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Jack Haley did such a wonderful job with the role of the Tin Woodman (or Tin Man as I like to call him). Haley, like Ray Bolger who played Scarecrow, started out on the vaudville circuit. He moved into comedy shorts and then to musical feature films. Haley took over the role of the Tin Man from Buddy Ebsen, who had to back out of the part due to his allergic reaction to the silver makeup.
I was anticipating my own difficulties with Tin Man’s silver color and metallic texture but I actually had quite a lot of fun painting this character. As with the portraits of Dorothy and Scarecrow, I painted Tin Man on an 8"x10" canvas using water soluble oil paints.
My sketch of Tin Man drawn directly
to canvas just prior to painting.
With regard to the paints, I did find a drawback to the water-soluble oils while working on this portrait. As soon as I had finished the painting, I wanted to photograph it. I took it outside to a spot where I like the natural lighting, set up all my photographic equipment and the portrait and began to take a couple of photos. Suddenly, it started raining...hard. The character Tin Man doesn’t do so well in the rain and neither do wet water-soluble oils; the paints started running and separating. The painting was literally ruined. I kept my cool, carefully soaked up the water and melting paint with a paper towel and painted it again using what was left of the original as the starting point. In a few hours the painting was restored. That was a hard lesson learned. It should be noted that these paints were still wet when the painting was exposed to the rain. If I had given the paint a chance to dry sufficiently (even by a few days) the rain would not have been an issue. Water-soluble paints become permanent when dry just like regular oil paints.
I’m sure you don’t need a clue to guess the character I plan to paint as the last subject of this series but let’s just say he can probably cough up quite a furball.
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