Standing on Broken Glass

Yup, 'nother illo for "A Refugee in Oz." This is my first attempt at a finished drawing of Dorothy, and she turned out more or less all right, except for her bad hair day. But considering all that she and poor ol' Nick have recently been through, she's allowed to have mussed hair. The reason Nick's holding her up is because the ground is a mass of broken glass. He can stomp on that with his big tin feet, no problem, but soft squishy meat people might find it a bit of a hazard.

This time around I took some liberties with the Tin Woodman's joints. The more I look at the old illustrations, the less sense they make to me, so I drew ones that would be a bit more functional. I suppose I could take it a bit further and put ball-and-socket joints on his shoulders and hips to allow for a greater range of movement, but that might look a bit too weird. As for Dorothy's incredibly unflattering belt, there have been so many conflicting designs for that thing that I just pulled a composite out of the air. As for the colors - it's magical and uber-powerful, therefore it's allowed to be gaudy.

The cel shading in this pic was an experiment. Since, as usual, the printed version will be in B&W, I colorized it for my own sake. This time I was playing with techniques. I had to fight myself to finish it, as part of me was insisting that it sucked, it looked like MS Paint crap, and Dorothy's hair looked like one of Hedwig's old hairpieces. I've learned that when I feel that way, the worst thing I can do is give up. If I keep with it, sometimes the result is not bad at all. And even if it is lame, at least I've gotten that much more practice in. So - maybe this sucks, and maybe it doesn't. If it does, oh well!