First attempt at painting oo gauge figures

The people are from AC Stadden and are exceptional quality - just my painting that lets them down. The cows are Merit black & white Frisian's which I repainted to suit the more common brown shorthorn found in the 1930's norff west.

Unless they're Priser or Merton I'm not a great fan of model railway figures but these seem to be well represented and well proportioned despite rather scary faces !


The paint job however exceeds all excellence and if you've ever seen my disasterous efforts at painting figures, or painting anything come to that,  then you'd know why !


Merit cows on the other hand were always a good representation of the bovine maternity and your change of breed is right on the ball.

Great stuff Ian.


Allan

I like the shorthorns Ian - a very good representation.  :thumbs :thumbs

As Allan said, some scary faces on the humans.  How did you do them ?  Overall black to start with or just coloured them ?  If the latter, you've got some nice shadow detail in there.  ;-)

Hi Ian,

They look great, superb attention to detail. Railway manual workers were grimy most of the time. There are some great films of the LMS in the 1930's on You Tube, the assortment of clothing they wore in all weathers (especially the gangers) is interesting. I like the bowler hat.

Nigel

[user=6]Petermac[/user] wrote:

I like the shorthorns Ian - a very good representation.  :thumbs :thumbs

As Allan said, some scary faces on the humans.  How did you do them ?  Overall black to start with or just coloured them ?  If the latter, you've got some nice shadow detail in there.  ;-)

The "dirty faces" were not meant to be quite that dirty! I touched in the eyes with too much black (paintbrush too big) and when I attempted to clean off the excess with a cotton bud/white spirit, the black just went everywhere. I suppose the right thing to do would be to strip all the paint off and start again, but that's for another day when I have less important things to do!! On the clothing, I went over with a watered down matt black wash to help with shadowing - i'm still learning about figure painting, so hopefully I will get better with time and practice.

[user=1632]BCDR[/user] wrote:

Hi Ian,

They look great, superb attention to detail. Railway manual workers were grimy most of the time. There are some great films of the LMS in the 1930's on You Tube, the assortment of clothing they wore in all weathers (especially the gangers) is interesting. I like the bowler hat.

Nigel

I have watched several of the LMS you-tube videos - really helpful for getting details on, well, detail if you know what I mean! type of workwear, detail on buildings, lineside etc. very helpful - just a shame colour film wasn't used much in the 1930's - that's where I have the biggest problem - knowing what colours were used in the period for everything including clothes! I have been on several websites and many help with company liveries etc but you can't beat seeing the colour in real life or on a good quality photograph, piece of film to help.

Nice painting Ian,the guy with the beard looks bang up to date.

Here is a pic with some of the figures in place as a work gang outside their hut. The etched brass platelayers hut is from Severn models, along with the etched tools.

Ah now this picture I do like.  The first pictures suffer more from poor lighting than painting I think.  I struggle to get my subjects properly lit.

Excellent work.

John