Tinman Concept Art

Last week I finished my Tinman, the third character concept in my The Wonderful Wizard of Oz series. I know in the book he’s call the Tin Woodman, I’ll still just call him Tinman for brevity sake.

Ok – first, I did a basic hollow pencil sketch on bristol board to lay down the main idea and elements. From there, I inked the lines and stippled the detail in.

Like I explained in the last post a little, I wanted to add the Tinman and give a sense of his personality…I’ve tried to do that with the characters thus far and I’ve started the Lion yesterday and will try to convey his personality with that as well.

In the book, the characters all convey that they are lacking something, yet they display the very qualities they say they are lacking – Scarecrow comes up with all the ideas, Tinman is compassionate, the Lion is protective – so here I wanted a little moment in which the Tinman with a creature – in this case a butterfly comes over and lands on his finger.

I wanted his expression to convey the idea that he recognizes this is a tender moment, but also melancholy in that he is weighted down from enjoyment of the moment and a perceived lack of empathy because he knows he has no heart.

I brought the drawing into GIMP – my program of choice – and went over a basic airbrush and over a couple more times for variety. Also, my bristol page is 14×17 and this doesn’t scale well to the 24×36 poster size I make this for, so when I import it, I have to add elements to the top and bottom, so I decided I wanted us to be looking at him from the yellow brick road and up top I added a branch of apples from the tree.

Finally, one element from the book is that the Wicked Witch sends 40 wolves to kill them all and Tinman beheads all of them while Dorothy, Toto and Lion sleep when they wake in the morning see what happened, so in the left of the image a wolf’s head and his ax is bloody from them.

I’m not certain if these will be part of something – I’d considered doing playing cards or something, but not sure. Right now, they exist as posters that can be ordered through my Etsy site – might be a cool set to have for a game room or something.

I’ve also currently got the Witch against a shirt background available. These shirts are fantastic, feel and wear great – not those sorts of starchy, uncomfortable, awkward tshirts. I may add the other characters with full backgrounds and make more scenes.