Iron Pinup process:

Shane-Michael Vidaurri and I met several years ago at the New York Comic con. He was an illustrator who was starting to dabble in sequential storytelling. I really liked what he was doing with watercolor washes and subtle pacing. We have since stayed in touch and his first book is due out from Archaia this summer: Iron, or the War After. Shane asked me to do a pinup for the collection.

Shane contributed a pinup to Mouse Guard (which will be seen in Black Axe #5) and this piece was to balance the exchange. I like how he frequently uses inset panels, open space, and muted colors. So I intended to emulate these methods into my piece for him. He specifically asked for the Officer Tiger character, Engel. Using the first chapter's imagery, I honed in on one page from the book showing Engel in his office, uniform jacket removed, suspenders showing, with his important documents and intercom-radio on his desk.

I started with a sketch or two in my sketchbook (the tiger's head was drawn on a different page and at a different scale while looking at photo reference). The sketches were assembled and adjusted in photoshop. Some of the details didn't fit into the frame (like the radio or the desk papers) the way I originally drew it, so I sliced up the image and moved bits where they needed to be for this final composition. The inset panel was saved for me to draw a tree branch in ink, and the wall paper pattern was pasted together off of a sampling of a pattern from a historic wallpaper company.

Using a printed version of the digitally adjusted layout above, I inked the final art on bristol board using a light box to see my layout as a guide. Instead of just digitally inserting the wallpaper texture, I wanted to hand ink every little bit of the pattern. This allowed me to make subtle wear marks or differences between them so that in the end, the image doesn't look hand drawn with a computer generated/pasted pattern laying on top of it. The hand inking makes it all cohesive.

Scanning the image I layed in my flat colors. This is where I establish the color areas: his face & arms being a different color from his shirt, also different from the pants, and the wall...and where all those colors start and stop. I forgot to mention above that the pocket watch was something I added to give the character an interesting pose and also to suggest something about his character...a man who believes in rules and following them. Turns out Shane liked this character detail and incorporated it into the later chapters of the book.

After my flats were established (and we took time for the pocket watch segue) I rendered the image. To add the highlights and shadows I use the dodge (lightens) & burn (darkens) tools in photoshop. The color holds on the wallpaper and the tree branch were color tweaked and rendered as well. It was a pleasure to do this pinup, not only because of knowing shane, and it being for our mutual publisher, but also because it's an interesting animal story, where the animal species are cues to the reader about what type of personality that character has, and I would love to read more stories like that.

S.M. Viduarri's Mouse Guard pinup

2012 Appearances:
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

Printmaking: Intaglio + Relief
I've talked before about my two main printmaking disciplines (Intaglio & Relief)  in college and how they informed my growth as an artist. But I wanted to share a process I only used a few times in practice that combined the two techniques for Itaglio (printing from ink underneath the surface of the 'plate') and relief (printing from on top of the surface of the 'plate'.

My Printmaking professor at Mott Community College, Sam Morello, showed us a piece of his work when it was on display for an exhibition in Flint. Normally he wouldn't have shared his work with us since he wanted us to be uninfluenced by his work and only influenced by his teaching. The piece pictured here wasn't the piece he showed us, but similar. He was also vague about how the image was made. With a bit of pressing he gave enough details for those of us inspired to figure it out.

At Eastern Michigan University, I decided to try the technique in one of my last semesters as a printmaking student. The process goes something like this, in a woodblock, you carve lines like a contour line drawing (I chose to do drawings of hands in odd positions and cropped awkwardly). The block is then inked and wiped like an etching, meaning the ink settles down into the cuts below the surface of the uncarved wood block. All of the wood grain also act as tiny etched lines and the ink gets wiped down into them as well. As a last step before printing, you can add areas of flat color with a brayer (ink roller) like you would with a woodblock print. The colored ink sits up on top of the block. Making this technique a mix of Intaglio & Relief printing.

Unknown to me at the time, some past students at Eastern  had broken the press by running wood through it when they didn't also adjust the press for the correct pressure/tolerance settings. So I had no hesitation to adjust the press for my test runs of the prints, but when I put the proofs up for critique the professor was very upset I had run wood through the press. I explained I knew how to correctly adjust the press and he didn't sway, I asked him to adjust the press for me and we could run them together under his supervision, he didn't sway. I explained that these pieces were the majority of my work for the semester, and I had little else to turn in as a final, he didn't sway but re-iterated that by no means was I to run wood through that ever press again.

I called Sam. He had retired from teaching by then, but had a basement studio and a press he was willing to supervise me using. He and I printed the images I've shared above and when I turned the work in at Eastern for a final grade I was able to do so with out having broken any rules. I was questioned by the EMU professor at the final portfolio review as to how I printed them. I promised that it wasn't done on school grounds. He seemed uncertain and not pleased I still turned this work in...until the head of the art department walked in by chance, saw the work, and was very excited about my images & wanted to know more about the process. The head of department's enthusiasm forced my professor to put on a smile and grade the work based on merit rather than the backstory of how & where it was made. To add insult to injury for the professor, the head of department asked if I wouldn't mind loaning the artwork to them for their summer showcase.

The Hands Triptych now lives in our spare bedroom.


2012 Appearances:
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

TMNT Casey Jones Cover Process:

Cover number 6 of 8 TMNT micro-series covers I'm doing for IDW is Casey Jones.
Not as familiar with both Casey in the new IDW series and with drawing humans in general, I talked over the cover with my editor Bobby Curnow. We established that Casey running through someplace in Central Park with vigilante sports equipment in-tow would be just the ticket. I referenced a few photos of hurdlers to get the pose, but found that professional hurdlers have too good of form to be convincing as teenager/vigilante Casey Jones...so I found a photo of a kindergarten field day where a 5 year old was leaping over a hurdle and it was the perfect form for Casey. I sketch out the figure on one page of my sketchbook and some benches on another.

In photoshop I compositied the drawing of Casey with the drawing of some park benches. At this stage I also did some quick lay-ins for how the tone of the piece was going to be and to fill in the background a bit. I told Bobby when I sent this in for approval that I'd be doing some digital painting for the background. I did get some notes on the rough cover, but they had to do with changing Casey's legs and replacing the cricket bat with a hockey stick. I took the opportunity to enlarge Casey a bit and rotate him to make the pose & layout more dynamic.

The inks for this piece went rather smoothly. I used a printed version of the above layout on the lightbox to ink this on bristol board. Normally for folds in fabric, I'm drawing mice in cloaks and use stippling, but here I just concentrated on some well placed contour lines. The most difficult part of the inking process was the tread of that oncoming shoe. I wanted it to read as true to being a converse all-star, but also to not be so detailed that you couldn't believe it is in motion. Something about how painless this piece was to ink should have given me warning...but it didn't.

The next step was to flat the colors and start that digital painting...oh...there is the problem...I don't really digitally paint much...I relly on hard ink outlines to guide my color work...uh-oh. After several attempts to get the painted background to look right in the same image as my hard linework, I opted to add more falling leaves as a background cover-up and distraction. Here you can see the background still in process, but with newly added drawn & inked leaves I patched in. I drew that batch of leaves on a separate sheet of paper...still wasn't doing the trick though.



I rationalized that when I do subtle color backgrounds in Mouse Guard, I often will have inked crosshatched lines that I just color-hold. This adds a unifying texture to the page and is certainly in my comfort zone. So I went back over all my painted background using a wacom tablet to paint in crosshatched lines. I built them up on top of each other more like 'painting' with colored pencil rather than paint. This technique did prove to be the solution that got me through the cover. Here you can see a close-up of the hatching


I'm showing the process out of order a bit. Here is the final rendered cover, with crosshatched background, but by the time I was doing the hatching, I had already rendered the figure of Casey, the benches, and that golf bag. This cover took a lot out of me. I don't know if I conveyed the self-doubt I had while working on this piece in my blog-write-up...but it was crushing. I spent more time on fixing that background than it usually takes me to do a cover from start to finish. But I'm happy enough with it to have turned it in, and IDW and Nickelodeon were both happy enough to approve it!


I've listed the original inked cover art, sketch, & overlay inks for sale on ebay. Provided the auction goes well, I'll list the Splinter cover next...
CASEY JONES COVER ART EBAY LINK

2012 Appearances:
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

2012 FCBD Story: The Tale of Baldwin the Brave:
My story for this year's Free Comic Book Day book from Archaia followed the tradition I set last year with the story being some sort of morality tale told to a younger version of one of my main characters. Last year's story was a bedtime tale being told to young-Kenzie, and I did a post about the process of creating that story last year. Saxon was the recipient of this year's story, but before we go further...in case you have not found a copy of the 2012 FCBD book or you didn't get around to reading it yet, you can follow this link to have it read to you aloud: http://vimeo.com/mouseguard/mgbaldwinthebrave

Not wanting to repeat the bed-time-story setup from last year's offering, I chose to tell the story to Saxon by having him watch a puppet show. The idea had come to me early last year when I drew this piece of a mouse puppet maker. I love puppets and puppetry, so I thought mice telling stories with puppets would be a wonderful way for them to tell tales, make art objects, and charming for the readers of my books. The fez & vest of this mouse puppet builder is an homage to the Fraggle I made as an analog of myself named Gib. So, I proceeded with the idea to tell the whole story using marionettes. As a side note, I did pause for a moment to realize, I wasn't planning to use the puppets as a gateway into showing the 'real' story, but would illustrate the puppets on stage as you would see them if you were in the mouse audience....it still seems like a gamble to have only drawn 'real' mice in only 2 panels of my story, but I liked the immersion into the storytelling method.

The story itself was all built around a way for me to impress on Saxon that he should become the mouse who doesn't pause and hesitate at the thought of danger, that he should be a mouse willing to leap into peril for the good of mice, and that this bravery and daring-do pay off in the end. I thought of the quote from Edmund Burke, "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing". And mousified it to "Evil Prevails if Good Mice Do Nothing". And then it's easy to imagine Saxon perverting that into his leaping into everything wards off evil.

To prepare for drawing this story, I built a few props as guides for me. I printed out the stage proscenium from my cover art for the book (done in advance of the story) and cut it up adding a few basswood sticks and cardboard to create a paper-stage model. I made a few backdrops and flying walls to scale for the stage so that each scene would be playing out in new locations while still seeming like a believable stage play. I also sculpted a mouse marionette that I could pose for reference to get the joints and weight of the lifless limbs correct..

Baldwin (our puppet hero...and named after my Paternal Grandmother's Maiden surname) overcomes three obstacles in the tale. He saves the village from starvation by cleverly trapping a greedy goose as bait for a wolf, he has the courage to speak to a pretty mouse before she chooses death over loneliness, and finally, with his bravery as an example, he leads the town to triumph in battle over the same wolf from earlier. The pattern of three is a classic fairy tale device, and I wanted to make sure the three tasks were not all solved by brute force or just by the tip of a sword. Even though this story was for Saxon, I opted to make Baldwin a bit more well rounded and used bravery to outsmart, love, and lead.

Now to start thinking up NEXT year's FCBD story....perhaps it will be for Sadie's ears....


2012 Appearances:
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

2012 Free Comic Book Day video:

I hope you all had a great Free Comic Book Day last weekend! In case you didn't get a copy of the amazing hardcover Archaia put out, word is that you can contact them directly to try and obtain one. It really is a great book, and besides a new Mouse Guard story there is a Labyrinth story by Corey Godbey, Ted Naifeh, & Adrianne Ambrose, A Return of the Dapper Men story by Jim McCann & Janet K. Lee, a Rust story by Royden Lepp, A Cursed Pirate Girl story by Jeremy Bastian, and a Cowboy story by Nate Cosby & Chris Eliopoulos.

But as a treat for everyone who already got their copy or don't want to wait get one, here is a narrated version of my story: The Tale of Baldwin the Brave:

direct link: http://vimeo.com/mouseguard/mgbaldwinthebrave
Narration: David Petersen

Music: Jon Sayles

I also colored up the FCBD bookplate artwork I created for my appearances at Larry's Comics and Jetpack comics last weekend:

Next Week's post will be about my process for creating this story.

2012 Appearances:
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

2011 Free Comic Book Day video:

In honor of Free Comic Book Day this coming weekend (For those of you who don't know, most comic retailers offer a selection of new comics on the first Saturday in May for FREE! They use it as a way to try and get people who have never tried reading a comic -or- haven't picked up a comic in years, to try a comic for free.) I present to you all a narrated version of Last year's FCBD story: The Tale of the Wise Weaver:

direct link: http://vimeo.com/mouseguard/mgwiseweaver

Narration: David Petersen

Music: Jon Sayles

My 2012 Free Comic Book Day Plans:

On Saturday May 5th I encourage you to seek out your local comic shop and pick up Archaia's AMAZING hardcover for Free Comic Book Day.
The book contains: 

-a Labryinth story by Cory Godbey, Ted Naifeh, & Adrianne Ambrose

-a Dapper Men story by Jim McCann & Janet Lee

-a Rust story by Royden Lepp

-a Cursed Pirate Girl story by Jeremy Bastian

-a Cow Boy story by Nate Cosby & Chris Eliopoulos

-and a Mouse Guard story by me.

This year I'll be happily signing books in two locations in New Hampshire & Massachusetts:

From 9:30am-12:30pm I'll be at Larry's Comics in Lowell, MA.

From 2pm-4pm I'll be at Jetpack Comics in Rochester, NH.

Both stores will have a special tip-in bookplate for the event ,which are in very limited quantity from my understanding, and can be seen to the right.

Not everyone knows about FCBD. If you do know & plan on attending, explain to to your friends/parents/teachers/colleagues who don't. There's a comic out there for every kind of reader, every age, every genre. Publishers & comic shops are working to find new readers with FCBD. A message I really want stressed by FCBD (and I think the Archaia's FCBD hardcover does a great job of this) is that comics are stories. Not just superheroes & guns*, but ANY & EVERY story that can be imagined. Everyone likes stories. There's no reason comics shouldn't find new readers

*For the record, Nothing wrong with Superhero comics. I like superheroes. I just don't want them to be the sole representation of what we are

Check back next week for a similar video treatment to this year's FCBD story: The Tale of Baldwin the Brave.

2012 Appearances:
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

Black Axe #4 page 19 Process:
The fourth installment of The Black Axe came out a few weeks ago, so I consider that enough time passed to show the process on one of my favorite pages from the issue. So if you have not read the issue yet and/or are waiting for the hardcover, consider yourself warned that you may want to turn back now and come back for next week''s post
***Spoilers Below***

In this page Celanawe finally kills the Fox he's been sent to murder. I started with these sketches across 2 pages in my sketchbook. I knew this scene would be broken into three panels: the anticipation, the death blow, and the calm after the storm. With the Black Axe such a big heavy weapon, I have to be visually careful when it strikes a foe. With a sword, I can minimize the gore of the strike and still have it be a believably dangerous wound, but with the axe, it's harder to hide the horror. As usual, I'm free forming little drawings that I feel tell a moment in the story. I'm not looking at panel shapes or layouts at this point, or at best, only vaguely aware of what shapes I'd like the panels to be, but letting the sketches dictate themselves at first.

I scanned my sketches into Photoshop where I have a template made for the panel sizes (and if this page had dialogue, it would have the text placed as well) I decided to give the largest panel to the anticipation. That look in the Fox's eye knowing she's trapped and that she is about to die, is a psychological trigger so that I can ease up on the death blow panel and show less. That death blow panel is the smallest and shows Celanawe more prominently than the victim. At one point I had the 'camera' the other way around, but it would have been too much of a repeat of panel one and I liked focusing on the intensity of our hero's face, his swing, his body language, & get you to think about what this fight cost him (I won't further spoil what happened a few pages previous, but for those who have read the issue, you know what I mean.)

When the layout stage is all done and I've composited, resized, rotated, and mirrored all my sketches into the flow I want, I print them out at actual size. Using a lightbox (where I can see the printouts through the bristol board of the final art) I ink the page with the printed sketches as a guide. You will notice the vines are not as well defined in the sketches above. I save all of that for the inking stage. Some of them I will pencil directly on the page, but a lot of that comes out in spontaneous inking. Interweaving things at random intervals is something I can do on the fly. It looks complicated to some, but it really is just draw a vine for a bit and then stop to have another cross it. In the last panel, I left a bit of open space, this was a visual cue of the weight being off Celanawe for a moment, a brief respite for him and your eyes of the visual tangle I'd kept you in for so many pages.

After the inks are done, I scan them and start the first stage of coloring called 'flatting'. This is where you are establishing flat colored areas to distinguish one thing from another (the fox's head from her eye, Celanawe's fur from his cloak, or even one vine from another.) The character and background colors are all fairly close to the final colors because I was carrying over the palette from the previous pages, but for the briar, I used radically different colors. This was so I could see that I was getting a good distribution color value between the vines. If I started with them all vine colored, it may have been difficult to see if I had accidentally colored outside the lines of one and into another since the values are so close, but with red and green and yellow, it was easy to see that I stayed in my boundaries and didn't overlap too many of the same colors.

The last step for this page was to render (shade, texture, and highlight) the flat colors. I use the Dodge & Burn tools in Photoshop for this almost exclusively. The briar tones were pulled in from a previous page, swapping each of the bright colors from the flats with five subdued colors. To get the thorns a lighter shade relative to the vines they are on, I made a layer with the thorns painted in and set it to screen. That way it just lightened whichever vine color was underneath it. The vines in the far background of the last panel were painted in digitally and then smudged and blurred to allow that space to feel open but not blank.



2012 Appearances:
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

Pre-Mouse Guard~1149

Before Mouse Guard was Mouse Guard, I had an idea for an animal story that was more akin to Disney's Robin Hood than what Mouse Guard is today. It was a way for me to get to have fun with animal characters which I enjoyed drawing, and have a way to script out stories like the roleplaying adventures my friends and I were playing. I started working on this around my freshman year of high school, when my friends and I were making up all sorts of comic characters and stories (including Cats Trio) The comic was to be called 1149, referencing a date in the middle ages (which was also the starting year of one of my favorite computer games: Defender of the Crown)

The characters:
A Fox who got by in life by conning kings into thinking he was royalty, getting invited to their castles, and then making off with their treasures in the middle of the night. A tiger, who was a monk that had strayed from a religious path (in a violent rage fueled event) and became a wandering adventurer because he was no longer welcome at his monastery. A duck who was a grumpy butcher and was the most fearsome merchant in his village. A ferret archer who was exiled from every kingdom and lived in the wild. There was also a bear character, a rabbit, and an opossum who were never fully fleshed out. These drawings represent the earliest versions of the characters.

As high school went on, my friends and I would rotate duties on various comic projects we were dreaming up, but the next time I got back around to these characters, I honed in on the tiger, fox, duck, and ferret. They were going to be my main cast (I also planned on keeping the opossum at this point, but I can't find any drawings of her). I was trying to draw these characters consistently (which is probably why most of these are drawn in profile, as though I was prepping to do turn-around model sheets), because that summer, I started drawing the first 8 pages of 1149 while on a summer trip. Unfortunately, none of those pages survive today.

Towards the end of high school and into the start of college, I did another batch of re-designs on these characters. I was using new materials to draw and color with, and had learned from getting several false starts with comics in high school, that a streamlined design for the characters will only help you draw the story more comfortably. I think this was some of my first realizations about drawing like yourself being easier than trying to mimic other folks (even your friends)   This was marked the last time I tried to draw them with the hopes of 1149 being a comic series.

While in my first year at college I started a re-write of 1149 from the ground up, and had plans for it to be a novel series that I would also illustrate. I expanded the species list (to also include a civilization of mice) and tried to find a sensible way of honoring some of the old characters while still explaining why their species would be on the same landmass as the others. I painted these as character portraits to inspire me as I wrote. The first chapter dealt with two monk rams who found the half dead body of a tiger in a snowstorm on their monastery's mountain. The two rams debated whether to care for or kill the beast. Chapter two started off with three mice: Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand...

In 1996 I also drew three ranger-esque mouse characters for the novel I was starting to write. Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand represented myself and my friends Jesse & Mike. They also represented Sword, Wisdom, and Shield...or to put it another way, aggression, calm, and defense. By developing what their group of Guardmice did, why it was there, and how it functioned, I realized the heart of this story had to be the mice. They were the ultimate under-dog, their struggle was more interesting and important than any of the other species. I dropped the idea of the predators as characters away, and kept them as races meant only to be the threat...of the Mouse Guard.

2012 Appearances:
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

New Mouse Guard Tee!
Starting at C2E2  this weekend I'll be selling new Mouse Guard tee-shirts. (This is a color mock-up, the shirts were not printed in time for the blogpost) There are already shirts available on CafePress, but I wanted to do a new design that was printed locally and that I could guarantee quality control on. We will make these new shirts available for order through mouseguard.net at a later date. We should have the shirts at C2E2 (because we are driving there) but instead of bringing stock of the shirts with me to my other convention appearances, I plan to have a sample available, and then we will take orders at cons, shipping the shirts once we are home.Small, Medium, Large, & XL will be available for $17 each.
I'll be reprinting this shirt if necessary to keep it in stock for a while, but my plan is to periodically introduce a new design after a print run starts to run low.

To create the shirt's image, I did a new design based on my German print design. I didn't want to just re-use the German piece though, I wanted a mouse with swords and a bird behind him that held no meaning to real-world nations. I drew the mouse and bird separately, scanned them to composite them into a single design, and then hand inked this artwork using a print out of the sketch composite as a guide.

Then I scanned my ink work and prepared a digital file for the printer. I wanted the mouse's inkwork to print one color with the bird printed a different color. I approached this the same way I approach color holds  making a layer for the mouse and one for the bird. I deleted the original ink artwork scan layer so the separate mouse & bird layers are sitting on a transparency.

To show that layer break down a bit better, I've made this diagram. It shows that I only have 3 layers: 1) the mouse's outline, 2) the bird's outline, and 3 a background layer. On the mouse & bird layers, there is nothing but their outlines, the space all around them has been deleted to transparency.

C2E2 Info Dump:
-I have a signing every day at the Archaia booth (529)
Friday: 5-6
Saturday: 12-1:30
Sunday: 1:30-3

-I have a panel on Friday at 2:45-Archaia Presents where I'll talk about Black Axe and Legends of the
Guard v2 (and reveal some pages from contributors) Room S501abc

-Another panel on Sunday at 10: 45- Archaia Presents: Better Stories Through World Building with Sean Rubin & Jeremy Bastian. Room N427bc

-Otherwise, I should be at my artist alley table: E11
selling prints, sketchbooks, original art, bookplates, tee-shirts, and taking commission requests (first come/first served each day. No pre-lists made, $200 fully inked 7" x 7" on 12" x 12" bristol. No mice-as-other character requests please)




C2E2 Charity Auction:
While in London I did this piece for the C2E2 charity auction to benefit St. Jude Children's hospital. I did a Ustream brodcast as I drew and inked this piece from my London hotel room, looking out the window for design cues for the lantern and column bases, and now it can be yours! Here are the details on the auction. Happy bidding!





2012 Appearances:
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

TMNT Splinter Cover Process

As I hinted in my Leonardo cover process post, I got a chance to do more covers for IDW's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Micro series. This time up, it's their mutated rat sensei Splinter. My goal was to show Splinter as a bit of a guru, a master in a zen calm in his dojo...except insstead of a nice dojo, it's a sewer chamber filled with found and trashed items, and instead of a martial arts master, it's a mutated rat in a robe.

This is a composite of a few drawings in my sketchbook that I assembled to be the rough I turned in to IDW and Nickelodeon. They had a few corrections they wanted me to address. The feet didn't read well and looked like bandage wrapped stumps and they wanted the head to be facing the viewer a bit more and more craggy and brooding: "less Stuart Little". At the time, I wasn't pleased about having to redraw the head. I really liked this drawing...but after looking at it a few more times and starting a new head sketch, I could see how this head wasn't engaging enough

Taking the notes from IDW and Nick, I swapped out the head for one that had more age and wisdom to it and face forward a bit more. I edited out the feet, deciding to let Splinter's robe conceal his folded legs. I also lowered the stool he is sitting on to try and tighten up the space the candle glow would have to fill-in the gaps for. The background remained unchanged at this stage, but I knew that I wanted to make edits and changes to it as I moved forward.

I printed out the rough with the adjustments at full size and layed a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol overtop of it on a lighbox. I can see my rough through the bristol as though the bristol was thick tracing paper. At this stage, I filled in some of the gaps of detail on the shelves including an old copy of a TMNT graphic novel, a boy scout handbook, the Black Axe, and an IDW turtles book. There is a broken Mouser head, and the broken ooze canister hanging out on the shelves too. To get the beaded curtain inked, I daubed dots of rubber cement on the blank bristol to form the beads. I inked over them and when the ink was dry, pulled up the rubber cement leaving perfect trails of dots. I used a brush and some white-out to form the strings that hold the beads together.

The next step was to scan the inks and add flattened colors. As I've said before in past process posts, the goal here is to establish the areas that need to be different colors. I'm not worried at this stage (or at least I have to keep telling myself not to worry at this stage...)about the overall lighting and color choices, while I came pretty close to most of the base colors at this point, all I really need to do is organize the photoshop file so that the different areas are separate and easy to isolate for rendering and final color adjustment. One color choice note here though, I opted for the 4 patches on Splinter's robe to match the colors of the bandannas the turtles had in the cartoons & movies (and were recently bestowed with in the IDW series).


To the right is an animated gif you can watch by clicking on it showing the various layers being built up in the flatting process. Step 2 has the layer that ultimately is the the furthest back, but from that point forward, I'm working from the top down (each successive layer is behind the previous one).

The last step is the final rendering. I've added special layers to color hold the linework, to add glows and smoke wisps, and to shade the background evenly as it goes to the top of the image. It was a real trick to get the candles to have the right amount of glow to get the background to desaturate and darken to the right amount (without losing the details I'd carefully added.





2012 Appearances:
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