Autumn 2019

The locals admire the freshly sprouted mushrooms on this October afternoon.

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Tommie

Meet this little guy called Tommie! A frolicsome teenager with a ball waving to his friends or perhaps a train passing by.

Although he is a bit smaller than the rest of my home-made folks (one head shorter) he did turn out a bit bigger as I wanted altogether. He's meant to be around 1:22,5 but probably he's bigger for his age, more like 1:20 scale (actually my figures always tend to turn out a bit bigger, perhaps I must try to build 1:29 scale to come to the right size...).

It was made the "Chris Walas way" what I found a very pleasant way of making figures.

Faces and hands are still hard for me to do and those parts turned out just not the way I had hoped for, but also not bad either. I have once considered using Preisser parts for my figures hands and heads. But than again, it's just fun to sculpt the whole figure yourself and my figures are getting better each time, so I'm actually very happy with it.

And I'm very pleased with his cap, made from a small piece of a plastic coffee milk cup.

Here some pictures of the process and the final result. The light grey base is baked Fimo on a wrinkled aluminum foil skeleton. The green is Milliput for sculpting in detail.

Shoes and right hand from Milliput

Trousers, ball and left hand

Head and cap

Skirt and jacket. Grey primer paint

And there he is!

Painted in acrylic hobby paints

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Sculpting figures the Chris Walas way

I started sculpting my own figures years ago following the "Figure Classes" by Chris Walas on the MyLargeScale (MLS) website. It's easier than you might think and very fun to do! 

The classes are not hosted on MLS anymore, but luckily they can be found at a website about Chris Walas on 4largescale.com. This website includes a lot of other pictures and information about figures and his unique whimsical modeltrains.

Also Dwight Ennis from MLS has stored the articles as PDF's on his own North Pacific Coast Railroad website The articles and accessible by the links mentioned in his post on MLS. On request of Dwight I made a duplicate set of the articles to see to it that the articles outlive Dwight (and Chis) and are saved for younger generations to come.

So, here are the direct links to the articles in PDF format stored on this blog:
- Figure Class I
- Figure Class II
- Figure Class III
- Associated Files (Zip file with 3 additional PDF files)

Now let's get to work!

The method is very straight forward and fun to do. First start with an aluminum foil skeleton that is "designed" to withstand the temperatures of the baking; the aluminum will expand more than the clay but because the foil is crumpled the skeleton itself keeps it size while the expansion take place "in" the crumples. If you would make a skeleton out for instance pieces of brass wire the skeleton will expand, pushing the clay away/out of its form.
 
I made some figures that were totally build out of Fimo clay. But for smaller detail it's just a bit too hard/stiff to work with. Sculpy would be a better option and I was planning to try it out, but eventually I found out that Milliput is even better because it does not have to be baked at all.

The Milliput can be used over the Fimo clay, so I can make a "body" out of Fimo and do the detailing with Milliput!

Body from Fimo clay

Head and deatils from Milliput

Details from Milliput

Painting

For this particular figure (Torrence) I  used Tamiya acrylic paints for clothes, shoes, cap and suitcase (later figures were also painted with cheaper acrylic hobby paint from the local DIY shops, with very nice results).
Also the base skin color was done with Tamiya paint. The shades in the face are done with the Andrea Flesh Paint set (waterbase/acrylic). The shades on the clothes and the eyes were done with thinned oil paint (Van Dijck's brown).

Basic layers

Detailing