[Scuderia_Turini]

LOL - a lot of familiar faces there Anthony.
Yeah those little people need a lot of marshaling!

Leo

[Fluff]

But not one helpful hint on how you painted them all 

Steve

[Anthony B]

Ok the MOST helpful hint is......................

Get your wife involved  

Way back in the day I got my wife to help and she got very involved at the time - not so much anymore  

As mentioned - I take about 10 people that need to be painted, and start with a single colour - and do a different part of each with that colour, then change colours, and so on.

One change I will make - is start with flesh colour and then move to clothes...

[Scuderia_Turini]

Yeah, the "useless man role" can work well !!
Liking the production line technique, doing one at a time is never appealing.

Leo

[Fluff]

I can do useless male very well ,but I am left to get on with it in my useless way

Steve

[JasonVizor]

I've never made any serious attempt at counting how many little people I have, I've painted over 300, I have many more than that unpainted. All makes, I especially like Marx figures in 54mm roughly 1/32 scale. New plastic figure's get a good wash in hot soapy water, I don't use a primer, use Vallejo acrylics followed by matt varnish. Made a few of my own figure's using the Frankenstein milliput method, quite fond of this one.
   
Cheers Jason

[Scuderia_Turini]

Its pretty annoying to find the spectators knocked over.

At the risk of "teaching granny to suck eggs" - a fairly standard way to improve the usability of the figures is to replace the existing base with a thin sheet of clear plastic from packaging. 

Another trick is to drill a small hole up one leg and put in a piece of rigid wire (eg: from Twin and Earth cable) and then drill a hole in the layout baseboard to plug the spectator in.  

Leo

   

[CMOTD]

I really dislike bases on figures, it looks so unrealistic and spoils many an otherwise excellent layout. I always cut them off which is easy with plastic ones but usually involves a dremel and a degree of swearing with metal ones. Tip - if you are going to dremel a metal figure then do it before you paint or you are guaranteed to slip and remove some.

I have used Leo's wire method on some of mine but Fluff pointed me in the direction of Tacky Wax LINK which was originally made to hold dolls house items in place. It will stick them down very well but  they can be moved if necessary and, if they should have an unfortunate meeting with an errant car, will fall over rather than break as glued down ones do.

I have also had success with tiny magnets sourced from eBay fitted into the bottom of their feet and a metallic sheet under the grass.

[Fluff]

Just been cutting a couple in half ,it seems to be a case of The wrong trousers Grommit  !!!.,the other guy I removed his underarm helmet ,he now looks like someone has nicked his newspaper .Be interesting to see how they paint up

[Fluff]

The photos should have been with that post  ,try again