Ugly Pigs!

I've spent a couple days repairing one single picture in "Ozma and the Wizard," one of the "Little Wizard of Oz" stories. It's another illustration which spreads across two pages, so I had another seam to repair...but not only that, look at the pigs in this picture! I think they're not up to John R. Neill's usual standards. Do you?

I had two problems to solve. First of all, how to get rid of the seam. But I thought the bigger problem was whether to keep those ugly pigs as they were, or somehow replace them. I really wanted to honor the original artwork and just leave them alone. After all, pigs is pigs, right? But the more I looked at those pigs, the more I wanted to fix 'em. Particularly the one which is annoying Ozma...what's with its face?

I cheated. I actually had Midjourney redraw the whole picture in order to get new pigs "in the style of John R. Neill." Well, ugh, it looked like Ozma and the Wizard came out of some bad Baum TV show. And the pigs looked a little too Disney to use straight out of the download:

Plus, look at the weird Oz logos on Ozma's staff and forehead. Not to mention she's lost her shoes. And the ghastly cartoony faces! Besides, the pigs in the original are supposed to be white, not pink. That meant going in and repainting them, or recoloring, or re-somethinging them.

There was another problem, too, and that was the whole picture now had a sideways aspect ratio, and would have to be shrunk too small to fit on another page. Honestly, I almost gave up at this point, and just said the ugly pigs would have to stay.

So I cheated again. I split the picture into two separate images, which solved the seam problem, but meant butchering two of the pigs down the middle. So I extracted all four of the pigs and got rid of the one on the right. Ozma would get the piggie on top, and the Wizard would get the other two piggies.

The piggies still looked too Disney, too sharp, too new. I had to gakk them up by blurring, desaturating, and running a filter to add a bunch of jpeg-artifacts, to make it match the original artwork. Can you see 'em? Look at the pigs closely, and you can see squares of jpegs which are meant to match the poor printing of the original.

I re-oriented the Wizard's pigs, and reversed one of them. Then I cut out the Wizard's hat and put it just slightly in front of one of the pigs, to add a little more depth.

This final result is a Frankenstein versions which was part Neill, part AI, and part mine. I don't know whether Neill would miss his old pigs.

--Marisol