And here is the final colored version of the Lion for the secret Oz Squad project. With the other character portraits I’ve done in this series I’ve put some scene in the background that refers to that character’s past. Except for a little bit of green, suggesting the forest, I didn’t do that for the Lion. Partly that’s because the Lion’s past isn’t described in any detail. (I could have draw him pouncing on Toto but I honestly didn’t think of that until just now.) Partly I wanted him to fill up the illustration space to demonstrate his size. The Lion isn’t some little Earth lion. He’s huge, the size of a horse. Not a creature you want to mess with.
Category Archives: process
Coloring Oz – Lion 3
After the various past posts I’ve done on my Photoshop coloring process I’m not sure what I could say today that would be new. I’m continuing to post different stages in the process because I find it fun when other artists do the same thing with their work. If you happen to have any questions about my process feel free to ask.
Coloring Oz – Lion 2
In a land of intelligent, talking animals what do the predators eat? In more than one of the Oz books, Baum, the author, suggests that they eat each other. But he only suggests, vaguely implies, it. None of the main character predators: the Hungry Tiger, the Cowardly Lion, Toto the dog or Eureka the pink kitten, are ever show actually eating. A few bad animals, dragons, Kalidahs, the Skoodlers and other BAD folks threaten to eat our heroes but they never succeed.
In Gregory Macguire’s Wicked Years series there are both animals (the dumb sorts we’re used to) and Animals (who can think and talk). Animals eat animals.
In Skipp and Levinthal’s The Emerald Burrito of Oz there’s a brainless animal called a goomer that serves as the food source for all Oz predators.
I’m not sure what the predators eat in Steve Ahlquist’s version of Oz.
Coloring Oz – Lion 1
Of Dorothy’s three companions in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz the Cowardly Lion is my favorite. I suspect that this has more to do with my affinity for underdogs and neglected characters than because he’s necessarily more interesting than the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. It seems like Baum, the author of the Oz books, didn’t know what to do with the Lion. After Wizard the Lion gets very little page time. I don’t think he’s even mentioned in Land of Oz, the first Oz sequel. He shows up again, along with the Hungry Tiger, in Ozma of Oz, the third Oz book, but mostly he’s around to pull Ozma’s chariot. In most of the subsequent novels that his primary function. The only Baum written book that I remember him having a significant part in, post-Wizard, is The Lost Princess of Oz. And in Princess he’s one of many characters searching for the kidnapped Ozma.
I have to admit that the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are more unusual than the Lion. One is a living scarecrow. The other is a tin simulacrum of a man named Nick Chopper. The two are good friends and hang out together. Baum obviously enjoyed writing about them. Once they fulfilled their quests for brains and a heart they were still unique characters. Once the Lion got his courage? Then he was basically just a talking lion. You’d think that would make him interesting enough, wouldn’t you?
Coloring Oz – Dorothy 5
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
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 3
Above – the flat colors I’ve laid down under the scan of the original black and white art.
Below – what the colors look like with the illustration layer turned on. 
Coloring Oz – Dorothy 2
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.
Coloring Oz – Dorothy 1
I hope you’re fond of Oz, or at least Oz Squad, because I’m going to be spending the next few (many) days posting the series of mini-illustrations I’m doing for this project. And I’ll admit right now that I’m spacing out the stages of the illustration process into daily updates because, at the moment, I’m still working on the art. If I manage to get far enough ahead of the game I’ll post the process as a single update instead of doing it over the course of days.
Right now I’ll be keeping to one step per post per day. Today’s post is, like the Scarecrow’s series, a bit farther along than it would have been if I’d been thinking ahead. The art here has already had the main inking done.
Coloring Oz – Scarecrow 3
The next step after finishing the art on paper is to scan it into Photoshop and start coloring. I lay down color under the scan of the illustration. To begin with I just lay down flat areas of color without any shading or tones. Without the illustration layer the color looks like this:
