David Petersen's Blog, page 8

Morose Wooly Dragon

Last week on my Twitch Stream, we did the #DiscoveringDragons Community-Draw-Along! It's a fun event where I welcome all skill levels to push their pencils (or whatever tools they use to make art). It takes place on the first Friday of the month.

I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on the following Monday we shared our finished pieces.

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

For #DiscoveringDragons, I post two or three prompt words for everyone to make into a dragon. It's a nice framework for artists of any skill level to focus some time on an 'assignment' to shake the rust off or get the pencil moving again––all while also being loose enough that there's plenty of room for individual expression and interpretation.

This month the prompt was two words: Wooly & Morose

I opened several tabs of google image searches of sad dragons, Pokemon's Snorlax, Rams & Sheep, and some Mercer Mayer illustrations

I started on copy paper with the head and then worried about fitting it on the paper, so I drew a small thumbnail of the body below it, scanned it into Photoshop and started combining and digitally drawing over the top until I had the bigger shapes figured out I also used a 3D model of Ram hors rotated to the right angle for reference).
I printed that rough out and on a lightpad drew tighter pencils on a lightpad and a new sheet of copy paper.

Those pencils were then re-scanned and I cleaned up my color blocking to help me see what areas were what colors (what was horn vs wool, etc).

I printed out the above design at full scale and taped that onto 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 dragon. I used Copic Multiliner 0.7 pen to ink the art.

The inking on this piece started with the nose and mouth, but moved quickly to figuring out the texture and line density of the wooly hair so it felt matted and curly, but not heavy. I was unable to finish the inks on-stream, but returned to them later that night off-stream, where the inking continued on the rest of the body and the ankle and tail wool.


The next day, I scanned the inks to I could start the coloring process. After prepping the digital scan of the inks, I established a color hold (an area where I want the ink to be a color other than black)––the overall lines became a dark brown. Most of my #DiscoveringDragon pieces have at least two color holds, I think the is the first where I only needed one.

Then it was time to start the color flatting process––basically professional coloring-in-the-lines. Some of this is just to make it easy to re-isolate various parts when doing later painting & rendering. Most of the colors were established in the rough, but I played with the final value/hue choices.

For the final colors I used the dodge and burn tools to add shadows and highlights to give the dragon some form. Most of the work was in darkening in all the shadows in the wooly bits. and then––I opted to do a 2nd color hold on just the wooly bits. Below you can again see the final Dragon...

But, as this is a community event, I wanted to share all the other entries posted in the Discord. 
druffzilla

jodudeit
Knickolaus


Nate Pride

redSkwrl

88UncleErnie

VernNYC

HEROES CON 2024 paintings

For my return to Heroes Con next weekend, I've painted two 16" x 20" pieces in watercolor and color pencil. One of them will be put into the Saturday art auction at the convention. The other will be available at my table the next day with a price set from the winning bid of Saturday's auction.

I have not decided which will be in the auction––I think I'll decide when I arrive in Charlotte.

I wanted the paintings to work together as a pair (so if the winning bidder wants the other painting they can come buy it from me) but where each piece would work as a stand alone piece if they went to different buyers. I opted this year to do facing mirrored portraits of Celanawe and Midnight each with the Black Axe.

I did quick color blocking to help me see the forms but also to plan my colors and value ranges when doing the paintings
The pencil drawings were printed out (over 4 sheets of paper that needed to be patchwork taped together––with the help of a grid to get the alignment right) with graphite paper then placed between the printout and the illustration board.

By tracing over the printout drawing with a ballpoint pen, the pressure transfers the image onto the illustration board. This was done for both pieces 


I set up my two paintings and my watercolor trays (old Windsor Newton Cotman tubes that have mostly dried up and I use like dry cakes) on a TV tray and my desk with a large glass of water. It's nice to have two paintings going at once, so that you can swap between them when one is too wet to work and needs some drying time.

I painted the Mouse Guard portraits on my Twitch stream at the end of May.

Instead of now showing a great deal of photos tracking the progress/process of the paintings, I've put them all together in a YouTube video that you can watch below


Watch directly on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/53sW9UVxKNc

Vinelings Concept Art Revamp

Reap what you sow when you tangle with the Vinelings, a clan of humanoid-vegetation creatures that can control plant life to ensnare their foes, tangle the mobility of unwelcome travelers, and open the soils to rust and compost any war machines attempting to harvest them.
The plant species can vary from Vineling to Vineling, but they always have multiple vine or root-like arms and never show their faces. Wherever they wander, they cast off pollen and drop the seeds that cause them to stand for generations.

Or––that was the idea. In fact, they are a re-design of an old drawing I 'unearthed' when scanning pencil drawings for my Patreon.

A few months ago I shared a revamp of the Skullduggers from the same unmade gaming project.

Back in the earliest of the 2000's, I was toying with the idea of creating a table-top game (like Warhammer) with simpler rules for movement, army creation, etc. While struggling to design those elegant game mechanics (which never materialized) I only ever drew a few of the types of creatures to populate the game with.

To the right is that old drawing of a single Vineling (I envisioned these were the soldiers that could respawn.)
As a just-for-fun exercise, I thought it would be fun to redraw and redesign an older concept piece of mine like this (Plotmasters style).

I started the new version digitally keeping the basic forms and ideas, but making them as well as the pose more interesting. I did end up penciling the vine arms, legs and seed-pod staff traditionally on a lightpad overtop of a printout of the digital sketch. 

I wanted the arms to be more vine-like and to loose the grill/scarf (I think the original was inspired by the Black Wizard in Final Fantasy Tactics––a game I never played, but always liked the look of that character.)
I printed out the above layout with the pencil's also scanned in and added. That prinout was taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series Bristol. Using my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the surface of the bristol to the printout below and use it as a guide to ink from. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens.

This piece was a texture mess––and no good way to make it all make sense in black and white without adding shadows I didn't want in the final color...so I just did my best to control the density.

The original inked artwork is avilable for sale in my online store: https://mouseguard.bigcartel.com/product/vineling-original-art

When the inks were done I scanned them and started the coloring process. That first step is called 'flatting' where the different color areas are all painted in with flat colors..it's a professional version of coloring-inside-the-lines.
The color choices seemed obvious to me looking at the original and so I used similar colors when doing the digital sketch.

I also added a color hold (where I want the black lineart to be a color other than black) to the overall linework and a special glow around the eyes.
Here again are the final colors. They were rendered using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop and a stock textured brush. 
I have no immediate plans for what to do with these guys, but between my Draw The Extinct creatures, Discovering Dragons, and a few more like this––I seem to have a nice bestiary for fantasy gaming...

Nadra Illustration

Last year I did an illustration for my friend Thorin who is developing a RPG setting and novel series called 'Nadra'. Thorin is the son of Alice Finch who was responsible for spearheading the Mouse Guard LEGO display and project that celebrated the Mouse Guard 10th anniversary.

Thorin commissioned me to do a piece from a moment in the first book's story that he could also use to make some tee-shirts or prints for the RPG community helping him develop the setting. I opted to make it possibly serve as a book cover, which you can see with mock-up text on the left. Below I'll go through the process of creating the illustration.

Thorin provided me with a lot (and I mean a lot) of reference ideas for each character. In addition to written physical descriptions, he also shared something akin to a mood board for the clothing, hair styles, and weapons for them all (including characters not appearing in this illustration--in case I opted for a different scene from the book).

I'm not known for drawing humans very well, so I did struggle with getting the pencil drawings correct. I looked at some photo reference for faces and drew each character separately. The rocky character had some wiggle room in the visual design (though Thorin did provide me with rock formations and petrified dinosaur scales for guidance)...I do regret how much I inadvertently used the Batman the Animated Series Clayface design. I assembled the drawings, tinted them all differently and did a quick blocking painting for the rocks and sky.

The layout was printed out on copy paper (this piece was 11" x 14", so it took a few sheets taped together) and I taped the printout to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. On my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the bristol and use the printout as a guide to ink from.

I used Copic Multiliner SP pens (the 0.7 & 0.3 nibs) to ink everything. I was very caution when inking the faces because if I was just a little bit off, it would ruin the character's expression. I used the finer nib for the faces and the larger nib for more of the costuming and outer contours. 

Even though I knew I'd ultimately be coloring the piece, I wanted to be sure the artwork worked in black and white, so I tried to be hyper aware of where the dark spots and textures were going so I didn't overwhelm the piece with visual clutter.
Once the inks were finished, I scanned them back into Photshop to start the coloring. This first step is called 'flatting' where all the base colors are established. It's a professional version of coloring-in-the-lines. Some of the ideas of the colors were established in Thorin's descriptions, but picking exact colors was a dance I had to do to make sure everything read well while also looking harmonious (like they are all in the same place). Originally I was going to go with a yellow sky like in the rough, but opted in this stage to play with some pink-to-purple gradients to make the setting more ominous.

I also established some color holds (areas where I want the lineart to be a color other than black) mostly on the swirling clouds, but also on one of the character's upper lip and on the dwarf's bow string.

Here again is the final colored art (sans text). The rendering was done mostly using the dodge and burn tools with a stock textured brush.

To find out more about Nadra, you can visit Thorin's website:
www.thorinfinch.com/nadra/

Lake Como Folio Print

 This weekend I’ll be a guest at the Lake Como Comic Art Festival: https://www.lccaf.com/

They will publish a folio of art pieces done by the guests and made available at the convention. You can see my finished piece here and below I’ll show the process of creating the piece.

For the layout, I wanted to include some architecture found in Lake Como. I happened upon a photo of a terrace with an amazing tile floor and used it for reference (though I did have to alter the scale of the roof and columns). I also found that the Kingfisher is a native bird there, and loved the idea of mice in partnership with the bird catching small fish (for oil, scaled skin, bones, and meat for the bird). I drew these elements on copy paper and then assembled them in photoshop and did a quick blocking color pass to help me see everything clearer.

The layout was printed out and taped to the back of a sheet of 14”x17” Strathmore bristol. On my huion lightpad I was able to see through the bristol surface and use the printout as a guide to ink from. I inked the piece with Copic Multiliner SP pens. The original of this piece will be offered for sale at Lake Como, but later in my online store if it doesn’t sell there.

When the inks were finished, I scanned them and started the digital coloring process. This first step is called ‘flatting’ where only flat base colors are painted in (like a professional version of coloring in the lines). I’d mostly decided the color choices in the layout stage. I also established color holds (areas where I want the inkwork to be a color other than black) on the background landscape and the details of the tile floor.

Here again are the final colors, all rendered in Photoshop with the dodge and burn tools and a stock textured brush. The folio with the print will be available at the con, and *if* I get any extras I’ll make them available in my store.

Proud Patch-work Tiger Dragon

Earlier this month on my Twitch Stream, we did the #DiscoveringDragons Community-Draw-Along! It's a fun event where I welcome all skill levels to push their pencils (or whatever tools they use to make art). It takes place on the first Friday of the month.

I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on the following Monday we shared our finished pieces.

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

For #DiscoveringDragons, I post two or three prompt words for everyone to make into a dragon. It's a nice framework for artists of any skill level to focus some time on an 'assignment' to shake the rust off or get the pencil moving again––all while also being loose enough that there's plenty of room for individual expression and interpretation.

This month the prompt was three words: Proud, Patch-work, & Tiger

I opened several tabs of google image searches of Tigers, Milt Kahl's drawings of Shere Khan, and some of Nora Potwora's Art

I started on copy paper with the head and then on another sheet overlayed on a lightpad, I drastically changed the body by making it loop overtop the head. 
The stripes were drawn as just stripes, but I knew that when it came to the inking, they were the place I'd emphasize the 'patchwork' prompt.
I assembled the drawings digitally and then digitally drew in some wings and antlers after getting more reference. The colors were just to help me see the various body parts more clearly when inking to keep track of textures and forms.


I printed out the above design and taped that onto 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 dragon. I used Copic Multiliner 0.7 pen to ink the art.

The inking on this piece started with the contours and overall form. I was unable to finish the inks on-stream, but returned to them later that night off-stream, where the inking became all about the patchwork stripes and getting those textures and patterns to read, but still look like a dark stripe.


The next day, I scanned the inks to I could start the coloring process. After prepping the digital scan of the inks, I established color holds (areas where I want the inks to be a color other than black––on the overall lines to a dark brown, and a dark purple on all the patchwork textures with a few yellows thrown in to offset...later on I'd also add a hold to all the stitching lines).

Then it was time to start the color flatting process––basically professional coloring-in-the-lines. Some of this is just to make it easy to re-isolate various parts when doing later painting & rendering. Most of the colors were already established in the rough, but to add some more fantasy to it, the patches were a purple instead of a black/brown.

For the final colors I used the dodge and burn tools to add shadows and highlights to give the dragon some form. The stripe-patchwork all needed separate attention to vary their colors and values so they truly looked like patches. Below you can again see the final Dragon...

But, as this is a community event, I wanted to share all the other entries posted in the Discord. 
88UncleEnie

Capt.Nemo

Dakota


Doombot79

Jodudeit
JonathanTowry

KyleGerbrandt

mina_nah

Nate Pride

redSkwrl
soulseekerolga
VernNYC (1)

VernNYC (2)

Recent Toned Commissions

Here are some Toned Commissions from the start of the year and Emerald City Comic Con
A Mouse with an axe
A Guardmouse with a sword

Sadie in a leaf boat

aA Blacksmith mouse

Celanawe

Mirren from the Western Deep game 


Paul Atreides

A Squirrel in armor with family specific heraldry



Ghost Rider


Mabel Heir to Cragflame

Throg



A Mouse Musketeer


Happy Usagi
Saxon

1149 Shield Heraldry

Long before Mouse Guard was Mouse Guard––before it even had mice as characters, it was a project called 1149. To quickly recap, it was a fantasy adventure comic I started in high school with animal characters more akin to Disney's Robin Hood than what we know Mouse Guard to be. And I created a group, like a D&D party, with a duck fighter, a fox ranger, an opossum mage, a tiger monk, and a ferret thief.

Well recently on a whim an idea came to me to create heraldry for each one that I could eventually use in Mouse Guard some day. To the left you can see the final art for those heraldic shields, and below I'll go into the creation of the art. 
I started with some stock shield designs I found online and then in Photoshop I added penciled heads, arms, and tails (and in a few cases the interior symbology). Yes, there is also a Rabbit in this mix––there were a few side characters like a rabbit and a bear who were townsfolk who'd help the 1149 adventurers, and to round out the illustration I added the hare.

The hare was a farmer, so I gave him wheat and a scythe. The duck had been a butcher turned fighter, and he used his cleavers. The fox, while a ranger, was in many more ways a bard/thief who would steal from royalty he duped into believing he was a dignitary from another land, the opossum got a book with stars to represent magic. The tiger had a spiked mace and I made the background stripes to echo the tiger's fur. And the ferret used daggers, so I filled his shield with small but deadly weapons.  
When the roughs were done the way I liked, they were printed out onto copy paper and taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I inked them all with Copic Multiliner SP pens. Because these were simplified heraldry designs, I tried to keep the linework very simple and not add much texture.

I have an idea for how to incorporate these designs as well as the spirit of the original characters into a real Mouse Guard story... With the inks scanned, I started the coloring process. The flat color stage is about as far as I really needed to go with this (though the final art did get some light texture added). I also established color holds (areas where I want the linework to be a color other than black) like on all the lineart, and then on specific design elements like the checkerboard, the wheat, the starburst, and the book.

The color choices were mostly all determined from the characters original designs from high-school.



Here again are the final colors.

Even though these are just simplified heraldic designs, re-drawing these characters I made up over 30 years ago was an instant time travel device that took me back to my earliest comic characters and the ideas Jesse Glenn, Mike Davis, Nick Kowalcyk and I were coming up with (stuff we'd later categorize as 'Plotmasters')

Pirate, Spaceman, Cowboy, Knight

A Pirate, a Spaceman, a Cowboy, and a Knight all walk into a bar...or into some new designs. In a Plotmasters type exercise, I took an old drawing and tried to improve on both the artwork & the concept as a whole. I have no intention of developing this beyond a nostalgia trip and re-design exercise. You can see the results to the left, but in this post I'll explore where they came from and the process in revamping them.

In 1999 or 2000 I drew the piece on the right as well as a list of characters for the idea. In true Plotmasters fashion, the characters were clearly myself, Jesse Glenn, and the others would be based on the usual friends of mine that provided inspiration. I was clearly in my 'emulate Mignola' phase when I drew the Pirate and the Spaceman.

The overall idea was for a group of mis-matched characters to go on adventures together––and when I say mismatched, I mean in the same way a kid might team up action figures and toys from very different toy lines and in very different genres and scales. 

Sound Familiar? Toy Story, right? Well––it does match that franchise, and I did draw the original two as well as my list well after the first movie was out. But, instead I was influenced by an episode of The Twilight Zone called "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" where archetypal characters are stuck in a cylinder with no memory of how they got there only to find out they are toys in a Christmas donation barrel. And instead of a Soldier, a Hobo, a Bagpiper, a Clown, and a Dancer, I went with toy genres that were popular when I was a kid, but also seemed timeless.

And I have to admit, even in the re-designs, I couldn't get away from Toy Story, and so I leaned into it. My first step for the re-design was to draw the characters that had already been visualized, but this time to play with proportions to make them more stylized and toy-like.

I pushed the horizontal of the Pirate, making him low and squat, with the only vertical height being given by the ostentatiousness of his feather and sword. The Spaceman I wanted to push into a shape beyond what a human could wear as a costume and embrace a design of something more futuristic...though I think the design borrows a lot from Lego Space sets and Gizmo Duck.

To keep this exercise simple, I opted to ink them large and with a brush pen––focusing on the overall shapes and concepts and not on details and textures. This was inked on a 12" x 12" piece of Strathmore Bristol.

I remember being torn at this point in the process about the characters as toys vs characters inspired by toys Toy Story/Twilight Zone issue. And I wish I'd included a base plate (like on plastic army men) on the Pirate's foot & peg to make him much more obviously a toy.

I then scanned the inks and colored them in Photoshop. Rather than my normal Mouse Guard style of coloring, I went back to a technique I did on a Plotmasters episode for 'Hero Squad'. 

For this process each character is colored with flat base colors. Then a layer is placed above that set to 'multiply' and a pale purple is used to paint in flat shadows––same process but a layer set to 'screen' to create highlights. The last steps were to add color holds to the Spaceman's logo and face and a crinkled paper background to the duo to project the feel of this being part of a kid's imagination.

Written on the original drawing were two additional characters (I'm sure I was even considering more, but stopped at 4 in total): Cowboy & Knight. The trick with doing a modern drawing of a friendly toy cowboy is how to avoid Woody from Toy Story. I really leaned in to the toy-object idea and made his head and body wood block, his arms and legs rope and his hair and mustache yarn. 

The Knight I decided could be a material opposite to armor and made him a knitted plush. The cowboy design is based on my college friend Seyth––the Knight I don't know––perhaps Nick (see Cats Trio, Dragons, or R-Wars).

Like the others, I inked these on 12' x 12" Strathmore bristol with a brush pen. I like how they tall gangly Cowboy and short squat Knight shapes echo the first two re-designs of the Pirate and Spaceman.

I did worry that I was going to have to do more detail on these compared to the others just to get the materials of the yarn & rope across. Being aware of that helped me me better about not going down a rabbit hole of texture and detail and to just limit it to define basic forms and imply materials.

I think it's fun to imagine that while the previous two characters were store bought, these two toys were hand-made for the child, or that the cowboy especially was an older broken toy with knotted rope used to replace missing pieces.

The coloring process was the same as before, but this time I had a harder time choosing the base colors. There's a long tradition of me-characters being red and Jesse characters being blue. 

I know Seyth's favorite color is green, but how to make that work as Cowboy attire (when I so dearly wanted that bandanna to be red) took some subtle adjustments until I got something that worked. For the knight I just used Yellow & Orange to round out a Primary + Green scheme. I like that it makes the Knight look even a little more cautious and timid rather than the association of bravery with a knight.

Here again are the quartet together––just drawn for fun as an exercise. 

Where I think this idea could still work and differentiate itself from something like Toy Story or the Twilight Zone episode is for the characters-as-characters to exist only in the imagination of the child. Unlike Toy Story where the toys really are alive, these would be inanimate toys, but ones where the child living through some kind of distress (anything ranging from detention or being grounded to dealing with a terminal illness or an abusive parent) uses the toys as talismans and imagines the things they do that help the child navigate emotionally through the situation.
*PS*
Another idea of how to use these characters/designs would be in a co-operative video game set in a house (bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, etc) where each player can control one of the toys. They can pair up to accomplish special moves (the pirate can be hooked on to the cowboy's lasso and be thrown up to a higher location, the knight can ride the spaceman to joust objects out of the way, etc) each character would have their own pros and cons (the pirate walks slow, but has good reach with the sword, the spaceman is fast but makes the most noise, the knight is squishy and can fall without taking damage, etc.

Cosmic Jellyfish Dragon

Earlier this month on my Twitch Stream, we did the #DiscoveringDragons Community-Draw-Along! It's a fun event where I welcome all skill levels to push their pencils (or whatever tools they use to make art). It takes place on the first Friday of the month.

I worked on my piece live on my Twitch stream while viewers worked at home and then on the following Monday we shared our finished pieces.

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

For #DiscoveringDragons, I post two or three prompt words for everyone to make into a dragon. It's a nice framework for artists of any skill level to focus some time on an 'assignment' to shake the rust off or get the pencil moving again––all while also being loose enough that there's plenty of room for individual expression and interpretation.

This month the prompt was two words: Cosmic & Jellyfish

I opened several tabs of google image searches of Jellyfish, the Cosmos, and a few images drawn by Nate Pride: Blight Drone 001 & 'The Darkness Consumes All'

I started on copy paper with the head and a basic idea for the overall shape, but then quickly scanned it and built up most of the body, horns, and tendrils digitally. 
I printed it out to start inking but realized I didn't have the Jellyfish Bell drawn well enough and I thought my digital tendrils were too wispy. 

So, I did a lighbox draw over on a clean sheet of copy paper to formalize those elements (seen here after scanning in a purple/magenta tone).

I printed out the above design and taped that onto 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 dragon. I used Copic Multiliner 0.7 pen to ink the art.

The inking on this piece was all about managing those black areas that make the creature look transparent while also conveying that it is made up of galaxies. The Jellyfish bell and tendrils were something I tried to use a different texture for and practice more restraint with. I was unable to finish the inks on-stream, but returned to them later that night off-stream.

The next day, I scanned the inks to I could start the coloring process. After prepping the digital scan of the inks, I established color holds (areas where I want the inks to be a color other than black––on the overall lines to a dark blue, a purple for the Jellyfish bell, and a magenta on the tendrils

Then it was time to start the color flatting process––basically professional coloring-in-the-lines. Some of this is just to make it easy to re-isolate various parts when doing later painting & rendering. I went with a medium blue (darker than in my rough) for the base body, and a similar purple for the Bell & tendrils. For the spots on the bell, I used a very pale yellow as a contrast to the violets.

For the final colors I used a paintbrush to give some subtle color transitions in the body before using the dodge and burn tools to create the highlights and shadows. Each little star and planet and moon had to be carefully gone over with the dodge tool to make it brighter and a appear to shine inside this dragon's body. To make the bell seem more cosmic I painted white stipples all over it like a field of stars.

Below you can again see the final Dragon...

But, as this is a community event, I wanted to share all the other entries posted in the Discord. 


88 Uncle Ernie

Capt. Nemo

Dakota

Doombot79

jodudeit

Jonathan Towry

Knickolaus

Kyle Gerbrandt

Nate Pride

redSkwrl

VernNYC