Archive for the 'Character Design' Category

Singular Sensation: The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman

Published by
Kevenn
July 27, 2009 in Character Design, Illustration and Oz. 1 Comment

This Singular Sensation entry spotlights the illustration of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman that I did for the header for this site.  These are two of my favorite Oz characters to do, and I especially enjoy drawing them together and showing the tremendous bond that these two characters have for one another.  In most of Baum’s books, they both have castles in the Winkie country to the West that are very close to one another.

For the Scarecrow, I do go back to Baum’s text with details like one eye being bigger than the other.  However, I’m also greatly influenced by the depictions that John R. Neill and Michael Herring did of him as well.  I wanted to convey a sense of him being a little off balance, like Ray Bolger was in the MGM musical.

Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman, presents a special challenge when looking at how Neill and Herring depicted him.  Their renditions, quite frankly, defy the laws of physics.  They draw the Tin Woodman with nearly two dimensional limbs that are hinged basically with pins onto the sides of his torso.  This leaves him incapable of a wide range of movement, but didn’t stop them from somehow depicting him holding his ax with two hands.  I wanted to base my version a little more in reality, so there was no real way that he would be able to reach across his own body to point toward the Scarecrow if his arm was simply pinned at the shoulder to his torso.  For me, the solution was to basically treat him like he was a human-sized action figure and give him ball joints that not only hinged, but swiveled and allowed for rotation.

Neill and Herring depicted him basically wearing a suit of tin with the collar, the side pockets, and the buttons down his torso, so I did as well.  They’d also draw him wearing spats on his feet, a bow tie around his neck, and a flower “pinned” on.  One thing that I added that’s usually forgotten, is when the Tin Woodman gets his heart from the Wizard of Oz in the first book, he is patched up on his chest, and a gold star is placed over where his heart is.  This gold star is usually omitted by many artists, but I like to add it, because I think it’s a nice detail that adds more character and visual interest to him.

Scarecrow and Tin Woodman by Kevenn T. Smith ©Kevenn T. Smith 2009

Pencils, Ink, Prismacolor Color Pencils,  and Photoshop.
©Kevenn T. Smith 2010

Singular Sensation: The Cowardly Lion

Published by
Kevenn
June 22, 2009 in Character Design, Illustration and Oz. 1 Comment

This Singular Sensation entry focuses on the Cowardly Lion illustration that I did for the “Contact Me” page of this site.  I wanted to present him bigger here than he appears on that page.  Everyone knows the Cowardly Lion, but most people are used to thinking of the Cowardly Lion in terms of a person dressed up in a costume, like Burt Lahr in the MGM movie.  However, in the books, the Cowardly Lion is a real lion who talks, like all of the animals in Oz do.

I think that when the lion is presented as an actual large lion who acts cowardly, as opposed to a person in a costume, the visuals get to be more interesting and contradictory to the behavior.  For this interpretation of the Cowardly Lion, I wanted to make him more personal.  I made his eyes bigger than an actual lion’s eyes, while keeping the rest of the lion’s anatomical proportions intact.  Another thing about the eyes, were that I based them on my dog, Humphrey.  He’s like my own personal Cowardly Lion, who is all bark, but when someone actually stands up to him (like a cat), he runs away crying.

The bows are things that John R. Neill drew on the Cowardly Lion when he originally illustrated the Oz books.  I think they’re great touches that serve to visually reinforce the contrasts going on with the cowardliness and the powerful frame of a lion.  Michael Herring usually painted the bows light blue in the covers that he did for the Del Rey paperback editions of the Oz books, and those were the printings of the books that I grew up with, so I tend to try to give little nods to him and Neill when I illustrate Oz characters.

Cowardly Lion ©Kevenn T. Smith 2009

Pencils, Ink, Prismacolor Color Pencils,  and Photoshop.
©Kevenn T. Smith 2010

Singular Sensation: Pig Guard

Published by
Kevenn
April 19, 2009 in Character Design, Illustration, Masters of the universe/Princess of Power and Oz. 0 Comments

This second entry in my Singular Sensation series is of a character drawn for the cover of Oziana #37.  I simply call him “Pig Guard.”  I got a request to draw characters that appeared in stories in the issue, but I didn’t always have access to the actual stories.  In some cases, all I got was copies of artwork being used to illustrate the stories.  In this case, all I had was an illustration to go on, but one that really captured my imagination.  I am a big fan of the work that The Four Horsemen studio did on updating Mattel’s Masters of the Universe property for the 2002 line.  The amount of detail they put into each of the character re-designs continues to impress me.  When I saw the illustration of this “Pig Guard” character, I thought it would be a really fun idea to give him that same kind of approach.  I wanted to put more detail into his look and to introduce a more aggressive and physical element to the entire wrap-around cover piece.

In the cover piece, the Pig Guard was going to be fighting on the same side as Bastinda, the Russian version of the Wicked Witch of the West.  I thought it would be a nice homage to the Winkie Soldiers in the MGM musical movie version of The Wizard of Oz if I made the Pig Guard’s skin green.  However, when I thought about that, I worried that some people would think that I was trying to rip off the Gammorean Guards in the palace of Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi.  So that idea was nixed.  I still wanted to make the Pig Guard look more otherwordly, instead of a pink, tan, or brown skin tones that one usually found on a pig.  That’s when I hit upon the idea to make the skin tone a nice “decayed blue.”  It really worked too!  I thought I was being so original, until a friend pointed out that Gannon, the Big Boss in The Legend of Zelda game for Nintendo, was a big blue pig.  It’s true, there really is nothing entirely new!  I haven’t played that game in years, but from what I remember of the character, I think I made this Pig Guard look significantly different.
Pig Guard ©Kevenn T. Smith 2009

Pencils, Ink, Prismacolor Color Pencils, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.
©Kevenn T. Smith 2010

2008 National NOW Conference

Published by
Kevenn
July 13, 2008 in Character Design and Wonder Woman. 0 Comments

My frequent collaborator, Ray Caspio, was contacted by a representative of NOW, the National Organization for Women, concerning a Wonder Woman piece that he had posted on his website.  The NOW National Conference: 2008 was coming up, and they wanted to use his Wonder Woman illustration for the cover of their program book.  It was decided that a new character needed to be created for this, for rights purposes, and that’s where I came in.  Ray and I talked about what the costume should look like and what goals we wanted to achieve with it.  We wanted to create a new character that had a classic 1940’s Golden Age of Comics look, but I wanted to give it a slightly modern twist.  Ray had to use his original illustration as a basis for the illustration for NOW, but with a change in the costume and coloring details.  The design needed to be an homage to Wonder Woman without being Wonder Woman.  I came up with this:

Ray Caspio then used the costume elements that I came up with and transposed them onto his piece, creating what is now the program cover and image used by NOW to promote the conference, where the theme is “No Capes, No Masks, No Boundaries: Super-Women Unite!”

Image courtesy of Ray Caspio ©2008