12 Months of Dogs Of War - October (Veronica) 03

Veronica has the widest range of weapon specialisation out of all the characters. She is proficient in three weapon types, whereas the other characters tend to deal with two types (Sledge does employ a wider range, but he is more of a jack-of-all-trades). While she primarily uses a sniper rifle, Veronica is also highly competent with her custom shotgun and sub machine gun as well, giving her combat options for short, medium and long range.

The design and function of her sniper rifle and SMG are fairly rudimentary, but I wanted her shotgun to be something special. The point of the bad guy doggies is to combat a team that wear heavy body armour. I wanted her shotgun to be able to fire munitions that poses a threat to armour (armour-piercing solid slugs), but also had the ability to employ standard buckshot for the times the team fight more squishy targets.

I put a lot of thought into the functionality of her shotgun. Some may say too much, but I like to be creative. Veronica's shotgun is a modified version of the standard issue shotgun the main army use in Dogs Of War. It employs an 'over and under' barrel layout (ie two barrels stacked vertically) fed by a special drum magazine which contains a smaller drum encased by a larger one. The outer drum contains armour piercing  slug rounds, while the inner drum contains regular buckshot. I could go into fine detail as to how the firing mechanism works, particularly how the inner and outer drums are independently operated, but that may be too technical and I'd be getting away from the point of these blog posts focusing on the characters.

12 Months of Dogs Of War - October (Veronica) 02

To begin with, Veronica was named 'Sharon', but was later changed when I felt I had too many characters with names starting with 'S' (In addition to 'Stylene' and 'Sledge', I also had 'Scott' and 'Scope' - a couple of discontinued characters). I had also played around with the idea of her surname being 'Black' but given her appearance it felt too literal. Unlike most of the other characters, I didn't really have a  dog breed in mind when I designed Veronica. Maybe a kelpie, but to be honest it's up in the air.

For this picture I've used my new Cintiq drawing tablet. A Cintiq is something I've wanted to get my hands on for a while. Most of the drawings I've done have been created with a mouse. Not ideal, but it got the job done. I do have a regular Wacom tablet, but the reason I don't use it much is that I do my creative work on my laptop - my work space is nomadic and having more devices plugged in makes it more awkward when I'm moving things around (not that having the Cintiq solves this issue). I like the Cintiqs as you're drawing directly onto the screen - it's more tactile and I can create drawings more quickly. With a Wacom, the angle you have the tablet set up can be critical. I find there can be a slight mental disconnect between the angle you might think you're drawing and what appears on the work space. Still a bit of a teething process with the Cintiq, mind you. The line work may be faster and looser, but has ended up more 'sketchy' than I'd like. The other issue is that the screen on the Cintiq isn't as bright as on my computer monitor so when it came to colouring, spotting the gaps wasn't as easy. Though colouring such a dark character may not have helped.

12 Months of Dogs Of War - October (Veronica)

Ah, Veronica Williamson. I have something of a soft spot for her and she's one of my favourite characters. Though you'd think if that was the case, I'd have drawn more pictures of her. I had to dig up sketches from 2010 and 2013 to create these drawings.

It was kind of interesting how Veronica's personality developed. Y'see, when I create a character, I tend to not have their personality predefined from the start. Instead I let it develop on it's own as I write stories, based on the 'feel' I get from how the character may react in various situations. To take one look at Veronica, you may think she is a ruthlessly efficient assassin type that may not express much in the way of emotion. That isn't really true. Yes, she is an expert marksman - er, no - markswoman? Marksbitch? Yeah, let's go with that. However she does show a bit more emotion than the others on her team. She has a bit of a different outlook on the world around her and tends to question situations more than her team mates - a bit more 'shades of grey' than the others, who are a bit more absolute with their decision making. I may have mentioned this before, but this is something I try to do with my villains - give them some personality and complexity rather than the 'my-only-character-trait-is-anger' characterisation that I see way too often in TV shows and movies. Bad guys can be charismatic too, you know.