How Dorothy Saved The Scarecrow

Because I’ve been such a ball of anxiety about my artwork lately, it’s really stopped me from having any inspiration. I sit down and stare at a blank page with an equally blank mind. I think of things I could draw - musicians, that series of movie posters I thought would make a good portfolio addition, but it’s all so vague with no clear aim or direction that I just don’t bother.

About a month ago I was watching a YouTube video when the creator mentioned how they’d recently discovered musicals and proceeded to list off a couple of modern ones I’d never heard of. It made me chuckle to myself as I used to be huge musical theatre nerd. I used to live in London and went almost weekly at one point. It was my life and my biggest passion - I even got into drama school and was going to pursue it as a career, but my health took a nose dive and I dropped out. It’s my biggest regret in life honestly, and I often wonder how differently my life could of panned out. I guess that’s part of the reason I let theatre fade out of my life, and it’s something I haven’t even thought about in many years. But after hearing this YouTuber bring up the topic, a simple random thought entered my head - “I’m going to listen to Wicked later.” And I did just that, and everything’s just kind of snowballed from there. I’ve dug out all of my old theatre programmes and soundtracks, and more specifically am really caught down an Oz rabbit hole at the moment. I’ve always liked Wicked and saw it in London a few times throughout 2007-2010, but even then I didn’t like it as much as I do right now 🤷‍♀️

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to discover how great the world of Oz is as it actually fits right into my interests - I love fantasy from Victorian through to the early 20th century, my favourites being stuff like Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, etc. So why wouldn’t I like The Wizard of Oz? I used to be a real book worm but haven’t felt like reading much the past few years as it began to feel like a chore, but I devoured L Frank Baum’s books and have started Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series that the musical is based on. I’ve also been re-watching all of the movies - I’ve always enjoyed the Judy Garland movie (but who doesn’t??), Return to Oz scarred me as a child but I’m really quite fond of as an adult (I love a bit of 80s creepy-ness), and Oz The Great and Powerful has some good imagery but is better best forgotten.

What I’m enjoying most though is that it’s really inspired me to draw again!! I almost feel like my old self, happily doodling away every day, and I’ve reached that happy spot where the more you draw, the more inspiration comes. I have so many thumbnails of pieces I want to create and I have absolutely no idea when I’m going to get the time to draw them all!



I’m still not at a level I’m happy at in terms of my drawing ability right now, but I’m having fun and just trying to focus on that. I know that these things take time, after all. No doubt adding to it as well is the fact that I’ve been trying digital art lately, which has added an extra layer of difficulty as I’m floundering with it a lot and things are taking longer than they would have if I drew them traditionally as I’m not comfortable with the medium. I’ve had an iPad and an Apple Pencil for 18 months now because I wanted to get better with digital, it’s about time I got over my fear of Procreate and put it to use (I really do prefer Photoshop though 😩)

This is the first thing I’ve drawn in a couple of months, and like I say I’m far from happy with it but I’m pushing myself out of so many comfort zones right now and just trying to rediscover what I can do. It’s inspired by the chapter ‘How Dorothy Saved The Scarecrow’ from The Wizard of Oz as I just really loved the imagery of Dorothy stopping for a rest and admiring the view when suddenly a scarecrow winks at her. Initially I hadn't wanted to make Dorothy look like Garland's, but everything else I tried stopped her from looking like Dorothy so I just gave into it.

"When she had gone several miles she thought she would stop to rest, and so climbed to the top of the fence beside the road and sat down. There was a great cornfield beyond the fence, and not far away she saw a Scarecrow, placed high on a pole to keep the birds from the ripe corn.

Dorothy leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed thoughtfully at the Scarecrow. Its head was a small sack stuffed with straw, with eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it to represent a face. An old, pointed blue hat, that had belonged to some Munchkin, was perched on his head, and the rest of the figure was a blue suit of clothes, worn and faded, which had also been stuffed with straw. On the feet were some old boots with blue tops, such as every man wore in this country, and the figure was raised above the stalks of corn by means of the pole stuck up its back.

While Dorothy was looking earnestly into the queer, painted face of the Scarecrow, she was surprised to see one of the eyes slowly wink at her. She thought she must have been mistaken at first, for none of the scarecrows in Kansas ever wink; but presently the figure nodded its head to her in a friendly way."

Apologies if my blog starts to feel like an Oz stan account for a while, but this is the first time I’ve felt inspired in an absolute age and I intend to ride it out to it’s fullest!

Down The Rabbit Hole

If I’m being completely honest, I’ve barely drawn a bean since I finished university. I told myself it was burn out, I needed a rest, etc etc. In truth I was scared. I’ve mentioned how unhappy I’ve been with my style lately, and I’ve really been allowing it to intimidate me. I don’t know why: I was happy with my final pieces for my uni course which were more on track with the kind of work I want to do again, and I also drew an Alice in Wonderland piece, an update of an old drawing from way back, and was pleased as punch with how it came out. But then I didn’t pick up my pencil again, and allowed fear and self doubt to take over.



For the past 4 years, I’ve almost exclusively drawn portraits and abandoned my illustrative style. And I now feel as though I’m starting again from scratch. I barely know where to begin, there are so many mistakes and layers of lines, nothing looks fluid, I don’t remember how expressions work, I don’t remember how anatomy works, just how do I even art??

For a long time I’ve kind of romanticised a period of my life in my teens where I was drawing all of the time and would upload several finished pieces a week to sites such as deviantArt and forums I was a member of. I recently re-discovered that old deviantArt account and it was eye opening to look back at all of my old work - mostly it was crap. But back then I was convinced I was good, and I don’t mean that I had any arrogance over it because I didn’t, I just had that unwavering confidence of youth. I was having fun, and therein lies the crux of it. Art is no longer fun, it’s almost painful because I place too many expectations on myself and so I just end up frustrated. Looking back at my old work, I can also see why my work was so bad then and it’s mostly because I was trying far too hard to draw a certain way with a certain style. And I feel like I’m slipping back into that frame of mind; I’m so frustrated that I’ve lost the fundamentals of how to draw, but instead of fixing that I’m getting caught up in style again and trying to make things look a certain way. I need to get back to basics. Things might be a bit haphazard in terms of style for a while, but I’ll never re-learn if I don’t.

New version on left, and original drawing from about 10 years ago on the right.

I finally finished art school (+ the degree show!)

Throughout June my art school held it's degree show as part of our graduation, which gave all students an opportunity to exhibit our work to the public. Along with our professional portfolios, we also displayed originals or prints of our project work along with any promotional material.

Holbein Acryla Acrylic Gouache

My idea of "drawing more" hasn't gotten off to the best start! In my defense I was so busy throughout June that I barely had time to sit down. I had my degree show and all that that entailed, made several day trips around the South West as it'll probably be a long, long time until I go back to Cornwall or Devon, and finally packed up all of my belongings and moved back home 350 miles away up North. Then I had my birthday at the beginning of July which involved a road trip to see one of my favourite musicians Roger Waters at a couple of his shows. And since then I've just been too lazy if I'm being honest! It's been nice to have a break after such a hectic few months, and the hot weather the UK is having turns me into a sloth anyway.



Although I may not have any new art to share, I did recently buy some new art supplies. Last summer I finally began using gouache, and I haven't looked back since. I was only an occasional painter before and generally preferred my markers, but when I did paint I stuck to acrylic or watercolour. I liked watercolour, but find it difficult to control both in terms of consistency as well as mixing colours. Nothing was ever as vibrant as I wanted and would often look muddy. And I feel my art style just doesn't work well with acrylic.

I turned myself to face me

I've been wanting to start a new blog for my artwork for a while, especially as my old one turned into my portfolio. And as I've just finished an illustration degree it felt like the right time, especially as I'm kind of in a funny place with my art at the moment and feel like I'm in a transitional period.

Doing a degree is weird, as it gets you thinking and overanalysing your work in brand new ways. Especially in the field of illustration as it's basically about commercialising your work and building it as a business. I've spent the last three years completing briefs and trying to get my work to fit into the right box of what industry I want to go in to, which has resulted in me feeling like I've forgotten how to just draw for the pleasure of it, you know? And to be frank, I don't much like the direction my art has gone in, I feel like I've lost myself.



This was my final hand in of work for uni. I've spent most of the past few years working on portraiture, and I'm really proud of what I can do but I miss working in a more stylised way! And the trouble with working in realism is it makes you an awful perfectionist, so it's difficult to go back on. If things don't look realistic to me now, they don't look right. And I'm a perfectionist anyway, so trying to experiment with a new style and grow as an artist is incredibly daunting as obviously when you're trying to change your style things are going to look a bit crap for a while while you're re-learning. And that can be especially frustrating when social media is full of people's 'best bits' and you're not happy with anything you're creating. It can be very difficult not to fall into the comparison trap and to remember the hours of work that the artist you admire is putting in behind the scenes. And it's because of this insecurity that I decided to start a blog, somewhere I can post things I'm not happy with and talk about my growth and just break down some of those walls and be completely honest.

So what is my growth so far? Before I drew portraiture, I mostly drew a lot of Disney fan art. Although I've drawn my whole life, it was when I was a teenager that I began drawing seriously, and that mostly involved copying the Disney style. I'd pause my DVDs and copy poses and expressions, and animators were the only artists I took any advice from. But I gradually began to loathe drawing in this style as it wasn't mine, I was just drawing in the standardised Disney way. There was nothing to set my work apart as my own.


From that, I began looking at my other interests for inspiration which is mostly music and the 1960s and '70s. I experimented with more psychedelic elements and began trying to copy Yellow Submarine instead of Disney, and then began trying to draw musicians themselves which is what lead me to portraiture as it was the easiest way to capture these people whom I admired.




If I try and draw in a more stylised way, I default to the Disney style as that's how I learnt to draw, and that's incredibly frustrating to be honest as it's still something I'm trying to move away from so I can do my own thing. Artists I admire nowadays are people like Minnie Small, Audra Auclair, Lois van Baarle, and Stacy Fahey. I will always love Disney, but I also love Studio Ghibli and illustrators such as Tove Jansson, Raymond Briggs, John Tenniel and EH Shepard. I also love reading, some of my favourite books being Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind In The Willows, and Winnie The Pooh. I want to take all of these inspirations, and use it to create something that's just mine.


For my final uni project I created a few music posters, and I feel this is the closest I've been able to come so far to something I'm happy with. Still a bit too Disneyfied, but getting there. I'd spent a long time thinking about how I wished I could draw without actually drawing it, so although these posters might not have been exactly what I wanted they took a lot of The Fear away and showed me that I am capable if I just do it.


I've been trying to complete a full sketchbook since last summer, something I haven't done in years. I used to see sketchbooks as a place for practice until I started watching sketchbook tours on YouTube and started to see them as works of art in their own right with perfectly cohesive illustrations on every page. This is an unrealistic way to keep a sketchbook, and that's something I have to remind myself of regularly. I enjoy scrapbooking and keeping my sketchbook as a kind of journal, and find this helps me stop myself from taking my sketchbook too seriously and giving up on it a few pages in. I'm almost halfway through, and am trying to get into the habit of drawing everyday and drawing on location as I know this is the only way I'll get to the place I want to be with my work.




And that's the stage I'm at right now! I'm wanting to turn my YouTube channel into a more art focused direction, and just really hold myself to all of the goals I set out instead of just talking about what I'd like to do. And I wanted an art blog so I can just share something whether it's perfect or not without any fanfare, and just share my progress and my journey. And I hope you'll enjoy following that! ♥