Valentines in Oz and bloomin flowers.

Another holiday rollover for Tor, this time addressing Valentine's Day.

A lot of these holidays are fun to explore because of the either traditional or completely commercial imagery associated with them. Valentine's has a great variety of love, religion, and hallmark-ish symbols and images to choose from. I figured the most fun to paint would be cherubs or cupids following lovers in a very saccarine sweet scene of whimsical romance. I could avoid doing anything using hearts or chocolates that would have been a lil obvious.

So... even picturing possibilities in my head, I started thinking of Rococo style painter, Fragonard. He is primarily famous for (what I consider) over the top romantic paintings. Rosy cheeked men fawning over plump women with enormous dresses in flattering sideways light, in the middle of a lush garden. Adorable.

Beautiful, and very very ridiculous. So, one goal was to attempt to reach that level of overthetop ridiculosity. I started figuring out poses that would be graceful and flowing to see what possibilities would lie in the shapes. I quickly found that the cherubs would easily translate to flying monkeys, and with such an opportunity, I had to make the rollover involve the Wizard of Oz.

Narrowing down the scene a bit more to what I really wanted to show, thinking what could possibly relate to the rollover image, I settled on a carefree lover's chase. Cherubs circling above, aiming arrows of love.

Some tracing paper and photoshop magice later, I had my translation to the world of Oz.

And painted the finish.

... and another heartwarming image to leave you with.

-Scott