Mouse Guard MONDO POSTER Process

Today Mondo is releasing a Mouse Guard Fall 1152 Silkscreened 24" x 36" poster!!! In the past I've done two posters for MONDO: Brave & The Rescuers (you can click those links to see the process blogposts for those posters), but getting to do a Mondo poster for my own book series, is all the more amazing!!!

To the left you can see the final colors for the print, and below I go through the process from sketch to separated color file sent off to the printer:




For the Fall 1152 poster I needed to re-create the events of that book in one image that summed everything up. No problem, right? Harder than you think. I started with the idea that I should have the 3 main mouse characters as well as the snake (everyone still remembers that scene from the first issue). So, I sketched on copy paper, Lieam, Saxon and Kenzie with the plan to put Lieam front and center, with the other two either side of him. The snake would loom up over them from behind.

I then decided that I needed to show Midnight too...his part of the story was too big to ignore for a poster...and as a way to show this is an image for a graphic novel series, I added a horizontal panel at the bottom for Midnight's army in the rain. (Sorry, I don't have the original pencils of Midnight handy as-of the typing of this post) I composited the sketches (tinted different colors to help me make sense of the line-spaghetti) in Photoshop and added some border treatments, type, and a rough color scheme.


The poster is 24" x 36", but to make my life more manageable, I didn't do the artwork at that scale. to make sure I could ink the piece and have it still fit on my scanner (in 2 passes) I worked at 16" x 24". I printed the layout on multiple sheets of letter-sized paper and taped them together (the grid you see in the photo is to help me re-allign the pieces of paper into a single taped-together image). I also dropped out most of the color-scheme to save some ink and to make the lines easier to see.


Once the printout was taped to a large sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol, I started inking the piece on a large lighbox. I used Copic Multiliners (the 0.7 & 0.3 nibs mainly). Below you can see several photos in-process I took as I inked to show my editors & friends:

Here are the final inks. I added the rain on the back side of the piece and scanned it separately so that I could easily isolate those marks as they overlapped Midnight & his army. I had to ink this  on and off for several days because it was around this time My Mom, who has Parkinson's & Dementia, came to live with us so we could be her caretakers. It made the work go a little slower only being able to ink when she was asleep, resting, or deep into a TV show.

As I said above, I scanned the inks at high-res (600) in 2 separate passes on my scanner (I also had the misfortune to need a new scanner just as I was ending this piece and had to install and learn the quirks of the new scanner for this one.

For the coloring process I had to limit the palate to under 10 colors. Here was my initial pass, but after the folks at Mondo helped me out getting all the technical specifics worked out with the separations, we ended only needing 8 colors.






Below is the final file sent to the printer for silkscreening. Knowing Mondo poster sales, these may allready be gone by the time this post goes live, but check with MONDO to see if they have any left!!

2017 Appearances: 

New York Comic Con: Oct. 5-8

Mondo Poster: The Rescuers

As you may have seen, Mondo opened a Disney themed gallery show with new posters from a number of great Disney movies (Disney posted all the posters online here). I was asked to do a piece for the 1977 movie The Rescuers. I'd done a Mondo print before of Pixar's Brave, and was honored to be asked back. My Rescuers print, is available for purchase at the gallery and Mondo will release any remaining prints online. Today I'll run through the process for making the artwork for the print.

It had been a while since I'd seen The Rescuers, and while a few iconic moments came to mind, I felt I should re-watch the movie before drawing up anything. I'm glad I did. I knew I'd wanted to feature the main characters in the dragonfly-powered leaf-boat, but I had somehow forgotten about the scene with the alligators (Brutus & Nero) carrying off kidnapped Penny & her bear or that she was held hostage on a run-down riverboat. I sketched up all of these elements in my sketchbook and on a scrap of paper to try and hone in on what my versions of these things would look like (while still keeping the look of the classic Disney designs).

From there I did a digital composite of my drawings. I resized characters, changed the spacial relationships between them, and even used the liquify tool to warp some of the lines and features to get the image where I wanted it. Because this piece was ultimately going to be silkscreened, I had to limit the palette to 10 colors, so I was careful, even in this early stage, to be thinking about color usage & using repeating colors. This piece was then sent off to Mondo for approval. With the green light, I printed this off in a large format (took 6 sheets of legal paper to patchwork it back together), taped it to the back of some bristol, and warmed up my light table for the inking stage...

Because the final silkscreened print is 24" x 36" and I wanted to minimize the loss of line quality when getting enlarged, I inked the piece on 19" x 24" bristol. Some of the elements were inked separately (like the water splash & ripples as well as the title & type). This way, I could isolate them easier from the main illustration for their proper color treatment without having to do a lot of extra work.  Even though I have a large scanner, I did have to scan each large sheet of bristol in parts and then edit them back together in photoshop. The pieces were all inked with Copic Multiliners, a brush & ink bottle for the larger black areas.


To prepare a piece for silkscreening is a lot of work beyond the image-making process. Each color represents a separate screen that ink color is squeegeed through. The order in which the colors print is important, and so is if the colors butt up against each other, or if they overlap. If the seam between the colors isn't being printed over with yet another dark color (like the dark outlines), then the first color needs to be printed under where the edge of the next color will be (this is called "trapping"). I learned quite a bit about this on the Brave poster from last year, but this Rescuers piece was more complicated because my linework was more open and I was relying on color for more of the depth & design. This animated .GIF shows each color layer as if it were being printed in order.

Here are a few detail images of Bianca & Bernard, Brutus, Teddy, Evinrude, Penny, & Nero from the final version of the poster:

And another look at the poster in full.

Later this week, I will have some Artist Copies to sell through my online store ...I'll Tweet and Facebook update when they become available. *UPDATE* My signed artist copies are now up for sale (along with the original art pieces): http://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/mondo-rescuers-poster-signed-artist-copy

2014 Appearances:

Emerald City Comic Con: March 28-30

C2E2: April 25-27

Motor City Comic Con: May 16-18

Comicpalooza: May 23-25

Phoenix Comic Con: June 5-8

Heroes Con: June 20-22

San Diego Comic Con: July 23-27

Boston Comic Con: August 8-10

Baltimore Comic Con: Sept. 5-7

NY Comic Con: Oct. 9-12

Mondo Poster: Brave process:

Last Sunday Mondo released a Brave poster I did for their Oscar themed release night. Mondo has a great reputation for working with talented illustrators & designers and terrific production quality on their prints, so I was thrilled and honored to be asked to participate. I loved Brave and took my nieces to see it at their first Drive-In movie experience last summer. When released after Brave won for Best Animated Film on Sunday, the poster sold out in a few minutes (as Mondo prints tend to do). In this week's blogpost (which preempted the normally scheduled Mouse Guard architectural model, now to-be-seen next week) I'll run through the process of creating the image and the tricks in preparing it for the  silkscreen process.

I started with a rewatching of the movie and planning the concept points to be: a scene that seems 'brave', defining Merida's form by her hair, and getting to draw Mordu the villain bear. I sketched up a design and mocked it up in photoshop. Since the orange hair was a planned focal point, I opted to make the rest of the palette in the blue family. I trimmed the piece out with a designey wreath of the wisps and a border used in the tapestry in the movie. With a silkscreen print, you are limited on colors, so I planned to use colors over again. The orange is also the color of Mordu's dead eye, the brown of the ground is also the details of the border, the tan of the bow is the field of the border.

So it would be easier for me to separate out the colors onto different layers for the silk screen separations, I inked the components separately. The first up was the darkest screen color, the linework of Merida, Mordu, and the ground. Because the final print size is 24" x 36" I wanted to ink this LARGE to minimize any quality loss when enlarging my scans. The inks are 17" x 24" (and had to be scanned in parts since it wouldn't fit on my scanner all at once. The inking was done with Copic Multiliners, a brush for the fills and a brush with liquid white for making the negative space of Merida's hair.

The next inked piece was the border. I pieced together two different borders from Pixar to get the design to fit the perimeter of my piece. The animals were all from the tapestry in the movie, and to fill in the tall side bits, I found a few tapestry borders they used in some promotional art for the film. I hand inked the border because I wanted the piece to work as a whole and not seem like parts of it were photoshoped together. I wanted to hand distress the design in a way that ties it together with the inkwork on the characters. This piece is also 17" x 24" and had to be scanned in parts.

I inked other parts of the piece of smaller pieces of bristol like the darker lines of Merida's hair (seen here with round registration points that match up on the bow). Though I could have just processed the art from Pixar, I decided again to hand ink the Brave logo knotwork for the same reasons I hand inked the border. And that strip in the middle...that's a patch to extend the bottom of the original inks...but I haven't gotten to the reason for that yet....

At this point I processed all my inked artwork and the assets given to me by Pixar and got my file assembled and ready for approval. Pixar hadn't seen my rough, so the 'finished' version was their first time seeing my piece...and they requested changes. Normally, I've found that suggestions given to an artist on approvals for a licensed property are 80% silly and unnecessary. The folks at Pixar though...were 100% right and helped me make a much better finished product. They requested changing the scale of Merida to Mordu, to nix the wreath of wisps into a few ground wisps, to get Merida up higher than the logo (so she's not standing on it), and eliminating the tangent of the arrow on Mordu's lip. To fix this I was able to do most everything digitally (even drawing in some patch hair on Mordu with a Wacom tablet), but the strip of sticks I mentioned before had to be hand drawn to extend the bottom of the image when everything shifted upwards.

I had a big learning curve on this piece. Not only did I have to re-set my brain to think in terms of limited color, but also about the printing process. The order in which colors are printed and if they need to overlap or not is a real trick to figure out. Colors are generally printed light to dark...but there are exceptions that need to be taken into account there and to make sure there isn't a gap in between colors that butt against each other, the previous color needs to go under the color that will print after it. This is called 'trapping'.  I've put together this animated gif of the different layers to simulate what the print looked like as it was silk screened. I hope Mondo will ask me back for another print, as I now feel I have a better handle on the technical process of planning and preparing the art for a silkscreen printing like this.

Here are a few detail images of Mordu & Merida from the final version of the poster:

And another look at the poster in full.

As I said at the start, the poster sold out at Mondo in a few minutes of its release. At a later date, I will have some copies to sell through my store, but I will not do so until I have the prints in-hand. Please do not try and request them in advance, offer to reserve one, or ask when I will release my copies...I'll Tweet and Facebook update when they become available.




Watercolor Wednesday: Both last week's and tomorrow's Watercolor Wednesday pieces are exercises in redesign of old characters of mine. First up is something I called Poohbah, which started life as something closer to Genma Saotome in Panda form from Ranma 1/2, and ended as something more like a bear with bunny ears & Mickey Mouse markings. He was a bit of a Hobbes character for a little flying boy named Zippy when I created him (even did some animation in my DOS based Disney Animation Studio program in the 90's). This redesign still holds to the idea that while Poohbah may look like a real creature, he's just full of stuffing.


The 2nd is a redesign of a lizard creature I wanted to do as a puppetry project in the late 90's. These lizard guys would be a party of adventurers in the arctype tradition of fantasy RPGs. I still hope to build some of these puppets some day...

Tomorrow I'll post more paintings in my online store.

2013 Appearances: 

Emerald City: March 1-3

Fabletown Con: March 22-24

C2E2: April 26-28

Spectrum Live: May 17-19

Heroes Con: June 7-9

Albuquerque Comic Expo June 21-23

San Diego Comic Con: July 17-21

*more 2013 dates coming*