What gets me about most model railroads is the lack of people, I mean think about it somebody has the do all the work and eat and consume on these little empires…
Please, somebody who knows Mel Perry’s family, have them save everything related to his figures, and license them to be made.
I don’t know anyone who built out that combination of wit and skill better.
Licensing could be an issue with that idea:
So his figures, albiet modified to various degrees, were made from molds based off of available commercial castings. OK IMO if you are making them for your own non-commercial usage, but trying to make money off of them without a license could be very iffy - didn’t “Big Dawg Originals” get busted for selling locomotive castings molded from other manufacturers with minimal changes?
The easiest way to build up figures cheap is with unpainted figure pacts. They are a bit basic, but you can get sometimes a hundred or more figures in one purchase. Just look up unpainted figure pacts up on eBay or Amazon.
Woodland Scenics is the most common at a hobby shop, but they are pre-painted and very pricey.
As for how many figures you need, it really depends on a location. At a busy urban center, yeah you need massive crowds. But an industrial district? A couple people heading out to their cars at the end of their shift, a few taking a break outside, etc. is all you really need. Rural areas? A single farmer or two standing in their field, etc. The human mind is great at imagining what is not seen, and showing a couple people about is often enough to convince the viewer that there is life happening “elsewhere” beyond their vision. Empty cars, empty bikes, and all that give visual eye tricks to suggest people who were there but are currently unseen.
This very same topic was the subject of a recent July thread.
https://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/292803.aspx
Mel made his figures using Alumilite resin casting materials. First, he made the molds using using commercially available figures as masters. Then, he made dozens of the same figures in these molds.
There is really nothing to license here.
Rich
What I have done in the past for vehicles, buses and passenger rail cars is use the 1:100 figures off of Amazon sellers (yes ~12% smaller than they should be in HO but that just means they fit in most vehicles with no or mininal surgery to squeeze them in. Convertibles…meh, I have few and pose them as parked). Anyway these figures all needed to be repainted as I don’t model 1970s variety shows so gold lame jackets and silver pants are right out. Flat basic colors followed by a dark wash and then dull coating is good enough, although stripping the paint was ineffective with these so I primed and repainted, and the results were…passable.
Now a few posts back I was rambling about reselling figures from RR_Mel’s molds (which were made from other commerical firms IP) running into licensing issues. Well, xbox suggestion of HO figures from eBay got me to wondering what was available there. Turns out the first couple of hits were of knock-off castings made using the figures from Presier unpainted sets - I know those sets (I have figures from 3 of them - the 60+/120 figures kits - great sets but a bit dated to the 1980s with too many male figures in ties and most women figures in skirts as opposed to pants - maybe they have newer sets with more current figures) - and readily recognized at least 6 or seven figures in the “knock-off” sets - I gather eBay may not be all that worried about Presier’s IP.
As for Woodland Scenics figures, while IMO they seem to be molded a little ‘cartoony’, as for the paint jobs (I brought a few sets over the years hop
Yep!
WS_figure by Edmund, on Flickr
Did these ladies forget to remove their oven mitts? Or are those white baseball gloves?
Just sayin’
Regards, Ed
Ed, I believe that they are trying to protect their newly painted fingernails.
[:-^]
Rich
Those are thick white work gloves, the ladies are going to crank up the Fordson tractor and do some plowing of the back 40. They’re wearing their dresses because they just read an article in National Geographic on SouthEast Asian farm women keeping cool during field work…
see, this is one of the problems I have with WS figures - their paint is somewhat thick and gloppily applied - and those black pin-point eyes - oy vey! Just use some shadowing to imply eyes and mouth in HO scale and smaller, save the detailed face painting for O gauge, Large Scale, and mil-scale (1/35) figures.
Ed, you know they burned their hands and are doing their best to appear happy despite the heavy bandages and salve.
Could be carpal tunnel? Or Moffat tunnel?
Cheers, Ed
Naw, looks to me like a fist-fight about to happen…maybe a wandering hubby or maybe a stolen recipe.
Wayne
Maybe in the kitchen with a pan of muffins.
To the OP. Check out train shows. About twenty years ago, I bought a bag of unpainted figures of different makes for a couple bucks. Had to be about 200 figures. I’ve painted a couple dozen and the rest are still in storage.
Pete
Yeah I feel the same way about the WS figures.
There are lots of unpainted sets. In addition to preiser, there are Lytler and Lytler metal figures, Musket miniatures (crude but they do clean up well), SS Limited, shape ways and others. If you can be OK with commonly seen figures, the Campbells Weston figures are very nice along with the hundreds of painted Prieser sets that have come out over the years.
One of the issues that some modelers have with figures in motion is that they can look " frozen in mid stride"- the person swinging the axe is forever in mid chop etc. To avoid this, these modelers choose to have stationary figures that could plausibly be motionless for a period of time. People standing or seated etc…
Guy
I picked a few figures out of one of those bags of little people.
With a bit of plastic putty, some limb rerrangement and craft paint, they ended up on the Yellow Brick Road.
Also, I model the Transition Era so women and girls in dresses don’t bother me. They fit right in.
Well, my model lady didn’t get beady little eyes.
Preiser are the most relistic, espesialy if you give them a shade treatment. Weston are a bit of a caricture type and a bit out of scale but I use a couple because of the type and pose. You can buy Preiser unpainted also which I have used on some modifyed poses, you can pick up sets for cheap sometimes on e-bay, especialy sets that are partialy used.