The World According to Tom

I thought I’d do a series of articles on proportions, distortions and how to measure but first I’ll lay some groundwork on what it means to say ‘realistic proportions’.

I see a lot of misinformation about what constitutes the average and the range of human proportions. You can find all sorts of ideal proportion systems in art books, though these rarely go in depth and always seem to be based on some abstract ideal rather than actual observations of real people; for example the common admonition of drawing instruction is that overall height is eight times the height of the head when in reality perhaps one person in fifty has a head so small. It’s like calling someone six foot four ‘average height’.

This is a subject I’ve spent a lot of time researching over the years and while I make no claim to definitive knowledge my understanding is aimed at sculpting and perhaps can be made into something solid enough to build on. I welcome correction if it comes with solid evidence and anyone who wants to link or excerpt from this post is welcome.

All natural proportions show a degree of variability becoming exponentially less common in occurrence as you depart from the average, the ‘bell curve’, so while it’s theoretically statistically possible you could have almost any ratio you want, the likelihood of an extreme juxtaposition actually occurring can be about the same as a broken teacup suddenly flying back together. Also, when you get too far from the average the effect can appear freakish. How far you have to go to cross the line depends on the viewer’s sensitivity, the context and what part of the body you are distorting. Figure collectors for example have become so used to greatly distorted heads and a set of compensatory distortions that a 1/6 head proportion seems ‘realistic’.

Average height:

This varies in time and place, modern U.S. males of European descent average 70.5" modern Dutch are nearly 72" average, while Portuguese are the shortest Europeans at about 68" average. Women are about 7% shorter than men on average.

The standard deviation is about 2.85" or 4% so if the average height is 70.5" then 68% of men are between 67.85" and 73.35", and 98% are between 63.8" and 76.3" or a variation of about +/- 8%. This variation of about +/- 8% is a good rule of thumb which serves pretty well for most human proportions that is to say if you make a part of the body 8% bigger or 8% smaller than average with respect to the other body parts you have distorted it to a point where it represents less than 1% of the population. Going beyond this point there is an exponential increase in rarity so that a 10% distortion is 1 in 200, 12% about 1 in 400etc. thus the likelihood of someone being 20% taller than average or 85"(7’1") is one in about 200,000 excluding instances of growth hormone disorders.

The average height of recruits in the ACW was a bit less than 68" and the average height of the garrison at Heraculaneum was about 66" as was the height of an average Iron Age British male. The average height of Frenchmen drafted into service during the Napoleonic wars was 64.15" (Napoleon was 65" about average height BTW) though it was nearly an inch taller in the following generation. The British Army of WWI average height was 66.5".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height

Head as a proportion of overall height:

Modern males, 1/7.65 average with 99% of men falling between 1/6.75 and 1/8.

Modern females, 1/7.4 average with 99% falling between 1/6.5 and 1/7.75.

People from pre-modern times when average height was less seem to have had proportionally larger heads, or rather their legs and torso seem to have been shorter and their heads the same size. This is something I have noted from measuring old photographs and I don’t really know how valid it is.

There is a tendency for shorter persons to be towards the higher end of this scale and taller ones towards the lower end i.e. taller persons tend to have proportionally smaller heads and shorter persons larger ones.

The position of the eyes in the face:

The mid-point of the height of the face is, on average, just slightly above the lower lid of the eye for men with a variation of less than .5" or about 5% of an average 9.25" head. The midpoint of the average woman’s face seems to be very slightly higher, though this could be a skewing caused by selection of women with eyes nearer the middle of the face for photography. Children have eyes lower in the face than adults.

Body Proportions: (average measurements are for a modern American male,i.e. 70.5" in height)

The bone of the upper arm (humerus) is about 15% longer than the bones of the forearm (radius and ulna) if you compare a line from the shoulder joint to the elbow with one from the elbow towards the hand the equal point is about the middle of the palm. Average length elbow to fingertip is about 17". The average arm span is slightly more than height. Because of the way the joints of the elbow and shoulder move you can not straightforwardly add the lengths of the bones to get the length of the arm in various positions.

The hand is about 2/3 the length of the forearm the palm width about 1/3. Relating these to overall height would give a ratio of about 1/6.5 for the forearm, 1/10 for the hand and 1/19 for the palm. Average hand length is 7.5", the width across the knuckles of a clenched fist, 3.6".

Leg length is a bit more than half height for modern men, measured to the hip socket. The bones of the upper and lower leg are about the same length. I can’t find any information for the degree of variability in the ratio. Note this is measuring from the hip socket to the heel and the bones from the hip socket to the knee and the knee to the ankle.

I can’t find any statistics on the variability of proportion of leg length to overall height but judging by what looks quite odd in either direction compared to the average the extremes would seem to be 46% to 58% of overall height. Women have proportionally slightly shorter legs on average; that’s not a misprint, women have as a percentage of overall height on average slightly shorter legs than men.

Foot to height ratio is about 1/7 on average, about half the distance from the heel to the knee and seems to be more variable than most proportions.

Here are also some pictures sf another 1/48 (35mm) F&IW figure I made a couple of years ago but only recently fitted with a musket.

Posted by Tom Meier at 18:31 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

One of the things I find so interesting about sculpting is the enormous complexity of the fundamental question of representative art; what makes a thing look like itself?

It’s something we are taught by experience but also something we are predisposed to learn. A small child or a fan of modern art doesn’t require much more than a bit of twisted wire or a glob of clay to see a horse or a bird in flight but while impressionism is apparently doing well, deconstruction and abstraction have yet to make much headway in miniature figures,

Perception is a mix of experience, formulation and intuition/instinct. There is what we have seen before, what we expect to see, the frequently unconscious conventions we have learned of how to see it and the way our brain is wired to see. This is a huge subject and I expect I could write a book about it with a bit of research so I’ll keep it from ballooning out of control by confining it to the example of a figure I recently finished.

This difficulty of depiction occurs most commonly in things which can not easily be sculpted as they actually are, at least not with the materials we use, hair and fur for example or the clear parts of the eye. There is also the subtlety of the problem of complex surfaces, an example of this would be differentiating fabrics such as silk from denim, leather from wool.

The question I’m going to explore is a bit more unusual; how to give visual clues so as to distinguish between a figure of a a person who is very large and one which is simply out of scale.

Just as in a television or cinema picture, when human figures are rendered in sculpture at something other than life size the clue of relation to the viewers size is lost and some other visual clues to establish scale are sought by the mind. In a film this is generally the background this is demonstrated best by it’s manipulation in commonplace film special effects, if you put a normal sized man in a 1/48 model of a city he seems 250 feet tall, or if you establish the size of normal people you can use forced perspective to make other actors appear larger or smaller as Peter Jackson did in ‘Lord of the Rings’. A more mundane application is when short star actors are surrounded with short supporting actors so as not to diminish their screen impact. Miniatures present the difficulty of not being able to force the audience to view things in just one way or place them in a consistently scaled environment.

As a miniature sculptor all you have is the proportions of the figure and the scale of any clothing or equipment the figure may have.

Human proportions characteristically vary with the stature of the individual. Setting aside people with glandular anomalies, tall people tend to have smaller heads, proportionally to their bodies, than average. Acromegaly, another cause of great size, causes not only extraordinary stature but also enlarged hands and feet, distortion of bones of the head and proportionally long arms and legs.

Unfortunately these effects are subtle and can easily be ‘washed out’ if a caricature style, already exaggerated is employed.

In life 99% of adults of European ancestry have a head from 1/6.5 to 1/8 of their height, when you see people at either end of this range you notice their very large or very small head but miniature figures can be anything from 1/4 to 1/8. Metal figures generally have heads off the adult normal charts, 1/5 or 1/6 and modern plastics are adopting this stylistic distortion as well.

Fortunately for my problem the figure I made is for a line with relatively realistic proportions.

So I made the figure, who is meant to be ‘closer to eight than seven feet tall’ with a 1/8 head, long legs and arms, big hands and feet and with a sword designed to be wielded with two hands by a normal sized person so that the hilt particularly is long and delicate looking in his hand. His face has the eyes set high with prominent cheek bones and a large jaw and chin. The widely spaced teeth are also characteristic of someone with an above average dose of growth hormone.

The figure is about 45mm tall, 50mm if he were standing up straight, scaled to 1/48 or 7' 9" to scale.

Posted by Tom Meier at 09:54 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

All of you who have been waiting so patiently for the Fox WWII figures seem to be in need of some reassurance so I’m going to bend my promise to Jim Fox not to show any more pictures of the figures until the release is done. These are not pictures of a figure, only an accessory.

I also want to illustrate one of the great difficulties I’ve had with this range, to wit, tiny mechanical objects.

At the best of times I have never liked making microsculptures of machines. I think this is because the techniques I’ve developed don’t work on machines very well. Or rather it’s easier to spot the shortfall between what I make and the ideal. In simple terms they always come out looking a bit ‘rubbery’. And yes I know they look good compared to what else is available but I’m with Dogberry, "comparisons are odorous". My frustrations with mechanicals led me to once spray-paint "I will not agree to make any more robots" in foot high letters on my workshop wall as a constant reminder after one particularly nasty job for Hasbro.

On top of that the bloody thing took longer to make than a whole figure for this line would have from scratch.

The same is true of the other ammo carriers and the radio and weapons and the….you get the idea.

This would obviously be bad enough if I had time on my hands but I don’t, and what little I can make for sculpting is steadily eroding. When Carin (my wife) went back to work two years ago I was still able to work about 30 hours a week but this began to erode almost at once (I leave the reasons to the imagination of all husbands out there) until it’s now more like 10.

But both children will be going to school this fall and there really isn’t much left to do on the sculpting.

Then I just have to get the fiddly little buggers to cast.

For you Brits, the coin in the picture is a U.S. one cent piece, about the size of a ha’penny, if you still have ha’pennies over there, or 19mm in diameter.

Posted by Tom Meier at 05:43 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

I thought it might be interesting to follow the process of a commission work from inception to finished sculpt.

I was first approached by the client Theo Meier, three weeks ago. I’ve known Mr. Meier for nearly six years and although in the past he has bandied about ideas, this is the first sculpt he has commissioned from me. The price was quickly agreed ("a zillion dollars and I’ll be good for a whole week") and we began to discuss the project.

Theo M. It’s going to be called ‘Slug-eat-your-face’.

Tom M. So, It’s going to be a kind of slug…

Theo M. Yeah!

Tom M. And how is it different from an ordinary slug?

Theo M. It’s big.

Tom M. Is that all?

Theo M. No, it has big teeth, to eat your face and is really scary.

Tom M. What kind of teeth, like a shark or an alligator…

Theo M. No, like Hambam (a hamster who, it ought to be mentioned, once bit the client)

Tom M. Any other distinguishing features?

Theo M. Yeah, he’s really crazy, crazy to eat your face!

Tom M. And how does his mental state manifest itself in his appearance?

Theo M. He’s got one eye bigger than the other.

Tom M. One eye bigger than the other?

Theo M. Yeah, that shows he’s crazy.

The details of the design being worked out and a rough mock-up created by the client sculpting was begun a fortnight later and concluded in the course of a Saturday afternoon. Payment is pending.

Slug-eat-your-face

Posted by Tom Meier at 11:49 | Comments (14) | Trackbacks (0)

There are three main aspects to the problem of comparing figures for compatibility. Each has it’s own difficulties.

The height of the figure along with the scale of any standardized equipment he has. The problem here is the skill and tools required to accurately measure a figure. Nearly all figures are in a posture which, for comparison requires measurement to include an estimation of what the figure’s height would be if it were standing up perfectly straight. The change in perceived height can vary significantly with a walking posture much less in the sort of active poses favored by gamers. To extract actual from measured height requires skill and study most people lack.

The heft of the figure, the girth of the limbs and bulk of the body. Girth in itself is, I think, the least jarring of the variations which must be considered for compatibility, far more important is proportion and to a lesser degree other elements of style such as detailing or the way some elements are depicted.

The proportions or relations of the size of the parts of the body to one another is, perhaps even more than overall height the aspect which causes most people to declare figures not compatible. As we see in figure 1. merely increasing the heft of a figure is not very disharmonious but changing the proportions causes quite a clash. (Also note that though the examples all have the same overall height the ‘figure-ized’ one, because of the distortions on the head and face has the eyes at a different level.) Even in a photograph, without a way of comparing proportions most people can’t perceive variations.

So you can’t measure your way to an adequate definition of compatibility or define it by simple notions like ‘heft’. A photograph of the figures you would like to compare side by side would be ideal but is quite impractical given the astronomical permutations. Putting a ruler or a grid in photos has several difficulties as well. Macro photography can introduce distortions depending on the placement of objects and the angle of the picture. In particular a grid or ruler behind a figure can make it appear to be quite different from it’s actual size (figure 2).

It’s to solve these difficulties I suggest posed silhouettes in photos taken alongside the figure (figure 3). As can be seen it’s only necessary to have the legs and body posture approximately match the figure.

The silhouettes should use modern natural proportions such as those established by the U.S. army because any other standard is open to dispute. I enthusiastically support any sculptors’ developing a style but how can one of these take precedence over another? Nature is self-evidently the ultimate frame of reference for representative art. This doesn't mean you must slavishly follow nature any more than your figures must be an even number of millimeters in height.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

Figure 4.

Which?

Posted by Tom Meier at 11:44 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Distorting the proportions of head, limbs and body, the size of hands and feet are manipulations which could be understood as a stylistic choice but some common proportional anomalies just seem to be misunderstandings. Of these the most common seems to be the forearm.

The bones of the forearm, the radius and the ulna are shorter, I repeat SHORTER than the bone of the upper arm, the humerus, There is some natural variation in how much shorter but they are always shorter in humans without deformity. This is obviously not always true of miniature figures. Why?

I’ve heard the theory it’s an effect of distorting the size of the hands. I’m inclined to discount this as it seems to occur even when the hands show little or no distortion. My view is it’s more likely a misapprehension of the way the elbow works and how this confuses the perception of the arm in different positions.

I could spend a lot of time describing the way the elbow joint slides around the end of the humerus but a picture really is worth a thousand words, (fig 1).

I think the main source of confusion is the way the joint opens and rolls when fully extended. It is important to understand the point of the elbow is not the pivot.

On another subject, here is a proposal I made over on ‘The Miniatures Page’ for a system to compare the size of figures from pictures online using standardized silhouettes on a grid, the advantages of this system are:

It is cheap, once the silhouettes are set up and easily distributed to manufacturers and reviewers.

It does not require any point or standard of measurement e.g. ankles to the kneecaps or ears to navel.

It allows the heft as well as the height to be compared.

It uses reality as a standard for comparison (the silhouette in the example is from a Muybridge photo) so no arguments about who’s style to use as a standard.

If manufacturers don’t want to use the standard or try to manipulate it, reviewers can correct the deficiency.

Figure 1

Posted by Tom Meier at 08:32 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Here are some shots of the various revisions of Danni’s (lack of) hair, I thought you all might find them amusing.

On to women’s legs as promised:

One of the most common anatomical distortions in figures and indeed all representations of women is the length of their legs. So much is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever paused to think about it but we want a more thorough understanding of how much and in what way conventional representations depart from reality.

First I have a shocking revelation for all males out there. Women, according to the U.S. army who have taken a measuring tape to a rather large sample, have on average… proportionally shorter legs than men.

Oh the humanity! How is this possible you ask? Have men been blind. The answer is, shoes and confusion about where the waist is. You see a man’s waist, (though this may not be true of many gamers) is generally reckoned to be just above his hips because his ribcage is about as wide as his pelvic bone. A typical woman by contrast has a hipbone wider than her ribcage making the narrow point higher. Figure 1.

So, typically how long are women’s legs? The average for Europeans is a bit less than half overall height from hip-joint to sole of foot. Perhaps more interesting, the difference between extraordinarily long and extraordinarily short legs for two women of the same overall height is only about three inches (7.5cm).

But the problem of distortion doesn’t end there. When legs are extended many sculptors seem to be under the delusion arm length should follow torso length.. This seems to be the result of formulas they learned in art books saying the arms at the sides should fall to a certain point. The problem with such formulas is they only hold for the average. When lengthening women’s legs to a degree only one woman in a hundred shows in real life is a ‘normal’ distortion you can’t then apply a formula for arm length meant for a woman with real normal proportions.

In fact arm length in women with extremely long legs tends to follow leg length. The long bones tend to all be longer together. Just to show biological forms don’t follow neat abstract formulas (Leonardo take note), women with shorter legs do have arms which seem to follow torso length. (figure 2)

Next time, elbows and forearms.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Posted by Tom Meier at 07:14 | Comments (19) | Trackbacks (0)

I’ve finally finished a long run of toy work and have time to get back to the Fox WWII minis and, with John Kellner’s help, bringing out some of the figures I made a while ago. These are to include two wolves, three human (Byzantine) infantry a wood elf noble in traveling clothes and a goblin captain.

Here are some shots of a second wolf I had done a while back but had not taken pictures of.

Now a bit about proportions.

There is a lot of discussion about realism in miniatures particularly with respect to proportions and anatomy. From what seems to pass for good or realistic I get the impression actual anatomy and proportion is little known or generally misconceived. I’ve spent some time researching the subject over the years so I thought I’d set down what I’ve learned.

People are obviously not standardized industrial products, they vary but they do not vary in a completely random way, nor are variations or degrees of variation equally common. Adult male humans can be anything from two to nine feet tall but only one in forty European males are shorter than 5’4" or taller than 6’4" with 7 out of 10 being 5’7" to 6’1". Likewise the relations of the parts of the body to one another, the size of hands varies from about three to five inches across the knuckles but large hands almost always belong to large people, small hands to small ones. Variations do not occur independently but as a cluster of ‘normal’ related proportions. An important example is, modern European males are about 7.5 times the height of their head tall on average, that is to say 80% of them are 7.25 to 7.75 and less than one in a thousand adult males has a head larger than 6.5 or smaller than 8.25. Women tend to have very slightly proportionally larger heads. Old photographs seem to show people in the 19th century were shorter than moderns but their heads were the same size, that is the long bones of the legs and arms were shorter so the average head to body ratio moves to about 7 heads for men.

Small scale gaming figures (less than 54mm) even the ones praised for their realistic proportions are 4.5 to 5.5 heads or occasionally 6, which are the normal proportions of a child (see figure 1). The exception is many 1/72, 1/76 plastic figures.

The face has normal proportions as well. The eyes of an adult male are generally slightly higher on the face than a child or a female. The center point being between the pupil and the lower lid of the eye on average. Eyes higher or lower than this by even a few millimeters begin to look odd, move the eye more than a half inch either way and you are outside the range where 99% of adults fall. The relatively restricted position of the eye near the middle of the head is one reason why measuring figures -"to the eyes because if the figure is wearing a hat or helmet you can’t tell where the top of the head is" - makes no sense. If you can see the eyes you know how much taller the figure is within an inch to scale (assuming the figure is not grossly distorted, see below), on a 30mm figure that’s less than half a millimeter.

Again small scale gaming figures, even those praised for their realism tend to have absurdly low foreheads and oversized features. I expect this is probably to allow the sculptor to fit more detail on a smaller figure, essentially what’s being done is squeezing facial features which would be realistic for a 54mm figure on a 30mm one (figure 2).



Finally there is the difference between male and female faces from a sculptural perspective. Stripped of makeup the differences between the male and the female face is very slight, though our perception is attuned to it so it seems greater. Women have slightly less prominent brows, more delicate jaw and very slightly fuller lips, smaller ears and nose on average. Having said that there is an overlap, men with faces that look feminine and women with masculine faces. I suspect most males are so used to seeing females in makeup they would think just from the unpainted face half women were males without cosmetics. (figure 3).

Small figures generally overcome this difficulty by making female faces into cartoons with absurdly fine jaws, tiny nose, huge lips, in other words a barbie-doll face. This makes miniature female faces very much alike as there isn’t much room for variation in such a formula.

Next time, women’s legs (and arms).

New Wolf

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Posted by Tom Meier at 17:44 | Comments (11) | Trackbacks (0)

First a few questions which have come in:


"I was curious how Tom sculpted the beard on the Joseph nativity figure"


With hair I use several techniques depending the texture. The important thing the remember is you can’t really recreate most kinds of hair in small epoxy sculpture so you have to depict it by the impression it gives. In the case of Joseph I didn’t really have to think about it since I was basing the style on Renaissance woodcuts where fine close set lines are juxtaposed with clear space to get textural effects. I represented this effect in sculpture by forming the mass of the beard while the putty was very soft and cutting lots of fine parallel lines with my blunt exacto palette knife. I pushed this mass around to the shape I wanted thus stretching and to some extent smoothing and blending the lines. Then before the epoxy set too much I went in with a pin (the hook end of one of my tools) and teased out tiny loops. Rather like the technique for making chain mail but as random extensions of the wavy parts of the beard.

"When you are doing
armor, after you have done your initial shaping and smoothing of the
surface, do you later go back and trim it when the epoxy-resin/putty
has set to a specific point, or do you wait for it to cure completely
before doing a final shaping and polishing?"

I have tried everything I can think of with plate armor and not yet found a quick or completely satisfactory way to make it. It’s a pain. I nearly always make the plates smooth then add details with a separate piece of epoxy. I try to avoid trimming and polishing as it opens pores in the epoxy surface, though this is a good thing if I want to stick something to it. The most important thing is to apply the final coat of epoxy thin for control.

"do you do one layer and let it cure
completely before moving to the next?"

It depends how separate they are to appear. I’d always apply a paldron separately and I apply the knee and elbow pieces after I’ve made the underlying plates but not the segments in an arm piece or around a knee which lie very flat to each other.

Then some news about the Fox WWII line:

I am currently slogging my way through the three machine guns required to complete the release. I’m not sure if this is the most tedious and frustrating work I’ve ever had to do, it’s my experience the mind is not reliable in such judgments, I do know it seems like it. For those of you who don’t sculpt I can only describe it as being like having to go through your normal daily activities with boxing gloves on while being shocked with a tazer at random intervals. Nevertheless I have managed to get the American .30 caliber more or less done to an acceptable standard, that’s my thumbnail in the background.

Posted by Tom Meier at 07:44 | Comments (23) | Trackbacks (0)

The posting by Jim Ludwig of Darksword of the latest pictures of figures in the ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ range has brought up some interesting points about figures and photography I thought it might be useful to explore.

In figure #1 we see the difference in apparent proportions caused by different camera angles with respect to a figure. The level of the head and shoulders is the same but there is a gradual distortion as we go lower down until the hips appear to be in a quite different place. In a photo with no frame of reference it is difficult to tell the angle of the camera and how close to the figure the lens was. The effect is frequently to foreshorten the lower half of the figure without the viewer being aware of it.

The length of women’s legs is so regularly distorted in representations it is common, for men particularly, to think it normal for a woman’s legs to be a good deal more than half her height. In fact on average they are a bit less than half (see figure #2). High heeled shoes, which aid the illusion are a relatively recent invention, appearing for men in the mid 16th century (to help keep feet in stirrups) and adopted by women shortly thereafter, though in women’s case it was not to accentuate the legs, which were not exposed, but to increase overall height.

The third picture is a teaser for ser Loras.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Posted by Tom Meier at 12:39 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

Here is the outline of another of the classes I’ll be giving at Gencon and a picture of a 1/48 (35mm) figure I can’t say anything about.

1. Making small scale heads.

Why is there air - Ooook! Akkkk! Irrrp! … It’s yours - That’s just like my cat - 200mph


A: Representation and Perception of Features

Because I very rarely look like myself - You decide what color it should be

1. The limits of realism in scale

But what energy - exactly like that, but different - Pig Latin - Frog soup


2. Perception

I’m not shouting, I’m passionate - Balloon animals - mixed signals - Swimming, drowning, whatever

3. Structure and surface

‘Ow d’you cook it then - Falling water

B: Miniature portraits

Character portraits and individual portraits.

1. Fine tuning caricature

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

2. How the client sees himself

That’s not my butt - A picture is worth a thousand words or about 1/2 a Turkish lira


C: A brief introduction on general epoxy manipulation

Epoxy es nae fer pissin aboot, Jimmy - One big thing

1. Using epoxy, specifically Kneadatite.


I like Kneadatite - All you need is love, and some bits of wire (& if you are old, bifocals)

a. Time and planning.


How to eat an elephant - This looks like a good place to stop - symmetry in motion

b. Make epoxy’s peculiarities work for you.

Turn that frown upside down - It doesn’t matter I’m going to use it as a hammer - I’ve never seen anything like it

D: Techniques

Then bite their kneecaps - H. M. Womblebug - I can only see it’s eye

1: Thickness of epoxy

Ground effect - better living through chemistry - That’s close enough

2: Planning layers

It will look fine when it grows out - I shot the man working the machine - drink me


E: Demonstration of a method using the above principles


Postscript

The shoulders of guys of above average height.

Posted by Tom Meier at 07:57 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

I’m going to be giving some classes at Gencon this year. The last time I did this was at Origins a few years back and it didn’t work out very well. The problem was partly a lack of structure; I went into it with the idea of just answering questions, and partly the different levels of experience of the those attending the class. The beginners were bored by technical stuff they didn’t understand and the experienced sculptors were bored by simple beginner questions. Also no one seemed to know what they really wanted to know.

So this time I am going to give a more structured presentation of three classes, the first is for people with basic familiarity with the materials and procedures, it’s directed at common beginning problems. The latter two are ‘master classes’ addressing specific areas (faces and clothing) which seem to be difficult, even for sculptors of some experience.

Sculpture, even just the small portion I’m presenting, is a huge subject which a few hours is nothing like enough time to explain but I hope to be able to communicate something of value.

I’d like to give people who are considering taking a class with me some idea of what to expect. I can tell you it will not involve much demonstration of pushing putty. That is something you learn by practice and is perhaps the least difficult thing about sculpting. I have a bit to say about epoxy manipulation but not much. I expect everyone who attends to be familiar with the basics of miniature sculpting (what epoxy is like, what an armature is, how molds are made et) or to be content with confusion because I’m not going to explain stuff you can learn by reading one of the many introductory tutorials on the web.

Here’s an outline of the first class, the cryptic notes in italics are associations to jog my memory about what to say so you needn’t be worried if they don’t make any sense for you.

Introduction: Common problems with miniature sculpture.

An easy beginners guide to topological perception-cognition of lie transformation groups with respect to the neuropsychology of dynamic symmetry differential recognition and dialectical variance transformations - Don’t worry, it’s not nearly as interesting as it sounds - I’ll never forget what’s-his-name

A: A few things to keep in mind about epoxy manipulation and figure construction

Epoxy es nae fer pissin aboot, Jimmy - One big thing

1. Using epoxy, specifically Kneadatite.

And… it copies pictures from the funny pages - All you need is love and some bits of wire (& if you are old, bifocals)

a. Time and planning.

How to eat an elephant - This looks like a good place to stop - symmetry in motion

b. Make epoxy’s peculiarities work for you.

Turn that frown upside down - It doesn’t matter I’m going to use it as a hammer - I’ve never seen anything like it

2. Control structure, the armature.

Dem bones dem bones gotta walk around - I can see your house from here

a. Joints and measuring

Five easy spaces - Funny bones - Yes master, but when you look closer they’re all wonky

b. Gravity

The bearable heaviness of being - Waving or drowning- A good time to talk about camels

3. Control masses, fill.

a. Rigid, semisoft and soft masses

Knock on wood - In just seven days you can look like a condom stuffed with marbles - Ah is jus big boned

b. Gross muscle structure

It’s all connected - skin and bones - dynamo tension

4. Control surface, control depth

c. Blending

Avoiding the blivit - It’s just a figure of speech -
Where does this go

d. Detailing

When does it start feeling good - hooks and crooks - Take it easy, but take it

B: Fault as opposed to style:

1. Proportions

There’s not as much room as you think

a. The head, neck and shoulders

Three’s a crowd - Procrustes agonistes, - It hurts when I do this

b. The forearm and elbow

I’ll be a monkey’s uncle - Rollover - Where your lap goes when you stand up

c. Length of arms for different proportions

It goes round and round and it comes out here - Da Vinci and Spiderman

2. Clothes

Does this make me look fat

a. Cloaks

A multitude of sins - Winston Churchill’s pudding

b. Folds at joints

Ingenious fools - I want to be different, just like everybody else

c. Skirts

Well it has to go somewhere - A second helping

C: Extra Credit

1. Seeing what’s not there

Connecting the dots - M. C. Escher and you - the choir at the bottom of the sea

2. Vive la differance!

The power of cosmetics - Less is more and so is more

3. Looking real, realistic looking and looking realistically

Lots of numbers you won’t remember - how many dentists - a trip to the zoo

4. All you need to know about art

A&E spells re-dun-dan-cy - I’d be a fine soothsayer if I didn’t - The secret is to bang the rocks together

Here are some 1/48 heads, I’ve been making lots of WWII stuff but Jim Fox wants to save the pictures till they’re ready for release.

1/48 heads

Posted by Tom Meier at 13:32 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

So why aren’t figures made to scale? There are three classes of reasons.

-The creator would prefer to make them in scale but doesn’t.

This covers both deliberately making things out of scale for a compelling reason, such as durability or ease of manufacture and also just plain lack of skill or care in sculpting.

The compelling reasons used to be quite compelling, when figures were made of soft lead alloys anything smaller than 1/32 (54mm) really had to be distorted to have even minimal durability. Most companies since the early 1990s have switched to harder, stronger (and more expensive) non-lead alloys and the need for durability distortion has decreased considerably. While some distortion in non-lead alloy is required on 1/48 (35-36mm) and below for things like gun barrels and blade thickness it’s a fraction of what used to be needed in lead.

Lack of skill and lack of care can also have a compelling reason besides plain incompetence or laziness. Miniature sculpting for the wargame hobby pays very badly. Sculptors don’t really have the option of honing their skills and when they do they leave for the greener pastures of toy or gift-ware which pay two to three times as much. Lack of care can reflect the financial inability to spend enough time on the work. Getting a fine edge of finish on a figure can take two or three times as long as just throwing an adequate job together and you can bet you won’t be paid three times as much, nor will most customers be willing to pay much more for the figure. As with most consumer goods, marketing and price are the qualities which persuade most people to buy.

Larger companies which could more easily defray the higher cost of better sculpted models also have reason to keep the standard lower. They do not like to have key employees who would be difficult to replace. Businesses use the power of the labor market to keep wage costs down and maintain control of the workforce but for there to be a labor market there must be a pool of potential employees for every position, so it’s better from a management viewpoint to keep quality at a low enough standard so sculptors are disposable and easily replaced.

-The creator doesn’t want to make them in scale.

This is usually a stylistic choice, either because it’s thought to be more attractive to the consumer or to match existing products which were made in a distorted style for some reason. Not everyone wants scale model soldiers, some people prefer stylized figures. However I have to add, in my experience there are a lot of people who prefer realistic scale figures once they are exposed to them, particularly if they represent historical subjects, it’s just such models are rather thin on the ground for the reasons listed.

-The creator is confused about what scale is.

This is not uncommon and it’s one of the main reasons I’m taking the trouble to write these essays. There is an awful lot of misinformation out there and the correct answers are not obvious.

Here is another WWII figure in 1/48 (35mm) a U.S. Airborne.

Posted by Tom Meier at 10:49 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Before I resume my essay on scale and proportion I’d like to let anyone who is interested in the 1/48 WWII figures know, Fox Miniatures, who will be selling these figures now has a preliminary site up for news, inquiries or just appreciation Jim Fox, who commissioned these figures is spending a lot of time and money to make this line the highest possible quality.
www.foxminiatures.com

Now back to the scheduled program.

Everything there is to know about scale and proportion in gaming figurines:

Part 2: Size, Scale and Proportion

Making a scale model of a particular human being is no different than making a scale model of a machine, you measure the original, do the arithmetic and make the figure to scale. Complications come in when you set about to make a representative human being to scale because people vary in size and proportions and what constitutes a representative example can be a matter of opinion. Artists from Lysippus to Leonardo and down to modern times have eschewed a scientific study of what people are actually like and have imposed scientifically inaccurate ideal representations which are so common as to distort our perception of ourselves. It is only with the advent of modern ergonomics that anyone has bothered to try and determine the true proportions and degrees of deviation in human populations.

Most human proportions important to the matter of making figures are distributed through a population according to a bell curve. That is to say the measurement or proportion has a given average and a certain variance which is distributed so 70% are within one variation and 95% are within two. Overall height for young males in the U.S for example has a variation of about 2.75" and an average of 5’10" so 70% of adult men are between about 5’7" and 6’.1", only one in 40 is over 6’4" or under 5’4".

What’s important to representation is how deviations from the average are perceived. Artists who want to make a representative model need to determine when the proportions of a figure stop looking characteristic and begin to look peculiar or even deformed. To some degree this perception is subjective, if you are 6’4" you would probably not describe someone as tall unless they were at least 6’2", whereas if you were 5’7" you might well start at 6’. Likewise with small figures it’s what you are used to looking at, a common distortion like oversized heads or feet can begin to look normal, or at least skew your sense of normalcy, if you see it all the time. It’s common for small metal figures to have a head to overall height ratio of 1/5 (they are five ‘heads’ tall) or lower but in real life 1/7 to 1/7.5 is normal and anything below 1/6 is very unusual in an adult.

People rely on contextual clues to perceive irregularity. In real life the context is everyday objects of known size and comparison to other people but when we look at a scaled presentation of a person, as in a photograph or on a television screen, we loose many contextual anchors and when we make scale models like gaming figures, we lose even more. To a certain degree there are contextual clues in the proportions of the body, the shorter a person is the larger his head is proportionally on average but this is a very fine distinction.

With small figures a difference in proportions or size outside the normal range of variability is what causes figures to seem incompatible in scale. About two standard deviations is enough to be obvious. With figures this amounts to about a head ratio or 10% of height - that is, a 30mm figure with a 1/7 head will begin to look incompatible with figures over 33mm or under 27mm and/or a head ratio over 1/6 or under 1/8. The mass of the figure is not as important, since it’s normal for people to vary by 100% in weight provided there is little variation in the proportions of their bone structure.

The pictures today are another German SS and an American regular infantry sergeant.

Posted by Tom Meier at 09:04 | Comments (14) | Trackbacks (0)

Everything there is to know about scale and proportion in gaming figurines:

I welcome correction to the following essays. These are the facts as best I can figure them out (no pun intended) from my own experiences and with the resources available to me but I do not delude myself into thinking it beyond the possibility of error - I will, of course, require some proof I am mistaken.

Definitions: Scale is the ratio between a given object and a model of that object, it is expressed as a fraction e.g. ¼, 1/1200. Proportion is the ratio of one part of a thing to another, also expressed as a fraction, as in a model of a human with a head 1/7 of his height. Size is the comparison of an object to an established unit of measurement and is expressed as a number followed by the unit designation e.g. 25mm (millimeters) or .95" (inches)

Part one: History

In the beginning people made models of things which were smaller or larger than life size, the things they made models of were organic in origin, people, animals, plants and so didn’t have a set size and there was no need for them to be compatible with anything so there was no need for the concept of scale. There was, from early on a concept of proportion, though this was constructed out of an ideal imposed on subjective experience rather than scientifically observed reality. That is the artist or someone just arbitrarily decided normal people ought to be 18 times the width of their hand tall, or have a certain proportion in the ‘golden mean’ they didn’t test a statistical sample and arrive at the conclusion people are on average 18 times the width of their hand tall or have a hand to forearm ratio of 1 to 1.618 (in fact they don’t).

So the first toy soldiers didn’t have scale, they were just made whatever size the manufacturer found convenient, they weren’t presented as being a particular size, there was no reason to.

With the advent of accurate models of machines, model trains specifically, the need for a scale began. A given machine is an exact size and two machines to be used together must be in the same scale to be compatible and run on the same rails. The first modern toy soldiers, dating from the end of the 19th century were made to conform to model train scales. They are commonly referred to nowadays by a size designation i.e. 54mm, which was railroad ‘I scale’ that is 1/32. The referring to them by size is an anachronism, that is it happened after they were made and had become popular, when they were made they were not so designated.

Vulcanized rubber mold spin-casting technology made it much cheaper to make small castings and the beginning of modern model soldier war-gaming called for ever larger armies and so figures got smaller. Again, model railroad scale or no designation of scale or size by the manufacturer was the rule. It was about this time however that many hobbyists to refer to model soldiers by size, 30mm, 54mm, this was probably because many figures were made by manufacturers ‘just the size we make um’ and the people in the nascent wargame community needed a way to communicate about the various manufacturers’ compatibility. The first to self-describe their figures by a size rather than a scale as far as I can determine was Jack Scruby, a hobbyist who began to manufacture smaller figures specifically for war-gaming in 1957 and called them 30mm. They were about 30mm overall height, soles of feet to the top of the head.

In 1964 Hinton Hunt has the distinction of making the first line of figures egregiously misrepresented as to size, they were marketed as ‘20mm’ but were actually about 25mm tall to the top of the head, (20mm was their approximate measurement to the chest).

Jack Scruby made a compatible line he called ‘25mm’, to reflect their true size and it was in this size Minifigs later made their figures, which came to dominate gaming (which was all historical at that time) by the early 1970’s when the fantasy gaming explosion hit.

The first relatively widely used fantasy figures were made by Minifigs, though many others swiftly followed suit. Fantasy has the peculiarity of having many non-human imaginary creatures of no set size, as well as exaggerated humans. At first fantasy figures were relatively restrained, made to be compatible with existing historical figures, (which generally had certain minor distortions for better durability in the soft lead alloy they were then cast of, thicker ankles, bigger hands and wrists) but the tendency in fantasy was always to increasingly exaggerate proportion and size. The changes in the materials used to make figures at this time only added to the tendency. Fantasy gamers quickly grew to outnumber historical gamers several times over as the average age of miniature gamers dropped. There was ever more economic pressure, changing the way figures were designed, from models trying to reproduce reality preferred by older historical gamers to the fanciful caricatures designed to appeal to the imagination of younger fantasy fans. Eventually the caricature style which originated with fantasy found it’s way into historical figures and the line between scale model figures and cartoon-like toy figures which had briefly begun to define itself, was blurred.

Which brings us pretty much up to date.

Here are some pictures of the new Goblin standard pack, I will be molding it in the next few days.

Posted by Tom Meier at 21:03 | Comments (12) | Trackbacks (0)