1:35 Builders set 3 (6 fig.)

Six workers for a construction scene

A gang in overalls is among the most usable things that can be bought for a military or a civilian diorama. Whereas soldiers anchor a scene firmly in time and geography, a worker with a pickaxe or a measuring staff fits the middle of the last century as well as the present day and shifts the weight of a view from fighting to work.

What you can build with the figures

• the repair of a damaged road or of railroad track
• the rebuilding of a bombed-out house where rubble is being cleared
• a hall or a bridge under construction with a machine in the background
• the camp of a work gang with a dump of material and tools

Six figures is just enough for a scene to look inhabited without turning into a crowd. It proves useful to divide them into two dissimilar little groups, give one of them something to do and leave the other on a break. The difference in posture between the groups is what the eye reads as movement.

Overalls take a rougher painting hand than a uniform, by all means with bolder accentuation of the edges and a suggestion of dust on the trousers. It is good to vary the shades of the blue and gray overalls between the figures, so that the gang does not look like a regiment in a single uniform.

It is also worth noting how a gang fits into built-up surroundings. A worker on scaffolding or at a concrete mixer gives the scale of a house just as reliably as a soldier does beside an armored vehicle, and because working postures tend to be stooped or astride, they do not form a dull row of verticals on a base. It is precisely the variety of silhouettes that distinguishes a living view from a case full of monuments.

When gluing, pay attention to the contact surfaces of the arms and the heads. A test without glue will reveal whether a part sits without a gap; if it does not, it tends to be easier to level the surface with a file than to fill the joint with putty later.