Sometimes an idea for an image just sticks in your head and you have to just go with it. That’s how it was when I thought about the many reinventions of the Wizard of Oz tale; none, to my knowledge, had adapted it to a Post-Apocalyptic setting. That led me to imagining what these incarnations of the Oz characters might be: Dorothy could be a tough, Mad Max-style biker girl and the Cowardly Lion an experimental mutant escaped from some scientist’s (or Wizard’s) laboratory. The shapes of the Tin Man suggested to me a soldier in vaguely pulp-sci-fi armour and the Scarecrow a ragged, wasteland mutant. I pictured the characters in a group, on a road and looking outwards toward or past the viewer. The composition would be a wide, landscape format image, suitable for a comic or magazine cover.

In this workshop I want to give an insight into my methods and demonstrate how ideas change and adapt from the initial sketches to the finished digital painting. I created the image in Painter 7 on a fairly antiquated PC, with a little help from Photoshop.

PLEASE NOTE!

We are currently having difficuties uploading support files to the website. Please be patient - they should be online next week.