Category Archives: dorothy gale

The Gang, with Color

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I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I don’t consider coloring to be one of my strong suits. I think I can do it well but it does require a lot of trial and error on my part for me to feel like I’ve done it well. I’m a noodler. I like gradients and detail. Just laying down flat colors and calling it good is hard for me.

Flat coloring is faster than gradient, layered color, however, and I’m trying to speed up my processes. For the current incarnation of Oz Squad I’m just doing flat colors. So, even though my fingers are itching to add shadows and highlights, I’m calling this done.

Urrrghh.

Some of the Gang

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I started this illustration a few years ago. With Oz-Squad.com getting put together I figured that now was a good time to finish it. I’d originally intended it as a promo illustration for the Oz Squad comic revival. Now I’ll be using it as the illustration on the intro page of the website. I did the last of the inking and scanned it in on Friday. If all goes well I’ll have it colored in time to post that version on Monday. If all goes really I’ll have the text of the introduction finished as well and they can both go up together.

She’s Not Who She Thinks She Is.

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This and the next three posts feature the 1955 version of Oz Squad. I really can’t tell you much about them. They appear in a three page flash back in the 8th issue of the comic. Apparently Dorothy spent most of 1955 in a Soviet sensory deprivation tank while a duplicate Dorothy ran the Squad. Hopefully I’ll get to draw that adventure sometime.

Or at least do illustrations for the novel. Hey Steve?

Dorothy at the End of the Century

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The next four posts will feature my version of the original Oz Squad. I’ve made some adjustments to the designs to fit my own style but I’ve tried not to go to far.

The look of Oz Squad was established in the first issue of the comic, published toward the end of 1991. Andrew Murphy penciled that issue and, while I imagine that Steve had a lot of input, designed the look of the characters. Unlike many versions of Dorothy that have appeared in other takes on Oz in the years since, the Dorothy in that first issue is a good example of the sort of woman the Dorothy of the books might have grown up to be. She dresses fashionably and practically. As one of Oz’s representatives on Earth her style is somewhat formal and businesslike – appropriate for interacting with ambassadors and bureaucrats.

I’ve made Dorothy a blond. In the original books Dorothy is illustrated as blond so I’m sticking with that.

I don’t know if Andrew is still making art. If he is I haven’t been able to find any examples of recent work online. 

Dorothy Gale, Defender of the Realms

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Spot illustration #2 for the Oz-Squad.com and Skookworks.com header designs.

Dorothy Gale, in all of the original Oz books, always struck me as a practical sort of girl. She grew up on a farm. She faced down lions and witches and worse when most grown men would have been peeing their pants.

So when it came time for me to design my version of the adult Dorothy for Oz Squad I kept the short haircut from the final issues of the comic, gave her shoes she could walk in and clothes that wouldn’t slow her down. No doubt she dresses up for state occasions but I’ll worry about what Dorothy in drag would wear at some other date.

Portrait of Dorothy as a Young Girl

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The next many posts are going to feature small illustrations. I’m designing headers for Oz-Squad.com and Skookworks.com, and, at least for the first round, including four spot illustrations as part of each design. I’ll be posting the individual illustrations here. Please go to the sites themselves to see how they look in context.

Right now I’ve got two headers designed for the Oz Squad site. The first shows the characters as they appear “today”. The second shows the characters in their early days. The headers are set to show up at random so if you want to see them both just reload the page a couple of times and the image should change.

L. Frank Baum doesn’t say how old Dorothy was when she first came to Oz. In the illustration by W.W. Denslow she appears to be somewhere between 5 and, maybe, 8 years old. I don’t remember if Steve Ahlquist has specified her age in any of the Oz Squad comics or the novel. Most likely she was around six or seven. That’s the age we (that is, scientific professionals who study human behavior) currently think children develop their sense of empathy.

Coloring Oz – Dorothy 5

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And here’s the finished piece. For most of these illustrations I’ll be putting “origin” references in the background. For Scarecrow it was the cornfield. For Dorothy it’s the tornado. I was tempted to do montage of the various routes that had taken Dorothy to Oz (washed overboard, earthquake, magic roads) but that would have made the drawing needlessly complicated.

Coloring Oz – Dorothy 4

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As I’ve said, I’m dragging out the process of posting these process pieces. At this moment the only pieces actually finished are this one of Dorothy and the earlier one of Scarecrow. While I’m getting these finished I’m also working on a series of full page illustrations for this project and finishing up some other commissions.

Today’s image is the colorized tone layer that sits under the color and gray tone layer. (Sort of anyway. Layers in Photoshop can be “under” or “over” each other so they mask out other layers. They can also be “multiplied” so that the layers combine with each other.) I’ve duplicated the gray tone layer and used the flat colors to colorize it.

Coloring Oz – Dorothy 2

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Some folks have a weird idea that boys won’t read stories that feature girls as heroes. I suspect that the boys who have that problem were already indoctrinated with that thought by their parents before they’d learned to read. One of my early role models was a little girl from Kansas who, when dropped in a foreign land, didn’t cry or fuss she just picked herself up and set off for home. Not because she missed it really. Dorothy Gale wanted to get home so that her Aunt and Uncle wouldn’t worry about her. She slapped a lion, made some good friends, killed a couple of witches and overthrew a wizard. All before her eighth birthday.

She went back four more times before finally bringing Aunt Em and Uncle Henry with her and settling down in Oz on the fifth excursion. She wasn’t anything special. She wasn’t an outcast or a weirdo or a extraordinarily talented. She wasn’t a chosen one. There were no prophecies of her coming. She was just determined, smart, practical and knew how to look out for her friends.