Return to an unfamiliar place

I started my Oz series in the unhappy July of 2004, and finished (theoretically) the final image just about a year later. There were seven illustrations, to which I attached quotes from the book, although the slippers were ruby, referencing the movie. I did two major versions of the Emerald City, and was never happy with either of them: the first was too fluid, and looked more like a pile of seaweed draped over a rock than like buildings. The second was in some ways an improvement, but went too far in the other direction, and looked too right-angled and geometric.

Today, I was supposed to be working on something else entirely, and realized that the shapes I was looking at were much more the right kind of thing. So I tried making them green. I don't know if this will be the final version, but I like it better than the first two.

Emerald City (2008)



Architecture by Antoni Gaudi, clouds by Maxfield Parrish, formulas by all the lovely authors of .ufm and .ucl files. Whatever remains (after all those bits are subtracted out) is entirely my fault.

I'm getting close to being finished with the re-design of my actual gallery pages, so maybe I'll put up the Oz series again. It's hard to decide what goes into the real collection; I've gotten used to just sticking things on this blog, without much regard to technical merit or thematic consistency.