So where have I been?

My last post was about 9 months ago – shameful really. But I have a good excuse, an NDA! In August I started talking to BOOM! Studios and David Petersen about working on a dream project: The Mouse Guard Alphabet book. Every letter has some meaning in the Mouse Guard world, and each word is accompanied by a poem by David Petersen and two illustrations by myself.

The job was unexpected and quite frankly, ideal. I’m a big fan of Mouse Guard – it was my first graphic novel and the art and story has continued to endear it to me for years. It was a lot of fun getting to research the Mouse Guard universe and come up with my own interpretations of it. David let me have a great deal of freedom with my style and character designs (non-canon characters), and I produced some of my all-time favourite paintings.

So I finished the paintings in January and now I’m free to talk about it. I can’t wait until I can share more of the art from the book. It comes out in September 2017.

It started me on a path to pursuing traditional media. For years I have been using watercolour to almost-finish my paintings, scanning them, and using Photoshop to colour correct, to paint details, to fix proportions. This is a very fast approach, but it leaves my original watercolour paintings looking tragic, not something I can sell. In doing the Mouse Guard paintings, I forced myself to finish the illustrations traditionally in a sense. Some are different from the print versions, but the original paintings still look good.

It was a gruelling effort. Due to the time constraints of the project, I was able to spend a maximum of 2 days on every painting, meaning that I was working faster and more polished than I ever had been before. In the end, I like the look of traditional more, and I love having originals that I can now sell or hang on my wall.

So when I participated in the Month of Love in February, I set out to create several fully-traditional paintings. Admittedly, I don’t enjoy making romantic art, so my paintings are interesting interpretations of the themes.

 

Shelter

This is my submission for the 2017 Month of Love topic “Innocent”.

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Titan – 5×7″, watercolour, gouache and gold ink.

This is my submission for the Month of Love topic “Metamorphasis”.

I wanted to transform the humble cow into a goliath. Gary now roams the countryside, feared and respected.

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Covetous – 8×10″, watercolour and gouache

This is my submission for the Month of Love topic “Light”.

Inspired by Tolkien’s Smaug, a queen who covets wealth and power. She destroys everyone around her in her pursuit of riches. She sits surrounded by great castle halls, filled with gold, but she sits alone.

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Currently I don’t have any projects going on – always a scary time. I’m going to do an interior scene for my children’s book portfolio and see where that leaves me. I promise I’ll post more often now.