The finished portrait of Ozma. In The Marvelous Land of Oz Ozma is described as having a cloud of golden hair. In every book thereafter, however, she is shown as a brunette. I figure that, as a fairy princess, she can have any color hair she likes. Personally, I prefer the dark hair, so that’s how I’ll draw her most often.
Category Archives: process
Coloring Oz – Ozma 3
At the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz the hero, Tip, discovers that he’s really Ozma, rightful ruler of Oz and – a girl. When told he must be transformed back he’s not enthusiastic but he only spends a page protesting.
Finally he says, “I might try it for a while – just to see how it seems, you know. But if I don’t like being a girl you must promise to change me into a boy again.”
As far as I know, none of the Royal Historians have reported that she disliked being a girl.
Coloring Oz – Ozma 2
This illustration of Ozma was done back in March as I was putting the finishing touches on the cover layout for Oz Squad: March of the Tin Soldiers. I hadn’t intended to use this piece on the cover. The back cover (only available on the print edition) has four circular portraits of Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion as part of the design. The ones that are on the cover now are actually the second set of portraits. The first set was too complex and clashed with the cover design.
While I was working on the first set of portraits I sketched up an additional four portraits of other important Oz personages. As with the main four each additional portrait was to have a scene from the character’s history in the background. For Ozma it’s a scene of her approaching the Emerald City on her first adventure. Of course, on her first adventure, Ozma was a young boy and didn’t remember having once been a princess.
This portrait of Ozma is the only one of the additional illustrations that I finished. I started portraits of Ozzy, the Wizard and the Woggle-Bug but they didn’t get beyond the basic inking stage. I’ll post those later in the week.
Coloring Oz – Ozma 1
I’m done with my summer quarter. I finished my last final a week ago. I’m still working an internship until the middle of September so I’m not suddenly blessed with a lot of free time. I’m just now able to think about things other than school, work and chores. Now it’s just work and chores. Yay!
One of the first things I want to get together is an actual website for Oz Squad. The current one is just a quick placeholder. I’d started work on a site before school started and then lost what little I’d managed to do when my laptop died.
Speaking of Oz Squad, the sketch above is my version of Ozma. I figured no one is going to keep the same look for a hundred years, so no poppies for this princess!
Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
The Yellow Sign Challenge Coin went on sale today. The what? Yellow Sign Challenge Coin from Dagon Industries. The front features the Kevin Ross designed Yellow Sign. The back is view of Carcosa based on an illustration by me. 
Above is the original sketch I submitted to Jarred, my handler, at Dagon Industries. It’s based on the version of Carcosa that was in the background of the King in Yellow poker chip I did for DI a few years ago. Jarred liked it but wanted a couple of changes. 
This is the second sketch. Gone is the creature in the lake and the towers have been moved to the center of the image. Jarred approved this version.
Once the sketch was approved I inked it. For you art geeks out there I do most of my inking with a No. 4 round brush (I forget which brand). For some of the smaller fine details I’ll use an .02 point Micron pen. I’m pretty sure I used a pen for the reflection.
And then the coin magically appeared.
Okay. Probably there was more work involved than that but since I wasn’t there it seems pretty magical to me.
Gator Fan
The following three images are stages of an illustration I did for a friend of mine who is both a Man-Thing and a Gator fan. I did this drawing in October of 2010. I’d been working a lot at the Day Job and hadn’t been at my drawing table in quite a while. It was the first drawing I’d finished in months.
The first stage is the final inked drawing with the contrast adjusted to get good solid blacks.
The second stage is the scan of the final, marker toned art.
For the final version I combined both the first and second versions in Photoshop and set the layers to “multiply”. This gave me both the solid blacks I wanted and the variety of the marker tones of the original. Someday it might be fun to color this too. 
Coloring Oz – Nick 4
I quite like how this turned out. As an individual illustration I think the color and the composition work well. I like the tin Nick in the foreground and Rebecca, Amy and meat Nick acting out their destinies in the background.
Unfortunately I’d intended this portrait (and those of Dorothy, Scarecrow and Lion) to be part of a composition on the back cover of a book and this illustration doesn’t work with the rest of the art at all. The portraits of the other characters work okay but this one is just too darned busy. There’s too much action and the red in it clashes with the reds in the rest of the cover.
It looks like I’ll need to do new versions of these portraits. Keeping them simple this time. And working with the colors already established. Sigh.
Coloring Oz – Nick 3
It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Nick and the process of coloring this illustration. It’s that I’ve got a lot of paperwork to fill out in order to make sure I get into the spring classes at Seattle Central Community College. The paperwork from the college itself is minor – it’s the financial aid forms that eat time and kill the brain.
Coloring Oz – Nick 2
For the background of Nick’s portrait I’ve put Rebecca Eastwitch on the left, Nick and Amy on the right. Things are about to go very badly for our young lovers.
Coloring Oz – Nick 1
Nick Chopper could be considered a tragic figure. He’s a man who, piece by piece, had all his human parts replaced with tin substitutes. A witch enchanted his axe and it chopped off his parts. A tinsmith fashioned replacements for the missing limbs. Eventually all of Nick got excised and he became a completely tin man.
In the original Oz novels Nick is pretty satisfied with that. He felt the lack of a heart for a while but the Wizard gave him a suitable substitute. There’s no tragedy to that version of Nick. He and the Scarecrow hang out, often congratulating themselves that they aren’t subject to the need to eat or sleep or breathe like ordinary meat people.
The Nick in Oz Squad? He’s had a few more bumps than the Nick in the original novels. He doesn’t seem to miss being human much more than the earlier Nick did. At least not most of the time.
