For the cover of Legends of the Guard #4 Volume 2, I built an architectural model of a moorish style column. With the fan excitement over the video of Adam Savage talking to me about my models on Tested.com I wanted to do some videos where I talk about a specific model, how I built it, what the materials were, and why I built it in the first place.
Last week I mentioned the model of the Seyan gatehouse I built for the story "Serive to Seyan" which appears in Baldwin the Brave and Other Tales. Most of the story takes place outside of the mythical mouse champion afterlife of Seyan...specifically at the gatehouse.
To the left is the drawing I did of the big establishing shot of Seyan (in fact, the only one I've ever drawn). I looked at a lot of royal castles and citadels..both real an imagined by other artists as well as the capitol city of Hell in Hellboy in Hell by Mike Mignola. I combined motifs I liked in all of these: turrets/towers with gallery arches or open columns, domed and conical roofs, and a sense of impossible-yet-believeable stacking. I drew Seyan before I started on a design for the gatehouse, but having this drawing in hand, I was able to start...
Using the motifs I'd played with variations of all over the larger drawing of Seyan, I did a drawing of a tower perched over a bridge, its gates the only way across the bridge. Walls (which surely encase all of Seyan) also flank the tower (and seem to suggest an internal walkway of some sort). From the start I wanted there to be an arch in the bridge just before the gate. I drew all of this into my sketch and then started creating the model.
I built the model over the course of an evening. The main body of the tower is a large packing tube. The shingles and bridge are chip board..the stuff that backs a pad of bristol. I save all of mine when I go through a pack and set it to the side for projects like these. The arches, tiles, and gate details were printed and then glued on with rubber cement. Mostly the piece is glued together with rubber cement though.
I tend to build models so they can be modularly assembled. This helps with getting the correct view of a model without blocked view of the model by itself. It's also very hand when it comes time to store the model and to make repairs if part of the model is damaged at some point (and I've had to make repairs on most every one of my models at some point)
I 'skinned' the model with paper that I could draw out the slit windows on to. The arch supports under the gallery rim were achieved by glueing a paper printout to a built up rim made of more mailing tube with the back cut so its inner diameter could wrap around the outer diameter of the tower tube. I repeated this process several times for the lip the columns sit on. I cut in a section for the gate, so the gate didn't curve like the tower, but lay flat recessed inside the tower. On the side you can see a little nub sticking off. I added the details of the chipboard archway stones as a way to give this model a bit more of three dimensionality, but also as a color variance to help me see areas of the model better. That piece is what keys in the wall piece to keep it in correct alignment when the model is assembled. 
For the roof I first made a cone out of bristol board and glued it to the dowel columns. After cutting lots and lots and lots of chipboard scraps of slightly varying sized rectangles, I started gluing them on like shingles with the lowest row being glued first and each row going up slightly overlapping the prior row. The very top edge is a straight piece of chipboard I curled and wrapped around where the shingles meet the spire. I used the same shingle technique to top the roofs of the walls that abut the sides of the gatehouse tower.
Models like this come in handy. They helped me figure out the finer detail designs and placements of the tower in 3d. In my rough sketch, I didn't have those details locked down, and even if I did go to the effort of doing a really tight architectural drawing, I'd only have the place from one point of view and rotation. Building a model is a great way to figure out how different shapes connect in 3 dimensions, how proportions and scale really look (especially when rotated) and so that when, if a story comes along later, you can revisit this location at any angle and not have to rely on remembering what you were thinking or rely on drawings that may not have all the details from every angle.
Over a year ago, I posted about a false start on this piece. I wanted to do an oversized Mouse Guard print, with lots of detail, focusing on non-violent mice, and a ceremonial feel to it...but as I posted back in May of 2013, I never got it to a place where I could ink it. Today I'll go through the steps I took to get to this finished piece and my plans for it.
Using a few dishes & coffee mugs as circle templates, scrap bristol, cardboard, chipboard and basswood, I made model of how I thought the room should look. the brackets were cut on a small jigsaw to make life easier. I find making models like this to be very helpful not just with helping drawing in perspective, but also to help design a room in three dimensions as you build it. I decided to center the ceiling peak as I built this model, not just because it was easier, but because I as I held the rafters in different positions, I preferred it being not directly above the little platform the mice are on.
I photographed the model at an angle that worked with my original drawings of the mice and composited them together. This would serve as the perspective form foundation for the architecture I'd fill with curios and important mousey-things...but...this is the state where I abandoned the piece for over a year due to lack of time to devote to it. The original composite print-out stayed taped to my wall above my lightbox as a reminder to get back to it when I could.
Last week, I finally knocked the dust off this project and got it rolling again. I printed out the photo/drawing composite and on a lightbox re-prnciled the whole thing on several new sheets of paper (taped together to match the scale). Here I was finally able to add in all the items (many of which are nods back to various Legends of the Guard stories). I looked up to notes I'd jotted on the original sketch composite taped above my workspace, and made a few new ones as I went.
I taped the above redrawn pencil piece to the back of a sheet of 300 series bristol (24" x 12") and on my lightbox I started inking the piece: example 1, example 2. I ink with Copic Multiliner pens. I used the 0.7 nib mostly for this one, other than the eyes of the mice which I did with a 0.2. As usual I was adding various textures and line weights as I went to draw the viewer's eye through this messy cluttered room.
I scanned the inks in two different scans and then re assembled the pieces in Photoshop to start the coloring process. I established the various areas of the piece (fur, books, floor, clothes, wooden beams, etc) with obnoxious and garish colors to help me figure out if I stayed in the lines and if I established enough different areas so I could re-isolate any given object in the room to render it or alter it's final colors.Here again are the finished colors. I did all the rendering using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop while using a textured brush. This piece took me the longest of any single Mouse Guard page/piece I've ever colored. Partly because of all the little details on the shelves, but also because I knew this piece was going to be reproduced at-size and not shrunk down like other Mouse Guard pages and covers.
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Even though we still have issues of Legends of the Guard Vol 2 to be released, Today I'll walk through my cover for the hardcover collection of the second volume of Legends of the Guard. On the left is the final cover, with border and logo, and credits. But first I started with an idea for the cover of "a mouse peddling goods involved in a race against another peddler or a predator". It took some suggestions from friends and my wife Julia before it shaped into "two guardmice with a cart harnessed to a quail fleeing minks"
First up, I wanted to design the cart. I looked at a few medieval era cart drawings and recreations, but decided I'd rather scratch build something myself to get a feel for it. I used scrap basswood (they sell bags of it at the hardware store) to frame up the cart, lashed it together with string, and used some cardboard for the planks & wheels. I like building models this way (opposed to digitally) because it gives me a reason to push away from the computer, use my hands and engage my brain in not just a design sense, but a construction sense. How it's assembled is as important to me as what it looks like in the end.
I sketched out a quail, several minks, and the guard mice and assembled them in photoshop with a photo of the cart in the position I wanted. I struggled back and forth on what the minks should look like...should they wear clothes? if so, what type. I've only shown one mink before (Black Axe #4) and I drew it without clothing...but I felt these four needed needed them, not just to convey intelligence, but as a design choice to add some color and eye-lures to move the readers eye across the image better.
I printed out the above digital composite and taped it to the back of my Strathmore 300 series bristol. and then inked the piece on a lightbox using the printout as a guide. As you can see, I did a lot of the work in the ink. The mushrooms became so prominent because a fan tweeted to me that they'd like to see me draw more of them (they asked for morels, which I thought were too fussy with detail on this scale), so the guardmice now had a job of harvesting mushrooms.
The last step was to color the piece. I wanted to gain back the obvious 'up on one wheel' speed and fury the quail cart was going, so I added a color hold to all the inkwork behind the little ridge they are coming up over. Other than that, I colored this in my normal way, flatting in colors first and then using the dodge and burn tools to render each part and add texture. The overall palette is a bit more monochromatic that some of my past Mouse Guard work, but I'm aiming to be more subtle with color and not beat you over the head with it.
Reference Model: Upper Port Sumac:
Instead of designing these from scratch, I resorted to buying several commercial papercraft models.I printed out a few copies of each, but instead of assembling them as instructed, I kitbashed them making them into new buildings that were not someone else's sole design and also gave that look of layered building over time. A few branches from my yard provided the reference for the bases of the Staghorn Sumac plants that form a canopy over the upper town.
As I built the models, I came up with purposes for them. I needed a tavern for the scene, so that one was obvious, but the other two were thought of as I glued and taped and pasted. The one pictured to the left became the access to the rest of the city. The central opening leads to a secure door, and the bell above acts as a warning bell for the residents outside of the secure walls to get inside when predators are afoot.
The smallest structure (which only appears in the bird's eye panel of the town) I figure is a gatehouse of sorts. Beyond it is the path by land that leads either down to lower Port Sumac or out into the wider territories. I show Celanawe coming from this direction in the first page of the town.
Ultimately, the opening setting for my Free Comic Book Day story for this year takes place here (in the tavern specifically) so this model came in handy...though I had to figure out what the inside of this Weasley-esque building would look like ...but that's a post for later in the year....
Watercolor Wednesday: 
Confession: I made this model twice. The first time is when I was designing the room for the cover image. In the original incarnation the columns that make up the corners were from an attempt to make one full column and then cut into quarters. The result were some sloppy joints and wonkey lines. I'd also built it a bit small so that seeing the detail was harder than it had to be. Months and months later, when it was time to draw issue 6, I knew this model would be important (several pages take place here). So I rebuilt the model using some files I'd saved for the upper columns but also using my artwork from the cover as a skin for one of the walls.I had a better technique for making the upper columns this time too. I used wooden arched ribs or fins that stuck off the column to form a structure I could glue each paper strip of the column to.
The 2nd watercolor from last week was Cap Transfo, a character I first drew in 8th grade science class. Cap may be the first character I still remember making (and have record of). A little while back, I did a whole blogpost about character design that involved Cap and the project he was associated with (though I also had him & Zubelflex in their own story as buddy cops in the Intergalactic Space Police....you know...the IGSP)
