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Photography of Alvaro Montoro being a doofus
Alvaro Montoro

Lucas's Sidekick

Polygonal version of the main chraracters from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Drawing The Wizard of Oz characters in CSS

css html art showdev codepen

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the books I have read recently. So I decided to draw the story's main characters in a minimalist/vectorial way, just using 8 colors, HTML, and CSS.

Here's a demo on Codepen:

I tried to keep the drawing simple and to the minimum, so each character only has four sections:

  • Cowardly Lion: mane, face, ears, and nose.
  • Dorothy: face, hair, dress, and hair bows.
  • Scarecrow: hat, face, necktie, and straw.
  • Tin Woodman: hat, face, jaw, and bowtie.

The drawings are done with clip-path, using the polygon() function. So the process was a little bit like carving from a square to the desired shape... which was a small challenge considering I didn't use any editing software to generate them -all by hand (watch the video below).

/* Cowardly Lion's mane */
.lion .mane {
  background: var(--orange);
  clip-path: polygon(
    50% 5%, 73% 8%, 87% 40%, 85% 80%, 70% 95%, 
    65% 93%, 60% 98%, 55% 95%, 50% 100%, 45% 95%, 
    40% 98%, 35% 93%, 30% 95%, 15% 80%, 13% 40%, 27% 8%
  );
}
Example of CSS code from the drawing

A small animation completes the drawing: moving the mouse over each character will display what they want to ask the wizard: courage (a star medal), going home (a house), a brain, and a heart, respectively.

The result looks nice. Although I must admit that Dorothy resembles the girl from Wendy's and the Scarecrow, a rocket taking off...

Later, I changed the drawing to make it a little more interactive by replacing the container <div> with links to each of the actors who played the character. You can see that version here.

Overall, the whole drawing process took around an hour and a half. Here's a video of how it went:

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