Escape the Witch (2019)

An abstract art representation of Wizard of Oz movie characters adapted to a Parcheesi game board design

Produced for the 2019 San Diego County Fair’s Fine Art Show / ‘Oz-some’ category. The piece ended up making the art show, received an Honorable Mention, and a donated award from the East County Art Association.

It was early 2018 when I started work on this piece so I had the natural inspiration of starting the year off with a strong art piece. Having Creative DNA make the fine art show at the San Diego County Fair the year before made me want to try and get another piece in the show. I found out that the theme of the fair would be Wizard of Oz and that they would have a category in the art show for Wizard of Oz themed pieces. I took some time to brainstorm ideas for the piece. I was looking at some silhouette illustrations of the characters from the movie. I even watched the movie and took notes on the color schemes used in the production. Around the same time, I was looking at vintage game board designs and decided to craft a Wizard of Oz theme game board. The design is largely based on a Parcheesi game board but also has design inspiration from a vintage board game called Chiromagica.

I consider Escape the Witch a landmark piece in my art career. Really, it was the first piece where I felt like an artist. It jumped started my niche with game board design and my image transferring process that I used in subsequent pieces as well. I also used Molotow acrylic paint pens for the first time in this piece (including my now personal favorite Liquid Chrome pen). Together with Posca, these are my two favorite paint pen brands.