ONLINECON MARCH 2021 INFO!

March 24-28 ONLINECON will be on my Twitch Stream (twitch.tv/davidpetersen) from 2-10 pm east. Over the course of those 5 days I'll be streaming 8 hours each day, spending half the time drawing commissions, and the other half with guests for panels, interviews, and programming!

In my online store everything except commissions will be 25% OFF using ordercode ONLINECON starting on Wednesday at 2pm

To the left you can see the promo for the event and I'll go into more details below!


I'm proud of the guest list we've been able to assemble for this event. I'll be drawing on the even

numbered hours, but on the odd numbered hours of ONLINECON features a panel or presentation by one of our guests. Joining me will be: Stan Sakai, Angela DiTerlizzi, Jesse Glenn, Serena Malyon, Donato Giancola, Tracy Butler, Norman Chan, Meredith Salenger, Karl Kerschl, Jenny Robb, Armand Baltazar, Kevin McTurk, Very Handsome Billy, Noel Macneal, Steve Hamaker, Alex Kain, Erin Godbey, Sanford Greene, and Gene Ha!

Below you can check out the full schedule of dates/times for each guest and a description of what we'll be covering with them:

But in addition to guests, there will be several new items going into my Online Store during ONLINECON as well as a storewide sale:

New 11" x 11" Signed & Numbered Limited Print 'Yarrow'

New 2021 Signed & Numbered Bookplate

New 'SERVICE' 8" x 8" Mouse Guard print

Tea Stained 9" x 12" 'Mortimer' Print

Signed Mouse Guard books with a mouse head doodle

Black Axe Black & White edition with a brush-pen sketch 

New Grey Mouse Guard Tee Shirt 
'Mouse must not kill mouse'

New Original inked artwork

Toned Commissions
These are single figure torso commissions with limited backgrounds on toned paper. 

(I'll be opening a list through the online store March 23rd)

Also you can print your own badges!

Looking forward to seeing you at ONLINECON!

twitch.tv/davidpetersen

Hellboy & The Cockatrice Trio! Process

 I'm very pleased to have created a piece for the MIKE MIGNOLA: DRAWING MONSTERS Documentary Kickstarter. My piece will be offered as a print for the campaign and eventually the original inked artwork will be offered as part of the reward tiers. 

Mike & Hellboy mean a lot to me creatively. From understanding what the medium of comics could be do beyond superheroes, to listening to every interview with Mike I could find where he talked about his motivations & history to help me create an unusual path of my own for the type of career in comics I was after

To the left is the finished piece, and below I'll run through the process of creating the artwork.

I thought of several ideas for a Hellboy pinup: Hellboy drinking in a pub with skeletons (some playing cards, a cobwebbed dart board, drinks all around), Hellboy in artifact collector's trophy room, Hellboy fighting a big moster and breaking it's jaw like King Kong fighting a dinosaur...and somehow in all that flurry of writing down ideas, I came up with Hellboy stealing the egg of a cockatrice.

So, I sketched out this version (added the 'EGG' balloon just for fun) and gathered some reference including photos of roosters & the cockatrice bronze window on the transom of the Belvedere Castle in Central Park. Pretty much the only bit of this drawing that survived to the next version are the cockatrices 

I felt like a less action-packed scene was more my lane to be in. So on several sheets of copy paper, I worked out a new unbothered Hellboy holding a clutch of eggs, and worked out two more acceptable cockatrice drawings to go with the one from the last rough. I assembled these in Photoshop, while I blocked in the major forms with color. It helps me to see where the masses are, where color tangents could pop up, and to help me figure out when inking what areas need what textures. I added a weasel perched on Hellboy's right hand to the scene––Weasels are the natural enemy of the cockatrice. And instead of going back to copy paper to tighten up the bits that still needed work, I digitally roughed in some falling feathers, one of the beast's wings, and the pile-of-sticks nest at the bottom.

With the layout all blocked in, I was ready to start inking. With a printout taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol, I inked the piece on a Huion lightpad.

I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 and 0.3 nibs) to ink everything.
Most of the ink-work was done live on my Twitch stream as fans watched and asked questions.

I tried to vary the density of the ink details, going much darker and more textural on the nest while making the scales of the cockatrices more suggestive and leaving their wing-skin very open.

When the inks were done I scanned the original back into Photoshop and started the coloring process. This part is all just about establishing flat colors. I'd done some of the color selection work when I did my layout, but those colors become affected by the colors around them and had to be adjusted after adding in the nest, background, and window colors.

I also decided to push back the window architecture further into the distance, so I added a color hold over the inks there (an area where I want the ink lines to be a color other than black)

The last step was to render everything with light, texture, and shadow. I do almost all of this work using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop while using a stock texture brush. This one took a lot of fiddling to get just the right blend of tonal values, and a big thank-you to Gene Ha who I showed this to at a mid-stage who had some advice that saved me a lot of struggle,

So, go back the MIKE MIGNOLA: DRAWING MONSTERS Documentary Kickstarter! and get a print of my Hellboy piece on one of the reward tiers!

The Salamalican

Last Friday on my Twitch Stream, we did the third community draw-along event #DrawTheExtinct where I posted an image from an old block print I made with a few animal photo inspiration prompts and the idea to create an imaginary extinct animal. I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on Monday we shared our finished pieces. 

Here is my finished Salamalican. And below are my steps to create it as well as the community submissions.

We started with the prompts of my original linocut print from a piece titled 'Extinct' as well as an Orange Salamander, a Pelican, and a Frog's eye. I named the creature 'The Salamalican'. I told the viewers that they could use any combination of the inspiration prompts––they could make their version as cute and cuddly as a pocket pet stray kitten, as monstrous and deadly as a giant kaiju destroying cities, or anything in between. I also wanted this to be an excuse to get their pencils moving. I invited all skill levels, because I'm a firm believer that you shouldn't have to be good at something or pursuing mastery of it to just simply enjoy the act of it...and art is no exception.

On the Friday stream I started with mechanical pencil on a sheet of copy paper to draw the creature. Then I decided I wanted some minnows in his mouth, and on a separate sheet of copy paper on a light pad I drew his meal as well as one in his hand. The image here is after I'd scanned my pencils and edited the two drawings together (tinting them to help me see the different bits) in Photoshop.

My main pushes for the new design were to make sure the gullet felt like a flexible membrane instead of just a jug-jaw and that the 'S' shape of the body was clear to read and anatomically believable.

With the pencils scanned and adjusted, I printed out the image and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Using a lightpad, I was able to see through the surface of the bristol as I inked the Salimalican. I used a Copic Multiliner 0.7 SP pen to ink the art. 

Most of the inking was pretty straight forward other than the texture on the gullet. I kept looking to my pelican reference for texture guidance.

On stream, I not only finished the pencils and inks, but was able to scan the inks and proceeded to the color flats.

The color selections were pretty straight forward when looking at the reference photos, it was just a matter of using different layers to establish where those color areas started and stopped: The main skin vs the beak, the gullet vs the minnows, etc.

Below you can again see the final rendered colors with a border and type applied.

But, as this is a community event, I wanted to share all the other entries posted in the Discord (some are works-in-progress I've been told). I awarded a prize and we voted together on a few more (prize winners marked with *) on Monday's Twitch stream and we all enjoyed seeing what each other had done. I hope we get even more participants next month (first Friday!)

Wicked Goblin King*

AU Tiger

Evil Cartoonist

Captain Nemo

Evil Cartoonist

Cortrah

Tefrin

Vern NYC

Bunce

Nate Pride*

Dark

Tyrie

Pagan Celt

Serarel*

Evil Cartoonist

Flannel Wizard

ONLINECON: March 2021!

ONLINECON is BACK! A free online event with 20 guests, an online store sale, and much more...

March 24-28 I'll be running a special event on my Twitch Stream (twitch.tv/davidpetersen). Over the course of those 5 days I'll be streaming 8 hours per day, spending half the time drawing commissions, and the other half with guests for panels, interviews, and programming! I'l also be running a sale in my online store and adding new original artwork and merchandise to the store.

To the left you can see the promo for the event and I'll go into more details below!


I'm proud of the guest list we've been able to assemble for this event. I'll be drawing on the even

numbered hours, but on the odd numbered hours of ONLINECON features a panel or presentation by one of our guests. Joining me will be: Stan Sakai, Angela DiTerlizzi, Jesse Glenn, Serena Malyon, Donato Giancola, Tracy Butler, Norman Chan, Meredith Salenger, Karl Kerschl, Jenny Robb, Armand Baltazar, Kevin McTurk, Very Handsome Billy, Noel Macneal, Steve Hamaker, Alex Kain, Erin Godbey, Sanford Greene, and Gene Ha!

Below you can check out the full schedule of dates/times for each guest and a description of what we'll be covering with them:

But in addition to guests, there will be several new items going into my Online Store during ONLINECON as well as a storewide sale:

New 11" x 11" Signed & Numbered Limited Print 'Yarrow'

New 2021 Signed & Numbered Bookplate

New 'SERVICE' 8" x 8" Mouse Guard print

Tea Stained 9" x 12" 'Mortimer' Print

Signed Mouse Guard books with a mouse head doodle

Black Axe Black & White edition with a brush-pen sketch 

New Grey Mouse Guard Tee Shirt 
'Mouse must not kill mouse'

New Original inked artwork

Toned Commissions
These are single figure torso commissions with limited backgrounds on toned paper. 

(I'll be opening a list through the online store March 23rd)

Looking forward to seeing you at ONLINECON!

twitch.tv/davidpetersen

Ye Old Lore of Yore Reading

 Back in 2005 Jeremy Bastian and I released a self-published anthology comic called 'Ye Old Lore of Yore'. It has long been out of print, but recently, Jeremy and I decided to share it with fans again by performing a dramatic reading of the five stories within––a Cursed Pirate Girl story, Two Fir Darrig tales, Sir Hannibal of Ash, and a collaboration between the two of us: Gilbert Luther. Enjoy!

Direct YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/Co4VAzcMick

Mouse Guard: Service Print Process

In January I was inspired to do a new Mouse Guard piece. I intended it just to be for fun and for my Twitch stream audience. I'll get into the inspiration points in this post but for today's blogpost I wanted to go through the process for creating the piece––which will also be a new 8" x 8" print for ONLINECON in March (24-28).

To the left you can see the finished colored artwork for the Mouse Guard 'Service' print. And below I'll explain the steps to create it.

The main inspiration point was Amanda Gorman's poem 'The Hill We Climb' which she performed at President Biden's inauguration. It got me thinking about ideas and ideals learned in my scouting days about being of service to others. Often times, fans can think of the Mouse Guard as a band of warrior mice, when they are really more of rangers, there to do work as helpers. Sure, they at times need to do battle, but more often than not they are avoiding conflict in duties that are of pure service to others. I found this Norman Rockwell cover to Boy's Life and used it as the visual jumping off point.

I also wanted there to be some kind of insect or bird in the image to help show the scale––of what it's like to be very small in a world that is much bigger than you are, and still forging ahead to serve. I landed on a monarch butterfly as a beautiful symbol for the theme. 

To draw a cluster of flying butterflies, I made a quick model by printing out the same photo twice (once mirrored) with a twist-tie inserted across the wings as they are glued together. This way I could fold the wings to several positions and photograph it from various angles. To the left is a photo I took with my phone in one of the positions.

I did a pencil drawing of a Guardmouse on copy paper to resemble the Scout's pose from Rockwell's cover. I thought including a book and pack were important to the image, and so was keeping the sword sheathed and adding a shield to the back (sword, book, and shield echoing the ideas in the guard emblem). The cloak was tied off in front like a Scout's neckerchief. With the pencil drawing done I scanned the art and did a quick digital composition (including adding in fast colors for the mouse) dropping in the Guard emblem from my Mouse Guard enamel pins as well as lots of overlapping photos of the butterfly model.

And then I added in the text 'Service: Greater Than Self And Sword' to get the point across of being a helper rather than a combatant. 

I printed out the above digital composition and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol. On my A3 Huion Lightpad I was able to see through the surface of the bristol to the printout below, which I could use as a guide while I inked. 

I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 and 0.3 nibs) to ink the piece. I think it's important to hand ink text like this when possible. I was able to get all the letterforms and spacing just as I wanted with the font, but the imperfections I can add in the inking make it look like it's part of the art instead of a digital effect. 

Once the inks were finished, I scanned them in to start the coloring process. That first step is called flatting, where I just color-in-the lines and establish where all the color areas are––which bits are which colors. At this stage I also establish color holds, areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black.

A lot of the color choices were already established in my layout stage, but I still had to rebalance those colors and values taking into account the sky color and the text box below.

The final piece can be seen below after I did all the rendering using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop. This print will be on sale in my online store On March 24th when #ONLINECON starts on my Twitch channel