The Little World

I approach the exercise of painting figures with trepidation. There are so many better painters that I feel I am a fraud.

Yet I need pilots for my aircraft and spectators for my air museum. So it is either paint the inexpensive figures or pay for the ready-mades…and these are very often at a price beyond which I feel comfortable. At $ 5 a figure for a 1:76 or 1:87 size, I feel I am being fleeced.

The available figures are often railway-orientated, and not particularly modern. But a little paint and a lot of imagination can people nearly anything. I do welcome sets of figures that have multiple poses, though very few of them are civilian types.

These visitors to the museum would be more comfortable on a British railways platform in the 1950’s but they will have to make the best of it on the prairies. The thin girl in the orange jumper is part of a Chinese set that came extremely cheaply – they are all slim people but at least they are prepared to stand still for long periods of time; an asset in a scale model.

I can congratulate myself that the scale chosen is 1:72 – if it were one of the larger ones the price of the visitors would exceed that of the museum.