Figure it out!

A quiet day today and one where I figured out that my 009 narrow gauge layout will eventually need some figures to give it life. I could buy ready painted ones by a variety of manufacturers at a cost of somewhere in the region of £1 to £3 a figure. I know you can get bundles of 50 to 100 ready painted figures on eBay but the ones I have seen do look as though they have been painted with a tar brush using colours from a clowns make up box. I figured that I would be better off painting some figures myself especially as I had a pack of Dapol's Platform Figures in stock. In fact I had used three of them to populate my Leyland National bus that I built last year.

I think I paid about £4 for them not so long ago but I see they are now about £7.50. That is still cheaper than buying ready painted figures even allowing a few pounds for he paint used. First stage in painting them was to give them an undercoat of black primer. However whilst I had the airbrush out and before loading it with white paint I had the unusual inspirational idea that I could spray the cattle grid gate and track bridge from my 009 layout white to move that project on. This would mean I would only need to clean the airbrush out once at the end of the session of spraying as loading it with black paint after the white would produce a still suitable dark grey undercoat.

With the primer dry the job of painting the figures commences. They are actually nicely detailed figures which I think do not date back the 60 years to the Airfix figures but are more recent. As usually the power and resolution of digital photography makes my painting abilities look bad but in reality from normal viewing distance the nearly finished ones look OK - honest!

I figured out that it would be easier to leave the figures on their sprue at the moment to ease the painting. Their hats and shoes will be painted in once the rest of the body is painted and the figure removed from the sprue.