Video Blog:Trying something new with a video post about the models I make for Mouse Guard. The video is about 13 min long. Enjoy!


Direct YouTube link for video


Upcoming Appearances:
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7
2011 dates TBA

Pages from past Sketchbooks

Looking through the last 3 years of my color sketchbooks, I found that several of the pieces had meaning for me as I was doing the piece (upcoming stories) -or- sparked an idea as I was drawing it of a story or idea I'd like to play with more in the future. I grabbed a few to share (not all of them, this way I can revisit this theme if you all enjoy it)

Induction: Back in 2006 I did a piece similar to this one and mentioned that I'd like to revisit it. Working on the RPG with Luke Crane helped me to establish how I wanted to handle a mouse becoming a Guard, what were the requirements, and then once you were accepted, what was the ceremony like. I don't know if I drew this or the title header for the RPG that shows a similar scene first, but my influences were: being inducted into the National Honors Society in high school, The Sorting at Hogwarts, the Metal Ceremony from A New Hope. Now I still haven't shown this scene in the comics, but I do plan on giving the readers a front row seat to an induction into the Guard.

Weasels: Black Axe will have Fishers & Ferrets...but they do not offer the promise I have made since day one of a massive battle between mice and weasels. The plan is for that to be the fourth book in the Mouse Guard series set in 1149. I have to admit, the idea of drawing that war has me a bit worried..it's a tough job doing a normal series, but a whole war!?!? yikes. So the pieces I have done with mice fighting weasels have been good practice. This one was from a fan requesting Rand doing some damage. Fitting since Rand will be a main character in that story.

Love: I like a good love story, and I wanted to bring some romance to Mouse Guard. The ball got rolling with Winter with two couples romances starting, but in one case, it was under such adverse conditions, it wasn't very romantic, and the other happened at the end of the book. I have plans to deal with those characters and their feelings for each other in stories down the road. This piece (the original of which hangs to the left of my studio desk) reminds me to make sure the stories are about characters and relationships as much as it is big vs little and high adventure.

Loukas: Saxon's mentor was a character who was supposed to just be a mentioned mouse in the 4th issue of Winter. However since I needed to show a flashback and have Saxon inherit items of his, I had to design his cloak and sword, etc. The idea of Loukas and what his relationship to Saxon was like grabbed me. I have a history for the character planned out and I suspect we will see more of him in the Winter War of 1149 as well as a yet-untitled-yet-unscheduled story involving Saxon and Kenzie when they first joined the Guard.

Opossum: This piece was drawn for a fan who asked for a Guardmouse attacking something. Sometimes it's fun to not just re-tread some of the old battles for these commissions (crabs, owl, snake, etc.) but to expand the world a bit. I also wanted to show Kenzie fighting something effectively. Because of his personality and choice of weapon, I think it's easy to pigeon hole him into not being an effective fighter. So pieces like this help me figure out ways to show Kenzie in another light.

Matriarchs: Readers have only met Gwendolyn the matriarch in Fall and Winter, but I have had to start thinking about other matriarchs and their role in the Guard and territories. Like the induction ceremony, the RPG got me thinking about how matriarchs are chosen, what privileges they have, etc. Something I think will be fun to play with later is that Matriarchs will have sole access to all the writings of previous matriarchs. I picture all of these texts (among other artifacts) to be held in a room that has portraits and busts of previous matriarchs. This commission's tapestry was based on one that my friend's mother made and hangs in a church in Ann Arbor (though I mousified it to include some Guard symbology)

The End: While I have no end for Mouse Guard in sight. I do have ideas as to when certain characters meet their end. And that's not to say that it is anytime soon, but expecting a character to live forever is a boring prospect to me for the mice. I plan to use characters deaths to trigger events and force living characters to deal with the effects, even if those effects are only their own grief and loss. This commission started when I was asked for 'something creepy...like a tomb' and became a scene I have planned a long way off, but is an iconic moment for me in the continuation of Mouse Guard.

Upcoming Appearances:
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7
2011 dates TBA

Mouse Guard RPG Boxed Set:
At the NYCC we announced that there will be a Boxed Set of the Mouse Guard RPG to be out later this year. We have currently sold out of the Hardcover (though your local shops and online retailers may still have some in stock) and with plans to reprint, we thought we would offer a deluxe package as well that is full of stuff fans of the game asked for. Also the cover art is the piece I was working on a few weeks back when I was ustreaming the ink-flatting-coloring process and Photoshop crashed on me and I lost everything. (I rescanned and colored the piece the next day)

Among the items to be included in the box will be: a softcover edition of the 320-page Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game, a pad of character sheets, a pad of GM sheets, a folding GM screen with handy reference charts, a map of the territories, 5 mouse pawns (which I carved the master for) to mark locations on the map, and a few more items I'd like to talk about in more detail:

A brand-new 44-page supplement* with new missions and adventures. Luke and I had said from the start that we didn't want to expand the game and make supplements unless we had very good reason to. So in the booklet we cover a few new rules including riding mounts, 'weapons' for conflicts, & three new locations: Flintrust, Grasslake, and Sandmason. The pre-made characters from the main RPG book have been advanced, Celanawe has been added to Kenzie's patrol, and an entire new patrol of characters from the Mouse Guard comics has been made into template characters. With all of that AND three new missions, we feel like this was a supplement worth making.

Dice: In the Mouse Guard RPG, the dice rolls are almost binary: failure( 1-3) and success (4-6) ...with 6 being noted as a 'bonus' success that you can re-roll to gain even more successes. So we designed special dice that are included in this set(x10). The failures are represented by a snake eating it's own tail, the successes are crossed swords, and the '6' is replaced by the Black Axe. The image shown here is a photoshop mockup I made, so the final product may vary slightly from what is pictured.

Cards: Three decks of 12 Action Cards each, 15 Condition Cards, & 21 Weapon Cards. All of the cards are designed to help players streamline play. Instead of having to re-reference the book, or pass it among the players every turn, players can refer to their cards of options with rules noted on each. Playing them also saves writing and erasing over and over on your character sheet and/or scrap paper. The weapons cards (of which I did new artwork for..though the cards shown are not the final design of the card layout, but rather to show the artwork) help players understand the rules for their weapons. Mace was also added with special rules for the boxed set.

*The plan is to release the supplement booklet as a .pdf purchase so that players who already have the original RPG hardcover are not forced to buy the boxed set in order to take advantage of the new rules.

Upcoming Appearance:
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7

House of Mystery Page Process

When I was asked to do a House Of Mystery story to be written by Bill Willingham I jumped at the chance. Not only would I get to work with Bill and get some great exposure, but I was looking forward to working from someone's script...something I had never really done much of. I was very lucky, in that Bill wrote the script for me, so the setting and subject matter already fell into my normal range of work. To the right is the page 2 script he sent.

Vertigo was keen to have me thumbnail the entire story in advance. In this layout process, I didn't go into too much detail and, in fact, left the last panel a bit bare. With Bill's note about how many captions and balloons were going to be in that panel, I figured I would deal with filling in when working at full scale.

The pencils shown here a a mix of parts I drew right on the page, and lightboxed sketches I had floating on various sheets of copy paper. Knowing how I was going to handle the roses in panel 1, I felt that I didn't need to pencil the detail all the way across to give the editor a sense of what I was going for in the final inks. I cheated with the herringbone patterned brick work. I made a sheet of the pattern in photoshop and distorted it to different angles and printed them out, using a lightbox to transfer the pattern to the artwork.

Once the pencils were approved, I moved on to the inks. I penciled the page much tighter than I would a Mouse Guard page, so the inks were a very literal translation of what I had drawn already. Areas with patterns were the places I did the most work directly in the ink, like the roses in panel 1, the foliage in panel 2, and the wall and plants in panel 5.

For the colors I wanted to mute the palette but still give a sense of life and light to the garden. I tweaked the greens endlessly on this story, trying to make sure they didn't blend together and didn't have too high a contrast. Adding the color-holds to push the background further back helped me give the garden a slight dreamy state, which fit well with the tone of Bill's script.
The final art appeared in House of Mystery number 7 and was reprinted in the TPB of House of Mystery vol.2.


Legends At NYCC: The plan for this weekend is that Archaia will have a limited advance copies of the Legends of the Guard hardcover at the New York Comic Con (which is odd because this advance will beat out the release of issue 4). This means that not only might you be able to get your paws on a copy if you go to the convention, you will also have the chance to get it signed by: Ted Naifeh, Sean Rubin, Alex Kain, Terry Moore, Katie Cook, Mark Smylie, Karl Kerschl, Joao Lemos, and myself. (according to their sites, all of those creators plan to be at the show in one location or another)

Upcoming Appearances:
New York Comic Con (Archaia booth): Oct 8-10
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7

Extinct Print:

I wanted to share a print I did in 2002. This was an experiment I was trying for an exhibit called 'Zoo' in Flint, MI at the Buckham Gallery (which was later renamed and rethemed to just be an 'open call for entries'...but only AFTER I did a 'Zoo' piece). The piece is made up of 18 three inch linoleum block prints which I printed with water based ink on velum mylar. Because of the transparent nature of the mylar, I was able to hand color each mini-print using markers (a hodge podge of Charpak & Prismacolor) Below I arranged the individual mini prints in the same configuration as the original above, but so that you can click on each one for more detail.

Upcoming Appearances:
New York Comic Con (Archaia booth): Oct 8-10
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7

Inks to Colors:
Last week I was working on a piece I thought it would be nice to share on Ustream. So I set up my camera rig over my lightbox and recorded the inks. Then I scanned the piece and recorded the flatting process of coloring, and pushed on into the night with a third recording where I rendered and finished the piece...almost. In the last steps of the last stage of rendering, Photoshop crashed, and (since I didn't save once because I was thinking about narrating the ustream) I lost the whole thing and had to rescan. Next day, without streaming, I rescanned and recolored the piece. The finished piece is above. The videos* mentioned (including the fatal crash) are below:
*They are each over an hour long, and the sound quality is a bit 'underwater-ish' but per request, I have posted them.

Inking:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9598593

Flatting:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9601657

Rendering:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9603291

Upcoming Appearances:
West Hollywood Book Fair: Sept. 26
New York Comic Con (Archaia booth): Oct 8-10
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7

Oz:
Lat week I mentioned Audio Books, and Oz is one of the series I have yet to find a version of where I enjoy the reader. And as much as I'm a fan of the Land of Oz and as much as it inspired me as a kid, I have never read an Oz book from start to finish, which I'd like to fix.

Oz started for me when I was in 2nd grade. The annual tradition of it being shown on television was coming up and classmates of mine were very excited about it. Somehow, we, as 2nd graders, decided we would do a Wizard of Oz play for the school...or at least our class. Our teacher told us "no", but with the work we had already done (some parents, including mine, had started helping us with our costumes.) we were allowed to have 2 mornings to spread our performance over for the 2nd grade classes of Pierce Elementary and their parents. I was the Tin Man, who remains to this day my favorite of the characters.

In High School, I started looking towards doing children's book illustration as a profession. I remember when 'finishing' this drawing (it has no background!?) that I was ready to be hired to do book illustration. Luckily, I never went out looking for work with that attitude. What this piece shows me more than my cocky mindset, is that I was thinking about the work seriously. I had done countless Oz themed drawings between second grade and senior year, but I was making design choices here, thinking about composition, and using a variety of media.

This series of illustrations I did after college (so about 5 years after the other drawing). In college, we were steered away from illustrative subjects and work, and focused more on expression and abstraction. So, for a few years I tried to re-learn what I had been building up to before University. These were to become my portfolio to try and live as an artist. I was also trying to do my definitive versions of the characters, somewhere between paying homage to John R. Neil (my favorite Oz artist) and my own sensibilities. I had planned to do more characters (Ozma, Jack Pumpkinhead, Dorothy, the Patchwork Girl...) but after these 4 I must have moved on to other projects.

More recently, I was asked by Stephen Gettis to do a piece for his Literary themed collection: 'Hey Oscar Wilde, It's Clobberin Time!'. Oz was the 2nd piece I did for him (the first being Wind in the Willows) and I took it back to the origin for me...discovering the Tin Woodsman.








Fan Art: This week's piece may look familiar: "I know I've already submitted this piece before, but I made major changes to it after seeing how much attention you pay to the background features. thanks! -Charlotte Cheng"
No, Thank You Charlotte! I like the idea of improving through revisiting older work!
If you would like your fan art posted here, email your work to ericebon (at) hotmail (dot) com



Upcoming Appearances:
West Hollywood Book Fair: Sept. 26
New York Comic Con (Archaia booth): Oct 8-10
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7

Listening:
While I love movies and enjoy several TV shows, they are not something I can enjoy while I work. It's too easy to be distracted visually. So I tend to rely on Old Time Radio (OTR), and various audio books to keep me moving through my work. Seems about once a year I post something about OTR (past posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Mainly I listen via Sirius satellite radio, but I also go to the sites mentioned in the 5th post if I'm in the mood for something specific.

As for Audio Books, I recommend Stephen King's IT read by Stephen Weber and Wind in the Willows read by Terry Jones. But my old fall back series is Harry Potter read by Jim Dale. I have gone through all 7 of them nearly a dozen times, and I still enjoy them very very much. I have been told that the UK versions read by Stephen Fry are better, but I have not heard them. I have enjoyed Fry reading other books, but I worry that Dale's versions are so deeply in my head now, I'd have a hard time with a different reader. In any case, talking about this has given me the chance to share the recently colored version of the Professor Snape commission I did at San Diego. I find that coloring some of these quickly is a nice way to ease into coloring a larger Mouse Guard page (and this one had a very limited palette, so it was all the easier)

And just recently (through a subscription to Audible) I found dramatized versions of the Winnie the Pooh books read by a full cast including Stephen Fry (Pooh) and Judi Dench (Kanga & Narrator). They are delightful. I had forgotten how much I like the style of writing A.A. Milne did with the Pooh stories. It inspired me to do this quick warm up piece where I tried a new coloring/texture technique of overlaying tinted crosshatching (after I decided the inks looked too clean compared with the definitive E. H. Shephered's illustrations.

Fan Art: This week the fan art comes from Derek McLean who sculpted Lieam and Saxon in FIMO. He also shares: "I had made a Kenzie also, but it was defeated by my cat, and shattered on the floor." Sorry to hear how Kenzie met his end, but, Thanks Derek!
If you would like your fan art posted here, email your work to ericebon (at) hotmail (dot) com

Upcoming Appearances:
West Hollywood Book Fair: Sept. 26
New York Comic Con (Archaia booth): Oct 8-10
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7

This post is the product of me searching for something in an old filing cabinet and finding these unrelated items to share:

Screw-On Head: With this week being the release of the Amazing Screw-On Head and other curious objects Hardcover collection , I found it odd that I stumbled upon the original painting I did back in my watercolor/ink-outline days. I had scans of the painting, but thought the original was long gone (though I have plans for it now that I have found it) As readers of the blog know I'm a big Mignola fan and Screw-On head is one of those gems that got better with every reading and showed that you how other creators were still interested in doing something fresh and unique in comics. I'm very excited to sit down and read the collection which also includes the Eisner Award winning story 'The Magician and the Snake' that Mike co-wrote with his daughter Katie (7 at the time). And an excuse to share a painting I did of a character and creator that renewed my faith in something new & different lasting.

College Comic Strip: Though I never drew a single strip of it, I had an idea for my college newspaper. The premise was two college roommates (Nick & Dave) who need a third roommate to split the rent. Nick goes out to find a new tenant and instead brings home a monkey. He rationalizes that the monkey can take care of the apartment, cook, clean, perhaps even do some of their homework, which will allow the two to pick up more hours at work (which they never do). Another character Mike was a friend who didn't live with the pair (and now a monkey) but might as well have been considering how much time he spent there. Mike was going through an identity crisis and chose to wear masks until he discovered his 'true self' and was ready to face the world (this is why he's wearing a pumpkin in this lineup, but the disguise would change every strip or so). Over the course of the run I planned on the monkey robbing a bank to help with the rent, going to classes for them, and taking pleasure in terrorizing Mike.

D & D Character portraits: When roleplaying, I always enjoyed flawed characters (something the GURPS system taught me was beneficial to fun adventures). While I was trying to break in to doing illustration in 2001 or so, I did these character portraits for a fantasy roleplaying game. The focus I was working on were imperfect characters, not handsome or tidy, but folks missing teeth, with receding hairlines, covered in muck, scarred and homely. They are all rendered in pencil on white copy paper. Like much of the portfolio I took around at that time for work, lack a setting or background. It was fun rediscovering these as well as the above entries...never found what I was originally searching for, but the content for this post made it worthwhile anyhow.

Fan Art: This week the fan art comes from Aaron Hawbaker who did a pencil drawing of the scene from Fall 1152 where Celanawe has reclaimed his axe and Midnight is at a disadvantage.
Thanks Aaron!
If you would like your fan art posted here, email your work to ericebon (at) hotmail (dot) com

Upcoming Appearances:
West Hollywood Book Fair: Sept. 26
New York Comic Con (Archaia booth): Oct 8-10
Mid-Ohio Con: Nov. 6-7