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Building and Painting Small Scale Figures

Building and Painting Small Scale Figures First Look

By Michael Benolkin

Date of Review August 2009 Title Building and Painting Small Scale Figures
Publisher Master Class Model Building Videos Published 2009
Format DVD, two discs MSRP (USD) $49.95

First Look

Master Class Model Building Videos has released Part 3 of their Master Class Clinic Series. In this installment, Rafe Morrissey gets in front of the camera to show how to select, build and paint small scale figures. Small scale in this case is 1/32 and smaller.

There have been some great tutorials produced on figure painting including a nice video a number of years ago from Andrea (who produces a wide range of metal figures and figure paints). The only challenge with the Andrea video was that it was a low-resolution computer-based training course that had you painting in front of the computer. Andrea's tutorials were relevant to most figures, but many of the examples were Medieval Knights and warriors.

In this new release, the Master Class crew tackles 1/32 and 1/35 figures for this video and the majority of the video is focused on building a unique 1/32 Corsair pilot figure wearing shorts based upon a photo that was found in an Osprey title on Corsair aces. The figure in question is a new masterpiece from Master Details and is included in this video set! Check out the image below.

This is an instructional video that spends just a little extra time to show you step-by-step how to do different aspects of figure building from assembling, filling, and cleaning up the figure to the different ways to paint the figure. The topics covered in this title include:

Building and Painting Small Scale Figures

  • Supplies
  • References
  • Parts Clean-Up
  • Assembly
  • Seam Filling
  • Priming
  • Light Study
  • Pre-Painting
  • Painting Flesh
  • Painting Uniforms
  • Mixing Yellows
  • Mixing Whites
  • Final Details
  • Painting Hair

This video is really oriented to the aircraft and armor modeler who would like to have nice figures around your model to bring it to life. If you've been intimidated by some of the breath-taking work by some of the master-level figure builders, this video will help you get your figures not necessarily to the master-level, but to get some life-like figures that add rather than detract from the appearance of your completed model. This tutorial will help you to jump-start your figure skills and allow you to develop those skills with practice.

I definitely recommend this video to all aircraft modelers. I would also strongly recommend that IPMS chapters buy a copy for their club library to help educate new aircraft modelers.

The retail price of this video is $49.95, but Master Class Model Building Videos is holding a end-of-summer special for this video (including the Master Details figure) for $45.00.

My sincere thanks to Master Class Model Building Videos for this review sample! This video is definitely recommended!