed to as "flatting". This is to establish major color areas as being different from one another (and in Photoshop I make these each new layers: Turtle skin, shells, rocks, walls, thatch, fur, clothes 1, clothes 2, etc.). These colors are rarely even close to the final image palette, but meant to serve as easy to read placeholders.

The final step of coloring the cover is to make the final color choices, all the rendering (shadows and highlights) as well as to add any color holds (areas where I wish the inkwork to appear as color rather than black). I do all the rendering with the Dodge and Burn tools in photoshop and using a stock brush that adds texture and mottling as I work.

Legends of the Guard Vol.3 #2 will have the full "legend" of this cover on the inside front cover. And will feature stories by: Skottie Young, Mark Buckingham, & Hannah Christenson

2015 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con Mar. 27-29

Trolls and Legends Festival Mons, Belgium April 3-5

C2E2 April 24-26

Motor City May 15-17

Denver Comic Con May 22-25

Heroes Con June 19-21

San Diego Comic Con July 8-12

Baltimore Comic Con Sept. 25-27

New York Comic Con Oct. 8-11