Building a Tin Man.

The brief...

 

 

 

One room at Tatton was to be dedicated to the characters Dorothy first meets in Oz. The Lion, the Scarecrow, and of course the Tin Man. All three were exciting builds for us at Worthy Studios, it would be hard to pick a favourite, but for sheer variety of techniques used, we are going to breakdown the build process for the Tin Man.

 

The client wanted a full sized (6ft) standing figure, based on the original illustrations in the Oz books. The public who visit the 'Return To Oz Christmas adventure' would be able to get up close to the figure, potentially seeing it from all angles, so it had to be free standing, robust and detailed.

 

We love the fact that you can recognise elements of the tin man's body, from the petrol can nose and funnel hat, to the big oil drum torso. The joints are all 'bolted' but the details of the bow tie and spats give a lovely hint at the period of the story.

 

This build is a joy to tackle, it keeps you on your toes as you have to improvise around an idea. What we love about our work here at Worthy Studios, is that we create one-off pieces, so every job will be an adventure, probably never repeated, so life never gets boring!

 

 

 

Where to start?

All figures need a strong base armature, a skeleton to build from. We have to be wary of keeping the weight down, but it needs to look substantial and be strong. Robust enough to cope with being man(or woman)-handled into position.

 

So, based on the design, we started to build the skeleton. As you can see, it doesn't take many pieces to begin to get an idea of the finished shape.

 

It became clear very quickly that this tin man's legs were going to struggle to hold all the weight. We could have built the armature from steel for strength, but that would have had cost implications, and would cause problems when it came to cladding. So we went with wood. but put a supporting baton at the base to help those legs take the weight!

 

This was such an exciting stage in the process, full of possibilities and suggestions of the adventure ahead!

 

 

 

 

Taking shape!

 

Next we 'flesh out' the skeleton. In the case of a Tin Man this is made easier because he's built out of a series of tubes or cans.

 

For this stage we use the wonder-material that is Plastazote!

Plastazote is a brilliant material for prop making, it is flexible, strong, can be painted, comes in sheets of various thicknesses, can be stapled or glued using a hot glue gun. It comes in Black, white, or all number of primary colours! We chose white as we knew it would be painted to get the tin effect anyway. We bought polystyrene balls which can be sawn in half to make lovely buttons or 'bolt heads' of various sizes, again, glue-gunned into place.

Plastazote can be formed into shape by heating, it is pretty flexible even cold, we were really pleased with the way the Tin Man was taking shape!

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lick of paint...

 

 

We used heavy duty rubber gloves filled with wadding for the hands, added a funnel hat, an oil can spout nose, the axe, and other details. Then it was time for painting.

A metal grey base coat was added to the whole figure. Then we used a roller to lightly roll on a white highlight and an ochre 'rust'

 

Lastly, we disguised the support baton with a cut out depicting the corn field Dorothy finds the tin man in, complete with a couple of harvest mice!

 

And he was finished!