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