Thursday, June 9, 2011

Recent Work: The Wicked Witch Of The West

An interesting character in the popular tale The Wizard of Oz is the Wicked Witch of The West. She was made popular in the Judy Garland version of the movie adaptations.

Character design: I decided to draw her in the superhero genre as a villain. However, I veered from the old, green skinned, haggard looking wart-infested visage in popular culture. The WWOTW version 2.0 is an attractive looking woman consistent with comic book standards. You have to look into her eyes to catch a glimpse of the latent malevolence.
 
Her costume features tightly clad leotard, cape and even an exaggerated magic wand. Instead of the proverbial witch on a broom stick, I updated her means of transport to a redesigned vacuum cleaner fitted with propulsion jet pack.

Vector ‘painting’ technique: This is quite similar to the method I used on The Big Bad Wolf. An interesting thing happened during the design for the poster. I imported the on-going painting of the witch to see how the colours are in relation to the final design. During these tests, I discovered that I needed to mirror the witch on her Vacuum Cleaner 2000X to have a better composition. This is one of the advantages of vector illustration over the popular raster-based digital painting techniques.
Poster design graphics: The background clouds, compass graphic and lines are included on the final design. I also increased her face a little for a tighter composition.

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