It may be day 2 of the “Polar Vortex” here at my pad in Denver in January of 2025, but in my basement its Southern California in May of 1986, and the long-awaited trackside carnival at Drag City Raceway is now open for business!
To populate the carnival, I had to use every single remaining one of my good figures, a mixture of both plastic 3D-printed peeps painted by hand by yours truly, and several packages of MiJo “American Diorama” die-cast figures; I have now purchased so many of these building the diorama @ DC that the stack of containers for them takes up half a shelf in the toy room!
And its nowhere near enough! I know of at least one more MiJo American Diorama set that I’m going to buy with figures that are perfect for this application, but I’m several days out from getting those, and even those aren’t going to be enough; I figure I’m going to need at least a dozen additional ones to fill in this area to my satisfaction, and specifically, I need more figures that look like young children! Of course, I can get away with a few small (“true” HO-scale) figs to “simulate” children (I’ve already used 2 of those so far) but they still don’t look quite right, so now I’m on the hunt for some 3D-Printed 1:64 figs that were designed as kids. Thus, what you see here is only the beginning; the crowd will continue to grow as additional materials are acquired!
To get the figs to stand up, however, was not a cakewalk: I had to tackle several questions about how to mount them. Harkening back to a post from June of 2021, where I discussed the merits and demerits of white glue VS 3M double-sided transparent shelf tape to stand the figures up, I knew that the glue wouldn’t be the best idea because it would difficult to adhere to the grass substrate and, more importantly, if I ever had to move a figure, it would damage both the grass and the cork underneath significantly. So I decided right off the bat to use the tape with the adhesive exposed only on the side facing the figure, while leaving the contact tape on the bottom, so each little square of tape I cut would just serve as a non-adhesive base.
While that started off well, I quickly ran into a problem. Many of the figures just did not want to stand up, partly because some of them have unstable “pedistals” due to the position of their feet relative to their bodies, partly because the die-cast figures are heavy and prone to fall over under their own weight, and also because the waves and undulations of the cork under the grass resulting from glueing the grass down made the surface uneven. I found that in some cases, I had to use huge pieces of the transparent tape just to give them enough stability to stand up, and once those pieces of tape get to be that size, they become visually displeasing. So, looking for another way, I hit upon the idea of making bases out of modeling clay, sinking the figgy’s feets into the clay and then covering the dime-size dot of clay with some additional grass.
Though that made it look like some of their feet were disappering into ground, it worked surprisingly well…however, this raised a new concern: by covering the blots of clay with sprinkles of the grass, I was introducing more loose grass into the area, which can-and will!-eventually blow around and cause debris which could get into the track.
Hmmm….so what to do? Well, I hit upon the idea of blending some of the brown clay with some of the gray clay to create a “marbled” effect, and I found that once I did that, it seemed to blend in better with the with grass than either just the gray or the brown alone, and this allowed me place the figgys without the addition of adding more loose grass over those bases to make them more realistic.
So as of right now, about 1/3 of the figures are placed with the clay and roughly the remaining 2/3 are still on clear tape bases that are not adhered to the substrate. I’m going to leave them that way for now because, as I said above, I’m going to add a LOT more figures as I obtain them, and I’m quite sure that as I acquire them, new additional “mini-tableaus” will occur to me that will make me want to move some of them around; I’ll be more comfortable sticking them down with the clay when I’m more sure of where I want everyone to stay!
So what’s next? Well, in addition to finding some figures of kids, I may have to “modify” some of them, b/c I’d like to put at least a couple sitting inside the little rockets, and I may even try to get a few seated into the seats in the drop tower. And then, the biggest challenge: can I add figures to the movable seats of the Ferris wheel…without causing any damage to that delicate (and very expensive) piece??? Ah, being a stage director with a cast of thousands can be quite challenging, but it’s all part of the fun here at Drag City! Now all I have to do is stage another racing tournament!
Making figures stand up, especially on uneven surfaces is really tough! It really makes me realize how uncoordinated I am! Your solution with the clay bases and the marbling effect looks great I think and would be a terrific long term solution. The turf and the rides all look fantastic and are such a great addition. I’ve been trying to modify some of my peeps to sit in cars or on the tractor with limited realistic looking success. This is coming along so well and you should be really proud!