Black Axe #5 Cover Process:

A few weeks ago, I turned in the final files for Black Axe #5 to Archaia. While that is a great milestone, I know that it is much further behind schedule than everyone (Archaia, fans, & myself) would like. I'm moving ahead with Issue #6 and wanted to take this blogpost to share the cover art to #5 and my process behind it.

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HAVEN'T READ ISSUE 4?
READ NO FURTHER: SPOILERS ABOUND
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Em's death is explained and given meaning in issue 5, so I wanted the cover to feature her and show respect to the passing of the character. I showed a mouse funeral in Winter 1152, and for Black Axe, I wanted & needed to do something different with the ceremony. My two big visual cues came from various paintings (but mostly the one shown here) of Hamlet's Ophelia and Padme from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Celanawe, a weathered & grizzled mouse, recieved a funeral by fire. Em's more gentle nature needed something more calming, a sea/river burial. The flowers from Padme's casket-sled translated directly to this cover and the scene in the book, they also gave the ever-important mouse-scale to the imagery.

I sketched a floating Em surrounded by flower pedals (based on a daisey native to Denmark...since Denmark was an influence on the creation of the isle of Ildur). Em is holding a crow's feather, and (this isn't a spoiler) I don't explain why when it's shown in the funeral scene.Her kinship with birds gives Celanawe & Conrad the idea to send her off with a feather Once I had a floating Em sketched, I didn't need to do much more drawing since most of the work of this cover was going to be in the trick of getting transparent water on the submerged items & making the surrounding water interesting.

I scanned the sketch, made some resizing adjustments and then printed it out in-scale with the final cover art dimensions. Using a lightbox to see my printout as a guide, I inked in the figure of Em and the flowers. There wasn't much need to shade or render anything on this cover, so it looks a bit stark in comparison to some of the past covers. To get some transparency for the water's flow I inked water-ripple lines on an overlay sheet (using the lighbox so I could keep the lines in registration with the cover art). The lines shown here are pink only for illustrative purposes for the blog, they are black on the real overlay sheet. Having them on separate paper makes it easier for me when coloring to isolate and manipulate those lines.

Last step was coloring. The color choice for the water was directly related to the color of Em's dress. I wanted to take advantage of a blue/orange contrast and used a muted blue green that still played off of Em's muted red-orange dress. I set the water overlay lines on a layer which has some transparency to it. This allows the ink and color work underneath those lines to be seen. To get the parts of Em, her dress, and the flowers that are submerged to look so, I made a photoshop layer to affect those areas and desaturate, tint, and darken them.

Fan Art:

This piece comes from Kal Siagian who writes:

I did this fanart to get a laugh out of my friends who play kendo (Japanese fencing)...Adapting the helmet to the mouse head shapes was surprisingly tricky, and there was so much going on behind the mice with tails and armor cords that the cloaks were just too much, so I moved the identifying cloak colors to the plate of their torso protectors.

I wrote Kal back saying that the attention to detail with the costume is much more interesting than a guard's standard cloak. Well done Kal!


2012 Appearances:
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
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

Rocket Raccoon:
I was asked by Jon Morris to contribute to his blog project: The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe REDUXE Edition. Jon has previously organized several projects with indy artists coming up with their own covers for an alternative DC New 52, for a re-imagined Marvel, for re-imagined comic covers in general, and for new corner logos for various comics. The idea of the REDUXE Ed. of the Marvel Handbook is to have current indy artists redraw all the character portraits from the handbook, but with the freedom to redesign/reinterpret the character as they go.

I went for Rocket Raccoon simply because, as an animal character, he was purely in my wheelhouse. I combined a few visual cues from several various incarnations of the character and filter that all through my inking sensibilities (and with some copper-ish steampunky guns). Below are the pencil sketch and inks.

My Grandparents:
Gilbert & Doris Petersen were a pretty big part of my life. We lived only a few miles from them, and I saw them at least once a week from my birth right up through when I left for college. Even though neither lived long enough to see Mouse Guard released on a national level, I have tried to put their presence in the books (Fall is dedicated in their memory, there are mouse cities in honor of them, and the whole matriarchal society is because of the strong woman my grandmother was.) I sculpted these mice for them as Christmas presents around 1998 (6 years before I drew issue 1). My grandmother was the best baker I'll ever know, & my grandfather was a bit of a cowboy, so their mice sculptures depicted that.


Fan Art:
This piece of Saxon, Kenzie, & Lieam was painted by Andrew Bayliss. I really like the sense of scale and imminent danger. Great job Andrew!

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
Thought Bubble: Nov 17-18

Mouse Development:

Mouse Development:
While organizing things in the studio, I found a few older drawings of the mice I thought I'd share. They show a progression of how I didn't know what to do with my mouse concept for many years and eventually came to the ink work you recognize in Mouse guard today. If you are not a regular reader of the blog, you can look back at a few past posts about the origins of Mouse Guard and my drawing style before reading on:
Pre-Mouse Guard~1149
Drawing Like Yourself
The Old Guard

In 1996, after the initial drawing of Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand, I painted this on a wide scrap piece of mat board. I remember wanting to show the three as wilderness wanderers and adventurers without them being knights or warriors. It's interesting to me now that the wide horizontal composition, something I pushed for with Mouse Guard by making it a square book, was at the root of one of the earliest pieces I did of the mice. I was still heavily referencing Tom Pohrt's mice & backgrounds for this painting.

By 1997 I hadn't separated the mice out of the larger story concept of my "1149" animal world. While attending community college in Flint, MI, I started writing the animal tales as a chapter book (with the  plan for spot illustrations) I was also taking printmaking at the time, and generated a few etchings of the mice. The first one of the mouse trio (left) was a foundation level assignment where we were only allowed to use one type of ground (acid resist) to make the image.

The second I did as a mock book cover. While writing the first few chapters (which at that time had goats, a tiger, a fox and many other species) I was finding how compelling the mice were to write for. The concepts for their culture were solidifying from a vague altruistic-boy-scout-D&D-ranger to what has since become the inner workings of the Guard on display in my books and the roleplaying game. Using them as the focus of this mock cover not only was the shift for making the stories mostly about mice, but also for this importance of a major winter conflict with weasels.

Over the course of college I was jumping around between tools & techniques I could use to make images. And in the same way, I didn't know what would be the best way to tell my mouse story and jumped between options there as well. As a comic? as a chapter book? as a children's book? This drawing with watercolor wash was done when I was still in chapter book mode. The heavily photo referenced drawing taught me how I would need to draw my main characters without looking up photos of mice on every illustration. The facing page in my sketchbook has the note "the mice rarely trusted weasels, but in this case, they made an exception. Rand walked along ahead to warn of any dangers, Kenzie fashioned a clever saddle pouch from the weasel's bag and belt, and Saxon refused to be out of a sword-swing of the ferret's head in case the new partner was not to be trusted"

By 1998 or so though I had started to cool on seriously doing a mouse story. I was introduced to the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, and saw how someone else was already telling this genre of story with words far better that I could have hoped to. And though I was in school for art, I wasn't confident with my chops as an artist to tell a story mostly with pictures. The characters refused to die in my mind though. So for several years i would just draw the mice, even creating new characters, though I had no serious intent on moving forward with a way to tell their tales. But this causal hobby was allowing me to draw the mice in my own way ...no longer looking at how other artists drew mice or digging up endless photo reference.

After I graduated college in 2000, I had the itch to try telling a story with comics again (something I hadn't had enough time to try while earning a degree). Among other story concepts I considered to play with was Mouse Guard. The rendered pencil work seen above was too time consuming to draw panel after panel of, so I tried drawing the characters with just contour lines. I found the drawing too bland, it needed tone. So I added watercolor (which I overworked and subsequently made the drawing worse by adding). The watercolor went on quicker than fully rendering a pencil drawing, but it was less forgiving. (as a side note, I liked this composition so much I redrew it and used it on the über-rare 2004 MG sketchbook)


It was at a family BBQ where I tried drawing the mice in ink where I found my happy place for the art-style. I had enough experience drawing the mouse characters, I could do it without reference and still make them look like semi-real mice, and I could use cross-hatching and stippling to get all the tone I wanted out of them. With the ink I also got a look of polished-finish that my pencil and water color work always seemed to lack.This drawing (supposed to be me as a mouse) was from that drawing session at the outdoor BBQ. I was calling back my printmaking experience with etchings and woodcuts for "how to make grey tones from black lines" and it just felt right.

There was still a part of me that questioned if I could pull off doing a Mouse Guard story in a medieval setting though. Redwall wasn't only a popular book series, but had an animated series on PBS by this time, and I feared the comparisons. So briefly I toyed with the concept of a rather steam-punk-London-airships Mouse Guard. This character was to be one of our heroes who patrolled a war torn city from mouse spies, running up tall structures to leap into scheduled passing airships. Like James Bond, I wanted him to have a number for a code name, one that suggested there were others like him. This concept wasn't developed more than that, but I do remember while doing this drawing feeling I had a better handle on inking textures and making shapes out of inked negative space.

This last drawing (which butt ends the artwork from the Drawing like Yourself post from last February) was a carry over from the steam-punk idea where I tried to design an Ewok-esque flying rig for the medieval mice. Not only is the rig silly, but I opted to have mice ride birds in Mouse Guard to show the sense of wilderness, setting, and scale.


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

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