...continued from part one.

My favorite character from the Oz stories?  The Tin Woodsman.

I love the fact that he’s this sort of indestructible robot but he lacks a heart. 

Who can’t relate to that?  We’ve all lost heart and grown cold and rusty to the point where we get stuck, frozen in one spot, pantomiming a singular repetitive motion - like swinging an axe.

The hope of getting our hearts back can definitely lubricate the soul.

In my opinion, we commonly see depictions of the character that represent the ‘Tin’ part of ‘Tin Woodsman’ very well.  But the ‘Woodsman’ part is commonly de-emphasized.  I’m not sure why that is.  Perhaps its because artists have been too precious about the design elements presented in the original Oz books or, of course, the famous film.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those most classic depictions.  Its just that if I were to design a Tin Man of my own (which I did), I would amp-up the Woodsman-ness (which I did). 

I’ve been experimenting with Tin Woodsman designs for as long as I’ve called myself an illustrator. This is the first in a series of my three most recent interpretations of the Tin Woodsman.

This design, probably the least Woodsman-y of the batch, features a design element that I dreamed up while I was in art school.  I often drew the Tin Man as a hodgepodge robot made of junk.  Basically, I took the traditional funnel-hat idea a little further.  I imagined that all of his parts had been found instead of custom-made.

If you have read the book, you will know that the Tin man used to be a real man and he lost his body piece-by-piece until he was completely replaced with tin parts.  Of course, in the above design, he’s not really a junk-man, but he is still sporting the favorite element of my old junk-man designs - the buzz-saw beard.

Point is, I was trying to come up with ways to make him look like a Woodsman.  It made sense that if he was a woodsman, having a beard would be an important part of his identity.

Whether he was made of found junk parts or manufactured tin parts, he would think it important to include a beard in his self-redesign.

So I thought, “what found, metal object looks like a beard?”

For years, I’ve been drawing various Tin Man designs with a buzz-saw blade instead of a beard.  I’ll try to find some of those and share them in future posts.

Next post, I’ll talk about another Tin Man design element that I have used over and over (though its not shown here).  That would be the heart-hatch.  ...a little door on his chest, right over the place where his heart should go.

To be continued...