Monsters & Dames 2015

Every Year the Emerald City Comic Con publishes a charity art book called Monsters & Dames to benefit the Seattle Children's Hospital. The theme of the book is pretty self-explanitory in the title, but I decided to do something a little more Mouse Guard than I have in years past. To the left you can see the finished piece and this week's blogpost will show the process for making it from concept to colors.

With this year being the 10th anniversary of Mouse Guard, I opted to depict a "monster" & "dame from Mouse Guard. Someday I'd like to do an entire book just about all the Matriarchs of the Mouse Guard and I though this would be a good test illustration for that eventual book. To the right are my sketches on copy paper of a coyote skull (because I purchased one recently on a visit to The Evolution Store) and a past Matriarch Raina (who is referenced in the 'extras' of Black Axe (I also abandoned a drawing of a fisher because I felt this "monster" needed to have more of a supernatural feel than just a beast of the wild.

With the two sketches above, all I had was the idea that somehow Raina was able to lull a living skeleton predator to not gobble her up with the beauty of her music. Unfortunately  I didn't save a file of the step where I composite my sketches in Photoshop...so excuse the lack of a visual at this step. But I put the two drawings together in a square frame (so it will be easier to re-use in Mouse Guard at a later date) and added a top and bottom border of medieval sheet music (the arrangement found online) and with the Matriarch's name. I printed out that digital composite of drawings, music notation, and text for the next step...

I taped the printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Then placing the bristol on my lightbox I was able to see the printed image and use it as my 'pencil lines' to ink from on the bristol surface. I used Copic Multiliners (a felt-tipped nib ink pen similar to Microns...but better in my opinion) to ink in all the contour lines, texture and detail. The pile of bones, spider web, & harp-magic were not roughed in, even on my photoshop composite (you'll have to trust me on that) and I just inked the bones as I went from my head or lightly penciled in some guide marks for the web and sweep of the magic dots.

The inkwork is then scanned back into Photoshop to start the digital coloring. This step is called 'flatting' because you are establishing color areas with flat un-rendereed color. For a palate, I started with the established yellow-orange wardrobe of Raina from her window in Black Axe. To compliment that orange (and add some spook) I went with a darker blue for the background, and then balanced it out with yellow parchment & orange ink details on the top & bottom borders.

The last step is to render the color with shading and textures. I use a stock brush and the dodge & burn tools in Photoshop to achieve this. For this piece I added a lot of color holds, which are like a special effect where I have the inkwork as a color instead of black line. The music notation, text, spider web, harp strings, and music-magic are all painted with color to make the piece feel lees like a filled-in coloring book, and more like an illustrated scene. 

The Monsters & Dames book will be available at the Emerald City Comic Con for purchase (as well as the original art being auctioned off there) and remaining books are usually offered for sale online through the Emerald City website after the con ends.

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

Monsters & Dames 2014

The Emerald City Comic Con puts out an art book each year called "Monsters & Dames"...with the theme matching the title. The book benefits the Seattle Children's Hospital and is a great collection of artwork from many of the guests and artists in artist alley. I've done pieces for 3 of the past books: Beauty & Beast, Frankenstein's Monster & Bride, & A Dame riding a Dragon. To the left you can see this year's piece, and today's blogpost will cover the process for making the artwork.


The beginning of this piece had a few false starts, including the idea of a monster admiring fairies (dame-fairies), a dame/monster wedding, and a dame walking her pet monster on a leash. I kept playing with monster heads to get me into the right mood for the piece, but none of these were what I wanted. I did like some of what was happening with one of the heads though (middle top), and thought I could make it better...

Taking that head I liked above, I worked out a better head design and felt I got to play with the monster's personality a bit. It combined a few ideas from the past designs, with a little bit of a Disney tiger mouth/jaw structure. The full figure sketch followed, which gave me a sense of the overall layout and scale of Monster to Dame...and then set about getting a dame pose that worked. The final dame sketch was a hybrid of a few reference photos for the pose, dress, & umbrella. For the beast, I was still undecided on those horns...with or without...

I composited the sketches in photoshop into a template for the file specs of the piece. The yellow and orange border lines represent the edge of the 'live area' as well as the 'bleed' (or in layman's terms, where you want to keep all the important bits, and where you need to extend the art out to so when the paper is trimmed you don't have an unprinted edge). I tinted the image of the dame to help me make better sense of the lines and figures. And while debating the horns, I dropped in a photo of some real ram horns and liked them so well, I didn't bother redrawing them for the layout.

I printed out the above composite and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On a lightbox, I was able to see through the bristol and use the printout as a guide to ink by. The inks are all done with Copic Multiliners (the 0.35 & 0.7 nibs mainly) I focused on adding a nice amount of texture while still making sure the outer contours still read well. The bone landscape was roughed in very loosely in the layout, so I did pencil in tighter bones as I inked...referencing dinosaur, large mammal, and human skeletons.

The inks are then scanned back into photoshop and I start the coloring process. This stage is called 'flatting' because I'm simply establishing the color areas with flat base colors. I had no idea what my overall palate would be for this piece, but in the flatting stage it doesn't really matter, just color in the lines and differentiate areas that are meant to be different colors. I tend to make a new layer for most types of 'things' in my file: "beast fur", " skin", "dress", "sky", "bones", etc. It makes it easier to re-isolate an area when I want to render it or adjust the color overall.

Here again is the final render, which I achieved by using the dodge & burn tools (with the drybrush as my brush to add texture & mottling).



The Monsters & Dames book will be available at the Emerald City Comic Con for purchase (as well as the original art being auctioned off there) and remaining books are usually offered for sale online through the Emerald City website after the con ends.

Also this year at Emerald City, I'll be debuting an offset print of last year's Beauty & Beast piece and offering more of them for sale in my online store after I return home.

UPDATE:

Gordon Smuder Interpreted my Monster as a puppet:

2014 Appearances:

MSU Comics Forum: February 22

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

Monsters & Dames 2013 process

The Emerald City Comic Con has a fantastic Art book they put on every year at their show called: Monsters & Dames. The book features art with...well...Monsters & Dames by the various guests of the convention and the money raised goes to a Seattle Children's Hospital. As I am returning to Emerald City this year, I contributed a piece for the 2013 book. In year's past I've done a Frankenstein's Monster & Bride piece and a Dame riding a dragon. This year I wanted to do something a bit more fairy-tale-ish. So I did my take on Beauty and the Beast.

 I did a lot of looking at other versions of the pair, illustrations by Edmund Dulac and various other golden age illustrators, the animated Disney movie and stage play, and Jean Cocteau's La Belle La Bete 1946 film. The goal was to give something new, and Petersen-ish, but still familiar. I drew a Beauty and a Beast in separate pages in my sketchbook (so if I wanted to redraw or correct one or the other, I could do so without fearing erasing any part of the other) and then assembled them in photoshop. Beauty was inspired by a photo of Anne Hathaway and Beast is an amalgamation of my own illustration tendencies, Disney, and La Bete's wardrobe from the French film. The background is a zoomed in section of iron casting I felt made a nice design and set a mood of both beauty and danger.

The above digital composition was then printed out so I could tape it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On a lightbox I can see through the bristol to the printed layout and use it as a guide while I ink. This also means that unless there is an area I want to tighten up or correct in pencil before I ink it, there is virtually no pencil on the finished piece to erase afterwards. I inked the linework all with a Copic Multiliner pen (mostly the 0.7 nib) and the ironwork with a brush. The embroidery on Beast's cloak and the lacework of his high collar & cuffs was inked in black though I wanted them to appear lighter in the final color version. At this stage I worried that committing Beauty's face to an almost binary black/white line had taken away the softness and tenderness I worked so hard to get in the rough.

The finished inked piece was then scanned so I could flat the colors in. Originally I had Beast's clothing in more of a black/navy configuration and Beauty's dress in more of a gold...but I realized that I was being too heavily influenced by the palette of the Disney movie and Cocteau's film (the colorized cover art to the DVD). I swapped out the blues for reds (a color of aggression and passion) and the gold for pale blue (a color of sweetness, calm, and innocence). Even when drawing this piece, I knew the background was going to be in the violet family, and luckily the clothing color alterations didn't force me to change my background color scheme.

After the color flats are established and I've set the basic palate  I render the piece adding shadows, highlights and color transitions. Normally I do this exclusively with the dodge & burn tools in photoshop (using a textured brush) but this time I also used the paintbrush for some color transitions and a feathered lasso to isolate and enhance the color in selected areas. To get back the softness I felt I lost in the inks from the pencils, I focused on rendering the subtlety back into Beauty's face (with a little help of the Anne Hathaway photo for reference on the planes of her face & neck). I added color holds on Beast's embroidery and lace and to the background iron work too. I didn't want the iron to overtake the emotion of Beast's torn feelings to reach out for what he wants while fearing the outcome and internalizing his own self-loathing (at least that's what I saw going on there...)

The Monsters & Dames book will be available at the Emerald City Comic Con for purchase (as well as the original art being auctioned off there) and remaining books are usually offered for sale online through the Emerald City website after the con ends.


Watercolor Wednesday: For those who missed seeing the Watercolors from last week's Watercolor Wednesday, here's another look at them.
First up: 7 Horcruxes. I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I came across a 7 pointed star design while researching patterns for my Free Comic Book Day story. It occured to me that it would be a great template to make a Horcrux chart. I organized them in the order in which Voldemort made each (starting with the book and rotating clockwise)

Second up is one of my favorite paintings I've ever done for Watercolor Wednesday...and I'm not quite sure why. It's a heap of coins. I painted this at the same time as the Horcrux piece, so the palate is similar (those are the colors I had wet and going). I looked at some historic ancient coins for inspiration, but for the most part, I let the brush suggest details rather than plan them out.

Third painting from last week is a bell. I'd planned on this being more of a Christmas themed painting, but didn't get it done and posted in time. The music below the bell is 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen".

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*

ECCC: Monsters & Dames 2012 Process

For the last three years the Emerald City Comic Con has been putting together a charity book called Monsters & Dames. Guests of the show are asked to contribute a piece of PG-13 artwork featuring the very open-ended theme "Monsters & Dames". I did a piece for it back in 2009, the last time I attended the show.

I'm headed back to Seattle this year so for my piece I decided to do a genre mash-up. I love good dragon design and after seeing some of Corey Godby's,  and realizing it had been ages since I designed and drew a dragon, I made the Dragon my 'Monster'. Cory includes cool hair on his dragons, and I'd never done that. I also pulled inspiration from the feathers on the gryphon from the Storyteller episode The Luckchild. And the pose of the head was inspired by an upshot drawing Brian Froud did of the Chamberlain from the Dark Crystal

For the 'Dame' I wanted her to be riding on the Dragon's head. I made a rough body pose on my dragon drawing, but wanted to flesh her out on another page of my sketchbook. Like I said, I wanted to mash-up the genres so instead of a fnatasy-type barbarian queen or lady-knight, I went for a WWII inspired military lady. "Perhaps she is part of some fantasy anti-aircraft-dragon-blitzkrieg" I thought to myself. I gave her a curvey bombshell frame and pin-up girl hair to set the idea of the era, but without details to really say one way or the other where or when this is.

I assembled the two sketches in photoshop. Because of the scale (both of the figures in relation to one another AND how large I drew the 'Dame') the 'Dame' lost a great deal of detail. The two figures are tinted so it's easier for me to distinguish them from each other when inking. The yellow and orange borders are there as guides. The yellow edge represents where the page will be trimmed (roughly). The orange represents the area called 'bleed'. When the artwork goes off the edge of the page with no border, bleed is extra artwork that goes beyond where the page is cut, so that if the page isn't trimmed to meet the exact edge of the artwork, there is still some spare and you aren't left with a white sliver of non-artwork exposed.

The layout above was printed at full size and then taped to the back of my bristol board for me to do the inks over a lightbox. I had fun with the textures of the various parts of the dragon: hair, feathers, boney horns & snout, and soft under-belly. My pencils were pretty tight on the dragon, so the real work came in inking in all the undefined hair I had scribbled in on the rough. You will notice there is no background to this image...I debated with a skyline or even search lights & zeppelins...but ultimately decided a murky night sky would set the tone and draw the focus to the Monster & Dame better.

The final color process was a bit different for me. Because this was something other than Mouse Guard and I could afford for it to look different, I colored this with a Cintiq & a Wacom Tablet (Thank you to Katie Cook for the use of both). I was able to do a lot of slow building and painterly effects with the tools that I can't get when I color with a mouse. I still found the process off-putting, and didn't prefer it for flatting the colors. At Katie's house I flatted the majority of the piece and then rendered the sky and a bit of the dragon's skin before it was getting late and time to leave. Katie sent me home with her Wacom tablet to finish the job. At home I completed the rest of the rendering and color adjustment using her loan.

After the convention ECCC usually offers the Monsters & Dames book for purchase online if any are left.

2012 Appearances:
Emerald City: March 30-April 1
C2E2: April 13-15
Boston Comic Con: April 21-22
FCBD: Jetpack Comics: May 5th
Heroes: June 22-24
San Diego Comic Con: July 11-15
Baltimore Comic Con: Sept 8-9
New York Comic Con: Oct 11-14
Detroit Fanfare: Oct 26-28

Dames & Monsters '09 & Muppet Peter Pan #2

Dames & Monsters:
For the 2009 Emerald City Comic con, I was one of several artists (Frank Cho, Stuart Immonen, Bruce Timm, Scott Morse, Ted Naifeh, +42 other very talented folks) who did a piece of art in the Dames and Monsters convention book. (From what I understand there may be a few left if you e-mail the convention organizers). The original artwork is being auctioned off for the Seattle Children's Hospital. So bid bid bid people (hey it's for charity!)
All the auctioned artwork is on ebay here or
you can bid on my piece here

Muppet Peter Pan #2:I saw that Boom put up the cover for the 2nd issue of Muppet Peter Pan. I still am having a really great time doing these covers and I'm thrilled to be able to draw the Muppet characters in all these locations/costumes/story scenarios. "Thanks Boom! I'll keep drawing them as long as you will have me!" For this cover, I was happy to flourish up Gonzo as Captain Hook. Gonzo is my favorite Muppet, so I take even more pleasure in drawing him. I thought about having the feather in his hat be the tail feathers of a chicken that sat on his head under the hat...but I decided to go more traditional (and since I don't think that's in the story it was just embelishment for my own glee) However, note the chicken motif on the ship's railing and the pommel of Gonzo's saber.

Mouse Guard RPG wins 2009 Origins Award for best Role Playing Game!!

Luke Crane did a wonderful translation of my Mouse Guard world into a playable and fun game. He and I talked early on that the game had to be something more than just an RPG where you happen to be mice, one that really took the scale and the lifestyle of my characters and made the mechanics focus on it. So thank you Luke! And now it has won RPG of the year 2009 upsetting Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. Even though Mouse Guard uses only 6 sided dice, I think it just rolled a natural 20.

You can find out more about the Mouse Guard RPG at:
Burning Wheel's Mouse Guard RPG forum or Archaia




Social Networking:
I am excited about the use of social networking and its relationship between fans and creators (being a creator who also is a fan of other creators). I now use Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and this Blog (and that's not counting regular ol' e-mail.) I want to invite all of my fans to use the Blog, MySpace, and Twitter to keep in touch and connect/comment/question/compliment/or complain. However, I'd like to keep Facebook as a more personal site for friends and family I know personally and keep in touch with. I'm not trying to complain here, I just want fans to know that if I have ignored a Facebook request it's not a snub, just please contact me through one of the other venues.



Fan Art Redux:

A few posts back I mentioned how Walter Harris did a great job on his Mouse guard action figures he made from Ewoks. Well, he's been at it again and now has 3 'waves' (1: Saxon, Kenzie & Lieam. 2: Sadie, Celanawe, & Midnight. & 3: Rand, Conrad & Gwendolyn.) Take a look at his site for detail photos of all the characters. Thanks again Walter!

Upcoming Appearances:
San Diego Comic Con: July 22-26
Wizard World Chicago: August 6-9
Signing at Paradise Comics Toronto: Aug. 22
Dragon Con: Sep. 4-7
Windy City Con: Sept. 19
Long Beach Comic Con: Oct. 2-4
Baltimore Comic Con: Oct. 10-11
Mouse Guard Live Readings in the Michigan Area: TBA



Next Time (or soon thereafter): SDCC info...