When I first saw The Wizard of Oz movie as a kid, it scared the living crap out of me. It was not until years later that I fell in love with the cast of characters.

I have wanted to do a series updating the characters in a darker style for years. Think Oz with a Beetlejuice meets Pan’s Labyrinth vibe. Just use your imagination and have fun.

Your challenge this week is to reimagine the Tinman.

The winning entrant will receive a HM3 version of their character rendered by yours truly.

The characters must be your own design and not based on any character that might be copyrighted in any way.

Rules for posts, contests, and challenges:

Original characters only, no copyrighted characters, no characters based on copyrighted characters.No characters based on Official RPG NPC's ( Non-Player Characters ). Please keep all submissions PG13. I have the right to delete any post that I believe crosses this line without warning. Only post characters that have been created solely using Hero Machine, and that you know for certain have never been entered in a contest before. If you aren’t certain, don’t enter it, because I’m not going to go back through all of the contests and check.

All entries must be in JPG or PNG form (BMPs are too big), posted to a publicly accessible website (like the HeroMachine :,ImageShack, Deviant Art, or whatever); Do NOT use Photobucket

Entries must be made as a comment or comments to this post , containing a link directly to the image and the character name;

, containing a link directly to the image and the character name; Please name your filesas [your name]-[character name].[file extension] before you upload it. So DiCicatriz, for instance, would save his “Bayou Belle” character image as DiCicatriz-BayouBelle.png.

Please make the link go directly to the image (like this) and not to a hosting jump page (like this).

This contest will close on Monday, September 21st at 6:00pm Eastern