Salt & Fog

The Art of Veronica Casson

Work in Progress

Let's Get Outta This County - Illustration Process

illustration, Work in ProgressVeronica CassonComment
outta_county_header

If you are coming here from Rusty's Electric Dream, you will recognize the above pieace from the one that was sent out in the newsletter. If not you will see the entire artwork at the end of the post. First I though it would be fun to talk about about the process I did on creating this image, which was just finished two days ago.


I originally created this image for a page of the book I am working on about two years ago. It looked like this:

looking out window,

I am now at the phase of the book creation that I am going back and fixing things that don't work as well as I would like.

I had three issues with this piece.

• Claudette is much too large compared to the tower proportionally.

• The ravens don't really look like ravens.

• The dirigibles no longer appear in the story.

• The following illos (not shown here) take place during sunrise and this one seemed much to dark to believe the sun was just about to break the horizon.

I decided to make a new illustration that remedied all of there problems. So I drew this (don't mind this missing corner):

tower 4

I had to stop mid-drawing as I still did not like the way the ravens were coming out and I liked Claudette better in the previous image. I decided to do the rest of it piecemeal to make sure it all worked out.

I draw the town next.

town_alone

Then I draw the ravens on two separate pages (I threw many away before I came to the few I liked). Making a bird look like a specific birds is more challenging than I would have thought before going into this project.

raven_1

Then I put them all together in photoshop, including trimming Claudette out of the original image but re-sizing her. 

The finished image: Let's Get Outta' This County

The finished image: Let's Get Outta' This County

 

 

Art for Hope: Nepal - Process

Pen & Paper, illustration, Work in ProgressVeronica Casson2 Comments
art4hope

I was honored to be asked again to contribute to the wonderful Art for Hope project put together by Viz Media and AutoDesk.

Art for Hope is a digital art anthology benefiting the victims of the devastating earthquakes that ravaged Nepal on April 25th 2015. It is an e-book that features original works by 54 renowned pop, comic and graphic novel artists that were created using the Autodesk SketchBook digital painting and drawing App. 

Concept

The assignment was to create an image about hope. 

I found myself drawn to the idea of writing as hope. The theory that if you had the ability to create, imagine or write then you had hope. Originally I tried to work  with imagery featuring a typewriter but decided it would be more dynamic if someone  was in peril and using writing as a means of saving themselves.

To me, hope is the belief that things will get better even under the worst circumstances.

Process

I thought I would walk you through some of my process for creating the piece I did for the book. 

My initial layout containing just the preliminary shapes .

My initial layout containing just the preliminary shapes .

Here are the pencils before I inked them. You may notice some octopus tentacles that I later removed in place of some fish as it seemed to busy (and a little silly).

Here are the pencils before I inked them. You may notice some octopus tentacles that I later removed in place of some fish as it seemed to busy (and a little silly).

Finished inks. As I did these in Sketchbook Pro it afforded me the opportunity to use a colored line (as opposed to black) for anything in the background or below the waters surface.

Finished inks. As I did these in Sketchbook Pro it afforded me the opportunity to use a colored line (as opposed to black) for anything in the background or below the waters surface.

After inking I blocked all the color before adding any shading and fine tuning.

After inking I blocked all the color before adding any shading and fine tuning.

The finished piece as it appears in the anthology.

The finished piece as it appears in the anthology.

If you are interested in purchasing a copy ART FOR HOPE: NEPAL is available now for $4.99 from VIZ.com, VIZManga.com and all of VIZ Media’s digital partner platforms including ComiXology, NOOK, Kindle Fire, as well as in the iBooks and Google Play Stores.

Proceeds benefit the victims of the earthquakes that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015.

 

Below is the work I created for the Art for Hope 2011 edition.

artforhope_tsunami