Oz

A catch up with all of my Oz related illustrations this past year. Some of these are super recent so I show no signs of stopping yet!

I've been wanting to draw something from Return to Oz for ages. It's actually my favourite Oz related movie - I can take or leave the Judy Garland movie to be honest, I don't know if that's controversial but it's the book of the Wizard of Oz that captivated me rather than the movie version. I grew up watching Return to Oz and I think it's what gave me such a love of horror as scenes like the Wheelers and Mombi's hallway of decapitated heads both terrified and enthralled me! And as an adult I was so excited when I picked up Baum's books for the first time and realised they were much more in keeping with Return To Oz rather than the overly saccharine MGM movie. I want to draw more from Return to Oz at some point, but here's a start! Princess Mombi and a few of her heads.

After I first read The Wizard of Oz I drew the scene of Dorothy meeting the Scarecrow and it's what catapulted me down this whole art journey I've been on these past two years. My style has developed a lot since then as I was still very much finding my feet back then, and it's a scene I wanted to revisit. I'd love to know which version you prefer! I had to make references to the Scarecrow being Fiyero because this is me drawing it after all!

And I figured I'd draw the following scene where they meet Boq the Tin Man! He was a lot more of a challenge to draw than I realised he'd be, and whilst I originally wanted to do my own take I did end up taking a lot of inspiration from Denslow's original illustrations. Most of the difficulty came because a tin man would obviously be very rigid, whereas my art style is much more fluid and I wanted him to look stuck, not stiff and lifeless.

Drawing Wicked characters is my happy comfort place. I've been playing around with trying to give Fiyero his blue diamond tattoos he has in the books to try and give him back some of his cultural identity that they took away in the musical, but it's difficult not to make them look crap.

I can't believe it took me this long to draw this scene honestly!

This is a really old drawing that I did for Inktober of 2019, and I've been wanting to colour it for ages and finally got around to it last week! So this literally brings everything bang up to date. I don't know if you can even really tell, but I've been trying with a slightly more painterly style as my colouring process was starting to feel a little formulaic and dull. It's always really intrigued me with how many story possibilities there are with Fiyero turning into a Scarecrow and how that would effect him, his relationships, and how he interacts with the world around him. But unfortunately no one else seems to care about anything beyond "Gelphie" and I'm not a writer, so I just try and touch on it in my illustrations as best I can.