Spot illustration #6 for the Oz-Squad.com and Skookworks.com header designs.
Nick Chopper didn’t have a lot of choice over what his first tin body looked like but, as the twentieth century progressed and circumstances demanded it, he’s built and worn quite a few different forms. Some are big and scary. Some are almost graceful. Into each he puts the heart that the Wizard gave him. It’s just a thing of sawdust and silk but it feels nonetheless.
Spot illustration #5 for the Oz-Squad.com and Skookworks.com header designs.
Once upon a time, Nick Chopper was a young man in love. He cut wood for a living. He expected to get married, settle down and have kids. He expected a pretty normal life or least as normal a life as one can have in the Land of Oz.
Unfortunately he ran afoul of Rebecca, the Witch of the East. And she arranged him to run afoul of his axe. Several times.*
There aren’t a lot of depictions of Nick prior to his transformation into the Tin Woodman. The only one I’m aware of is by John R Neill for The Tin Woodman of Oz. And, chronologically, the illustration still takes place after Nick got chopped up. It’s in the chapter The Tin Woodman Talks to Himself. I love that chapter.
* See March of the Tin Soldiers for the details. And the 21st century aftermath.
Spot illustration #4 for the Oz-Squad.com and Skookworks.com header designs.
The last century has been hard on the Scarecrow. He’s lost friends. He’s been torn to pieces on more occasions than he’d like to remember. Unfortunately for him he remembers every one of those occasions. He can’t forget anything. Not even the trivial stuff. Fortunately, however, he’s not human so he’s able to cope in ways that a meat person couldn’t. He’s able to put on new faces to fit new moods. This is how he looks in the current incarnation of Oz Squad.
Spot illustration #3 for the Oz-Squad.com and Skookworks.com header designs.
The first person to join Dorothy on her trip to see the Wizard was a Scarecrow. He was stuck on a pole in field. Dorothy helped him down. The Scarecrow decided that a brain would do him good and that the Wizard might provide him with one and off they went. He and Dorothy have remained best friends ever since.
Today’s illustration shows the Scarecrow as he looked on the day he first met Dorothy.
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.
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.
No real post today. I was at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland on Friday and Saturday and I’m catching up on chores.
My first post at Skook went up on January 5th, 2003. That means I’ve been posting here for almost nine years. I’ve posted almost 1900 times. At the beginning of this year I’d been thinking I’d shut things down at an even 2000 posts. But this year has been more eventful that I’d planned. (Most years are.) So I’ve decided to shut this blog down at the end of this year. It’s not as if I’ll stop posting my art and ramblings. I’ll just be doing it at a different address.
I’ve owned DavidLeeIngersoll.com (and DavidIngersoll.com) since 2007. Until this month that address (both addresses actually) has been pointing to dliportfolio.blogspot.com. When I started the process of designing a website for Oz Squad I also started thinking about I should do with my own domain. I’d intended to get up full Squad site first and then move on to my own site. As I’ve been reacquainting myself with WordPress and playing around with design ideas it’s become apparent that both sites are going to be built simultaneously. Oz Squad will still be getting most of the attention but my own domain will be where I’ll be trying some of the messier experiments.
There’s currently a small amount of content up at Skookworks.com. And DavidLeeIngersoll.com. And DavidIngersoll.com. Those addresses all point to the same site. Ain’t technology grand?
The various logos on the page today are my first stabs at designing the logo for the site. None of them work. It’s been so long since I hand designed a logo that I’d forgotten one of the fundamental rules of design.
Work big. Work really big. Then when the art is reduced to print size your mistakes will go unnoticed.
The logo designs shown in today’s post are about the same size as the original artwork. They’re useful as tests but not as refined as I want for actual logos. The original art for the logo that appears on the site today is about 4 times the size it appears online.
When I first started posting here I had an AOL account and a Yahoo.com email address. Since then I’ve acquired both a gmail and a hotmail address. I’ve got an epilogue.net gallery and a deviantart account. I’ve got a MySpace page. A Facebook account. A couple of Twitter accounts. I’ve got a Wikipedia entry. I’ve posted comments on a variety of blogs and sites all over the net. I’ve got art in places I barely remember. Basically I’m a pretty typical netizen. Given that I’m only now getting around to using my own domain I’m a netizen who has a lot of catching up to do.
With school starting up again I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to devote to posting. I hope I’ll be able to keep up a regular routine until the end of the year. This blog will stay online for as long as blogger keeps it up. I’ll be reposting some of the content at the new site but I don’t plan to remove anything here.
Stay tuned!
Finally we have sketches for another couple of Jackson Elias photos. I realized that, with the previous five illustrations, I had enough images to fill the available space on Elias’s desktop. Any further photos who just end up crowding the existing ones. It might have made for an interesting composition but it also would have meant that I’d have done a lot of detail work that would just be covered up. I love doing fiddly detail work and don’t mind if most of it goes unnoticed but having it be completely unseen would have been even sillier than normal.
Here is the final background photo that is part of one of my illustrations for the Masks of Nyarlathotep Companion monograph to benefit Yog-Sothoth.com. Hopefully the adventure will see print before the end of this year. That doesn’t mean it will. I don’t have any control of print schedules.
