Exploring The Wizard of Oz....

I did a bit of research into W.W. Denslow's work, who illustrated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. These are some of the pages I did.

I was exploring the character of Dorothy in these pages, both responding to Denslow's illustrations and making my own. In the page above, I updated her and also drew her in the style of John Tenniel.

I quite liked Denslow's use of flat colour in single spaces - I noticed in a lot of his work, the characters themselves often have no colouring, but are surrounded by patches. It was this that I tried to emulate in these pages.

I experimented with using silhouettes on the above page, with small dashes of colour to see how that would affect the sharp forms.

Looking at the other characters and manipulating them with colour.

This was based around a piece of thread that I had stuck in my book and looked like an animal's head, I added colour and a little detail to give the profile of the Cowardly Lion.