These are some pictures of the mural I painted at Watson Park in Wichita Kansas. Which is a pretty cool park, by the way, and if you are interested in it here is a link to their website OJ Watson Park

I had too many pictures to put them all on my webiste, especially since a lot of them are just of mostly blank wall, But I wanted to show pictures from different stages in the process. If you would like to see the rest of my art you can get to it here KatherineConradMostlyDrawings.xyz

This is the original sketch that I started with. It was actually on two separate pieces of paper, but the other half didn't have anything interesting on it.

Here's another one that I did in color, with cheap paint so I knew what colors to use on the actual mural. I had to re-do this one a couple of times because I was panicking about the color scheme, and what paints to buy.

Getting ready to start. Actually this was several months after I figured out what I wanted to do.

Here I sketched out the Good Witch of the North, and the cottage.

I used these more detailed sketches as reference when I was drawing it though. I probably should have scanned them before I got paint all over them. Oh well.

You can see the Wicked Witch's feet here.

Munchkins at a feast. My Munchkins look a little like Hobbits.

A sketch of the Tin Man and Scarecrow.

The Tin Man worked out on paper.

I admit to basing him, to some extent, off of Cesare from the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

The scarecrow sketch.

The sketch for the lion. The monocle never made it into the final picture.

Here's a picture I took about halfway through drawing the lion. When I started the mural I had absolutely no idea what color to make him, but once I got to the part where I needed to decide it just felt like he should be red.

The sketch for Dorothy. You can see the witch's kiss on her forehead.

I re-did it here to make sure I could get the details right in paint as well as pencil.

But somehow, when I went to do it on the wall. . . everything went horribly wrong (it's the chin).

After painting over it, we're starting to get somewhere.

Changing the colors seemed to help too.

Toto.

I was pretty satisfied with Dorothy by this point, but I didn't know what to do about the shoes. I wanted to do silver, but I wasn't sure how. I thought about doing red, but it just wouldn't stand out enough. At least, not with the red lion right next to them. I tried to draw a sort of mirror surface on them, that didn't work.

It was my Mom's idea to just use silver spray paint. To get the shape right I took a photo of the shoes I had painted on the mural, and used digital editing to trace the outline. Then I took a measurement of the size the shoes needed to be, and printed the outline to that size. I was a little worried that the spray paint would bleed into the wrong place, or that it wouldn't be quite the right shape, but the whole thing went off without a hitch.

Here's most of the emerald city, but, though you can't see it in this picture, the whole thing was way too bright, and was overshadowing Dorothy and her shoes. So I decided to leave off working on it until I could decide how I wanted to change it. Also Toto.

Here I've started on the last part of the mural. With flying monkeys, wizard, and both good and wicked witches.

The sketch for the witch. Here she has a silver whistle, an eyepatch and an umbrella, like in the book. But she isn't quite the witch from the book, who is a stern old woman, and much closer resembles the witch from the movie.

And the monkeys. I wanted them to be kind of scary, and also kind of cute. They are, I think, a bit vampiric.

Here's the monkeys and the witch.

Design for the wizard. Meant to evoke the aesthetic of movies like the City of Lost Children, Micmacs, and the Extrordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec.

But on the actual mural, he looks more like Groucho Marx. Or, as one of my coworkers pointed out, the professor from Futurama.

I got paint on my sketch for the good witch of the south.

It was at this point that I decided to go back and fix up the earlier parts of the mural. You see, although I was satisfied with each indivigual piece of the mural, I felt like it didn't hang together. I did, anyway, but everyone else who I asked about said that they hadn't noticed any discrepancy. Maybe they were right, I have no idea.

And once I finished that, I felt like it still needed something, so I painted the text from the first and last pages of the book on each end of the wall. Unfortunatly, I didn't have enough room for the very end of the last page. For anyone who is curious, it finishes with, "said Dorothy gravely. 'And here is Toto, too. And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!'"

Anyway, without further ado, here are the finished pictures.