Wicked poster and process

 

 

For my first post I want to show this project that I just finished for my company’s semi-annual employee art show. The idea of a witch riding a motorcycle instead of a broom is just one of those weird notions that has been kicking around in my head for a while, and it just seemed natural to go to THE quintessential witch, the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. After all, she does ride that old bike in the opening scenes…

Changing her mode of transportation makes suggestions about her personality and attitude, and I wanted to give her a look to match. I went with a younger, more rebellious look, keeping the basic idea of her classic outfit, while altering the skirt, the hat, adding riding gloves, and freeing her hair from that rigid bun.

I absolutely love the nouveau style paintings of Alphonse Mucha and I decided to try and do this image with his style in mind, but with a more modern subject and more modern tools. I really enjoyed taking a familiar pop-culture subject and treating it in an unexpected way. Though I started from a simple pencil sketch, almost all of this image is painted in Photoshop, with a few elements handled in Illustrator. This piece took me way longer than I expected, partly because of the detail and large file size.

My workspace during the creation of "Wicked"

A hand-drawn type treatment that I ended up scrapping