In this step I also established my color holds (areas I want the ink to be a color rather than black) And I isolated the inks for the crows, the runic 9, and Merek's scars. Establishing what areas are which colors. This is basically coloring in the lines with flat colors. The first step to coloring digitally is creating color flats. I'd planned to do the coloring process on stream too, but I came down with some con-crud after SDCC and I didn't feel up to being Live on Stream while feeling crappy. I purposely left some gaps between the crow silhouettes and the foreground or borders so that I could more easily isolate them in the next step. I inked this piece entirely on my Twitch Stream. For pens I used Copic Multiliners (I think I only used the 0.7 nib here). On a Huion light pad I was able to ink the piece while seeing through the surface of the bristol. Once the layout was ready, I printed it out and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 bristol. The symbol in the upper right corner is a made-up runic number '9' (the vertical bar is just a pole to hang the roman numerals V and four I's). Part of the story of Merek is that the crows saw his deeds and carry the folly of Merek with them. In the background I pasted in several stock photo crows in flight. I combined these two drawings in photoshop and tinted them different colors to help me see which lines belonged to which figure. On another sheet, I drew the crab (with some help from my reference photo).
I then did a pencil drawing of Merek on a sheet of copy paper.
Julia went to our local fish monger and bought two cooked, but whole crabs I could use as reference. Merek does a horrible deed on the shores of Ildur, but instead of showing that again, I opted to have him battle a creature––a fan favorite, a crab! I still had the photos I took from when I was drawing the 2nd issue of Fall. In the epilogue, Lieam dreams a starry crow tells him the folly of Merek, and I give the readers the only images we see of this axe wielder (as he does not appear on the scrap of tapestry). In the 3rd Mouse Guard book: The Black Axe, I revealed (spoiler alert) that there have been nine wielders of the Black Axe before Celanawe.
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