Finalized my concept for Dorothy; after some advice from my teacher, I warmed up the colors and put a little bit more red into the cheeks. He also advised to make the pupils larger, but I think its a bit more my style to keep them small. I'm fairly pleased with the way it is now though, so this will probably be the finished version:
Because I liked the Tin Woodsman design so much, I wanted to work it into an environment. After spending all night trying to work something out, this was my first attempt:
The real problem that I realized was that my trees suck and I don't have much of a knack for leaves. Mainly I was trying to paint them individually and I need to learn how to better paint them as clumps/masses of single color. On my second time around I recycled the forest background to become a kind of dingy, bleak sky. I gave it more of a wasteland appearance to fit the feeling of loneliness that the Tin Man would more realistically feel with the absence of a heart (instead of the sort of goofy, nonsensical "I would ____ but I don't have a heart" he's always saying in the story). I switched the butterfly out for a bird to change the narrative of the piece a little since a bird implies that the Tin Man is chopping down its home, making it all the more meaningful to contemplate what would be going through his mind as the bird perched on his finger, especially with the apparent lack of compassion due to his missing organ.
Our latest assignment was to paint an environment from the story and do a color key for it. I chose the Witch's castle. On my first try I spent alot more time developing the sketch and design of the castle than I did the color study; the result was not sooo great and kind of messy.
On my second try, I kept things much simpler and went for an easier, creepier color scheme.
