Mouse Guard mice, pre-publication (2005)

It's easy to look at an artist's published works and forget that before those images were seen by the public, there were hundreds of thousands of steps to artistically get there. I've been lucky enough to be noted as having a 'style' that stands out with a confidence of textured ink line (I've done a few videos addressing 'style' and my inkwork 'Drawing like yourself' and 'Inking grey'), but I wanted to use this Blogpost to remind everyone that the look of Mouse Guard Issue 1 didn't just happen––nor did it happen quickly.

Below I've put together many images of my drawings of Mouse Guard characters when it stopped being the lots-of-species 1149 story, but before I'd drawn a single page of the comic. The earliest image is from 1996 when I was in my first year of college, and the last are from 2003-4 when I was newly married, bought a house with Julia and just before I started drawing issue 1 of the comic. I've tried to keep them in chronological order, and written some commentary for each.

This is the first image of Saxon Kenzie, and Rand––when I decided to add mouse characters to 1149.
These were drawn while sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom looking at the mice in Tom Pohrt's Coyote Goes Walking (a Michigan based Illustrator).

The images were drawn in pencil on copy paper, inked with a crow-quill dip pen, then painted with watercolor pencils.

Very soon after that first image I used a scrap of mat board to draw my patrol of Saxon, Kenzie, and Rand. I was still figuring out scale here––the 1149 characters were human-sized, but with animal features, and when I brought the mice in is when I wanted to utilize real-world proportions--this is still an in-between stage. The mouse bodies are wrapped in cloaks (later to be a distinguishing feature of Guardmice) because I didn't have good reference (real of from another illustrator) of a mouse standing on it's hind feet.

This is again crow-quill dip pen and watercolor pencils.

To try and make the characters more 'comic book style' I tried stylizing their proportions (I feel like I was influenced by real-life Kenzie, Jesse Glenn's drawings for a 1996 Cats Trio revamp.

Crow-quill dip pen and Prismacolor Markers 

Another ink & watercolor pencil on a scrap of mat board piece––this time trying to get a handle (poorly) of that fictional upright mouse anatomy. This may have been in preparation of a bronze statue you'll see in a few more images. What I remember about this piece was how many people commented on my 'rat' character...I made a concious decision I had to figure out how to stylize them so they looked 'cuter' to evoke the feel of mice.

In my second year of college I took a printmaking class around the same time I was actually writing down a story for my Guardmice characters. This was my second ever etching (a technique assignment all using softground). This may be the first time I'd drawn all three with their signature weapons. 

One of my last prints made in that first-semester Printmaking class. The assignment was more about the scale and printing an edition of your plate, but to note here is that I was doing this as a potential book cover when 1149 was going to be a prose book with illustrations. Much of what that story was got stored away and used as raw ingredients for what will be The Weasel War of 1149. But, at this stage, the other species of rams, a tiger, duck,  fox, opossum, etc. were still characters.
 

Around the time I was taking that printmaking class, I was also taking a sculpture class where we did a bronze casting. The piece had to be sculpted in wax first, then a mold (able to resist the heat of molten bronze) was formed around it, heated to melt out the wax, and then filled with molten bonze (I added the felt cloak later).

This isn't the only sculptural Mouse Guard piece from this pre-comic era. And I'd say at this stage that was partly because I didn't know what 1149/Mouse Guard was supposed to be. Was it a prose book? a comic? a stop-motion film? a puppet show? Exploring mediums as well as 2D & 3D here was all about trying to find what I wanted this thing to be and where I felt most comfortable.

Please excuse the poor quality of this image--it's actually a low-res photo of a slide projected on a screen of a watercolor painting, and while the original wasn't great, a lot of quality was lost here. This was from my one and only Watercolor class in college. It's also an era of internet where doing image reference searches wasn't really a thing...so for weasel reference I had one or two photos in a book on mammals to look at. But art-journey-wise, I think here I was exploring taking what I learned in casting the bronze statue and applying it back into a 2D format where I felt more at home.

To give a sense of dates, I think this was from 1998(?) I got into a groove with 1149 drawings at this point (I have a Ferret and a Fisher drawn around the same time) all done in rendered pencil. Still trying to find a balance in stylization and realism. 

1999-2000-ish(?) These mice were all drawn from some field guide that had several photos of mice I could reference. And while they are so based on real-mice, I think this is where the clearest turn to my stylized proportions and sensibilities of the comic arrive.

This was pencil in a sketchbook with some light watercolor wash.

Please excuse the low quality of this image. I'd nearly forgotten about it and then saw it online when I was gathering links and a few photos of the sculptures from Facebook. I'm fairly certain this was before I drew issue 1––but I'm not sure when. I placed it here because I felt the proportions more closely matched the piece above and the sculpts below. Note Ran'd shield being silver/grey metal rather than copper––something we see next...

Sculpy Sculpts from 2003-4.
I did these for fun, still not knowing I was going to start drawing the comic when I started them. The bases are broken tiles we used as coasters at our wedding reception, the weapons are mostly made from found objects (sticks, nails, metal fittings––AND a scrap of copper for Rand's shield from the hammered leaf centerpieces I made for our wedding). Their cloaks are all scraps of fabric I either had or bought as swatches from a fabric store.

And lastly, the 2003 inked drawings I featured in the earliest Mouse Guard sketchbook (that still pre-dated the comic by a few months...and is available in my Digital Sketchbook Collection). As I've told many times, these were after a 'breakthrough' drawing I did without any access to reference (of photos, other artists, or even my own work) while at a Family BBQ. I leaned into my memory of drawing, my training in art school, and my printmaking background to draw/ink as comfortably as I could (later the main tenant in my lecture Drawing Like Yourself)

Hope you enjoyed that look back. I know I've changed a lot as an artist since that first issue in 2005, and the mice look different now as a result. That's what should be happening though...an artist whose work looks exactly the same year in year out would be stagnating, not growing, not pursuing, and not exploring.

We never arrived fully formed, and we shouldn't think any form we take is meant to stay.

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...

Grandparent Mice

Before Mouse Guard was a comic, when I was still in college, I made some mouse-versions of my Paternal Grandparents as Christmas gifts. I remember sculpting them in my workspace in my Dad's basement when home from school on Christmas break. These were made with Sculpey, an oven baked polimer clay. The eyes are bicycle ball bearings.

Unfortunately, these did not stand the test of time and I'd repaired them so many times with super glue and epoxy that they were a mess and still crumbling apart. I took a few photos of them before they fell to ruin.

My Grandmother was the prototypical grandmother, she was kind, loving, and a consummate cook & baker. 

As fans of Mouse Guard know, I based the very idea of having the Guard run by a Matriarch on my Grandmother's role in our family. More recently, I've made her part of the Mouse Guard with a Matriarch named Dorys who is depicted in the stained glass of the Matriarch Chamber as well as a piece in the 2024 Callendar: https://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2023/09/dorys-matriarch-cook.html

I sculpted the head for this mouse separately, and then later sculpted a body/dress––which is pretty out of proportion or capable of containing legs, and then attached them with a dowel. She's wearing oven mitts and presenting one of her famous pies.

My Grandfather fashioned himself a bit of a cowboy––and for good reason, he did have a natural way with horses. Though most of his life was lived in the city of Flint, he grew up on farms. In their senior years my grandparents wintered in Arizona, where my grandfather would drive a team of horses in the Tucson Rodeo Parade.

He wore a lot of Western style shirts and belts, so his mouse has cowboy boots and a neckerchief bandanna while riding a hobby horse. 

His mouse was the more crumbly of the two sculptures and lost most of an ear to dust before the end.

Gilbert & Doris Petersen on Lake Michigan

 

Skullduggers Concept Art Revamp

Beware the Skullduggers, a group of diminutive animated bones who use the scrap gear and weapons of fallen fighters as they tunnel and mine to excavate more of an equipment horde as well as bones of the dead to stock their own ranks with. 

They can range from a lone goblin-sized miner to a swarm of calamity miscreants all the way up to a legion of undead ready to murder the heroes and townspeople and collect all their possessions to repurpose for their own use.

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

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 one could populate their fighting forces with.

To the right is that old drawing of a single Skulldugger (I envisioned these were the minion pawns that could respawn.

As a just-for-fun exercise, I thought it would be fun to redraw and redesign and older concept piece of mine like this (Plotmasters style). I hope to do this with a few of the other drawings I've found when scanning things for Patreon.

I penciled the mining Skulldugger first, but then decided that the concept art should reflect the idea that these are a throng of minions rather than one unique character.

So, on other sheets of copy paper I drew one with a lantern (inspired from a character in Hellboy: Wake the Devil) and a glimpse of one in armor. These were scanned and assembled and then given a quick color splash to help me see the forms easier.

I printed out the above layout and taped it 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.

It was important to to overwhelm the inks with too much texture, so I tried to limit it to their gear where I needed a material or rust to be obvious and also to help break up the space between the larger open areas in their designs.

There is a tanget I regret in the armored one's eye socket and the rust spot on the front one's pick axe---it looks like a continuation of the opening...but I knew I could improve upon it with color.

The first step after scanning in the inks for digital coloring is called color flatting/ It's basically a professional version of coloring inside the lines.

I'd roughly established a color scheme for the front Skulldugger when doing the pencils/layouts, and opted to keep that look and expand on it only a bit to fill in the other two characters. 

These little minions should be dusty, dirty, and corroded––so I liked going with a cohesive muted palette. At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I wanted the lineart to be a color other than black) on the lantern openings and the miner's candle flame.

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...

Fir Darrig

Before Mouse Guard, I did a 4 page story for a publication my college Art History Professor was putting together called 'VOICES'. This was 2003/04. I was given 4 pages to do whatever I wanted to do. I decided to do a prologue to a folklore series I had an idea for based on the folklore character Fir Darrig. As a traditionally mischievous character, I wanted to force him to be the helper character that I could insert into a retelling of any folklore tale I wanted to adapt.

To the left you can see a mock cover for the first story I wrote for him (in which he steals a cloak of darkness, a sword of light, and a purse of plenty from three giants to help a young peasant marry above his station)

Below you can read the Prologue as well as a follow-up 8 pager of a common folktale where I used lots of Photo reference of Julia and my Sisters-in-Law for the three sisters.

Prologue:

Harp of Sorrow:

As I said at the top, the Snow, Crow and Blood story was the original one I wanted to adapt, where Fir Darrig acquires three magical items of giants that all help with the three tasks of the wicket princess whom the peasant boy wants to marry. In those tasks Fir Darrig, steals from her, throws a feast, and goes into hell and slices off the lips of the devil!

In the notes of that story, I also wrote that I wanted to do a tale with Black Annis, a blue faved witch who steals and eats children as well as a sidequest for Fir Darrig to obtain Iron Boots (which I think was both a homage to Mike Mignola's Helloy story 'Iron Shoes' as well as a way for Fir Darrig to walk along the bottom of a lake or the sea.)

I once pitched this as a comic after Mouse Guard's success, but there was worry about my time management and pausing Mouse Guard for an unknown. We also wondered about doing it as an anthology with different artists taking on each folktale I adapted for Fir Darrig--but again worry about the work involved (herding cats) with anthologies, not to mention the similarity to the Jim Henson's Storyteller comic Archaia was putting out.

Perhaps someday, I'll find a way I'm happy with to bring these tales and new ones as well to an audience.

Mike Davis' Wordless-Fill-In-Comics

Back in the early/mid 00's, my friend Mike Davis (Rand) and I had an idea for him to draw very quick simple comic strips that I would post (mainly on the CBR Hellboy Forums) for other folks to fill in their jokes. I colored most of these (and added a subtle color halftone to push the idea of them being newspaper comic strips.

We did a few as contests (I think I mailed a sketch to the person who's entry got the most fan votes), but I felt like this would have been a great publishable book (with more polish and production) where the pages are a glossy board book stock that colorform or post it style balloon shaped stickers could be placed on and easily removed. Anyhow, here is the full run of the wordless comics Mike drew and I posted over 20 years ago.

If you want to download any of these and try your hand at digitally adding in some balloons, text, and jokes, I'd be happy to do a follow-up post of everyone's efforts.