Tin Man - A Year Late

This post is a year late. It's about the Tin Man costume I made last year for Wizard of Oz. I figured it would be one of the hardest costumes to make look good - like it was solid/metal-like without actually being metal so as not to cause any injuries to the actor (or other actors). So I looked online to see how others had made them and didn't find anything helpful. You can buy some pretty awesome Tin Man costumes out of molded plastic for several thousand dollars (higher than my entire budget - for the show.

So I had to find my own way. After thinking about it and looking online for possibilities, I came across some good websites about making armor. One option was leather armor, which inspired me to look into fake leathers (since I can't afford the real stuff). I found some good upholstery vinyl at my local fabric store that was the right color. It was kind of thin - wouldn't pull off the "solid" look I needed so I decided to back it with craft foam and really thick interfacing - it took a lot of hot glue. Then I bound it with some strips of the vinyl to cover the ends.

Here's my prototype: 

 

Prototype

So I took a whole lot of measurements of the actor and came up with a plan.

I'd have him wear a unitard underneath to hid the skin. I made a hood and sewed on the funnel hat. His arms and legs would kind of look like a knight's armor with a forearm piece and an upper arm piece connected by an elbow piece, and similar for the legs. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of that part of the process - I got crunched for time. Needless to say it took a lot of fitting and adjusting to get it just right. The pants especially - I'll talk about those later.

The other big thing to figure out was how to do the body. My initial ideas involved a beer keg costume and some chicken wire, but that didn't pan out. So I went to Walmart and got a laundry hamper that was the perfect size for my Tin Man.

I had my assistant cut arm holes and a neck hole, and take off some of the bottom - I don't do power tools. I covered the sharp edges with duct tape - though duct tape doesn't stick to plastic well.

Here are some pictures:

Arm Hole Placing

After Cutting

Then I covered it with vinyl - again using lots of hot glue:

Covering

From the inside

Then I added shoulder phalanges and a collar.

Here's the complete torso:

Tin Man Body

After the parts were make I used black paint and a fan brush to grunge it up a bit, and added buttons for the rivets up the front of his body.

The "arms" connected to the body by a snap on a elastic strip sewn to the top of the arm.

The legs proved to be rather tricky. I started him off with some vinyl "panties" but they didn't quite work. So we ended up with part vinyl part spandex "bike shorts" that were held up by suspenders. The legs went over that and connected to a belt kind of like garters.

Here's the finished costume.:

Completed Costume