I quite like how this turned out. As an individual illustration I think the color and the composition work well. I like the tin Nick in the foreground and Rebecca, Amy and meat Nick acting out their destinies in the background.

Unfortunately I’d intended this portrait (and those of Dorothy, Scarecrow and Lion) to be part of a composition on the back cover of a book and this illustration doesn’t work with the rest of the art at all. The portraits of the other characters work okay but this one is just too darned busy. There’s too much action and the red in it clashes with the reds in the rest of the cover.

It looks like I’ll need to do new versions of these portraits. Keeping them simple this time. And working with the colors already established. Sigh.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about Nick and the process of coloring this illustration. It’s that I’ve got a lot of paperwork to fill out in order to make sure I get into the spring classes at Seattle Central Community College. The paperwork from the college itself is minor – it’s the financial aid forms that eat time and kill the brain.

For the background of Nick’s portrait I’ve put Rebecca Eastwitch on the left, Nick and Amy on the right. Things are about to go very badly for our young lovers.

Nick Chopper could be considered a tragic figure. He’s a man who, piece by piece, had all his human parts replaced with tin substitutes. A witch enchanted his axe and it chopped off his parts. A tinsmith fashioned replacements for the missing limbs. Eventually all of Nick got excised and he became a completely tin man.

In the original Oz novels Nick is pretty satisfied with that. He felt the lack of a heart for a while but the Wizard gave him a suitable substitute. There’s no tragedy to that version of Nick. He and the Scarecrow hang out, often congratulating themselves that they aren’t subject to the need to eat or sleep or breathe like ordinary meat people.

The Nick in Oz Squad? He’s had a few more bumps than the Nick in the original novels. He doesn’t seem to miss being human much more than the earlier Nick did. At least not most of the time.