Sounds corny? I have had few people on my layout over the years basically because they are hard to paint. Enter eBay… a vendor had 100 figures for under five bucks. They are 1/100th scale which close to HO scale, and they work out just fine. I’d always thought that the regular HO figures were a bit big in some cases and after a few quick measurements, my old HO people were all six footers and over! They worked out well enough that I have ordered more of them.

Anyway- these were already painted and I dusted them with black chalk to bring up the details and kill the shine. They are not front line figures, but are great for areas that are arms-length. Here is the first blast of people:

Originally I read this about John Allen’s experience taking pictures of Cliff Grandt’s locomotives to see if they were lifelike enough. It was a side bar in Lynn Westcott’s book on the Gorre & Daphetid Railroad. John would take pictures and show them to Cliff to see where he could improve his modeling skills.

While I am not going for a level of detail that Cliff Grandt was, I do like to use a camera to spot potential flaws in my methods and models. For example- in the picture below, I can see on the bridge that I am working on that there are grey tabs that I will need to cut off before I paint it and detail it further:

It still will need its road surface, walkways, and rails, but the tabs stood out to me. On the shot below, the buildings were not my concern as much as the hinges on the truck and the front of the van. It needs a license plate and a few other things to spruce it up:

In the last pic, the leading edge of the second building on the left needs to have the paper facing re-applied. The shallow relief building on the right is a stand-in, and whatever I replace it with needs to be a lesser scale. For the buildings in the read (both foam core with a fascia applied)- I need to do something with the lighting other than the available room lights before I take any serious pictures. The sidewalk is not painted, and I need a shallow building on the immediate right side (don’t know what just yet). The van on the right needs a license plate and is not good enough for a close up picture. Naturally- people would improve the shot a lot. I have some on order!