Scale Painted Figures
Benefits of Model Scale Trains Toys Hobby
Looking for a fun, engaging, and family-oriented hobby? One possibility is setting up your own home railroad with model scale trains. It’s definitely a step up from collecting Thomas the Tank Engine toys, which is where many families start with their lifelong passion for choo-choos. There are countless possibilities, from a modest circle track and single train, to an elaborate vista populated by homes, people, animals, and criss-crossing trains.
It’s easy to get started - it takes a single locomotive and a few pieces of track. Kids and adults both find it fascinating to watch trains toys traveling around, making that familiar clickety-clack. Creating your railroad is much more than just trains, and that is part of the universal appeal. If your children love horses, let them create a ranch populated with their favorite miniature horses. Build a town that looks just like your own neighborhood, and populate it with tiny versions of your friends and family. Or make a futuristic train world, with aliens and space ships too. The possibilities are endless.
While there is a definite financial outlay to buy the initial connecting pieces and model scale trains, these tend to be robust and long-lasting. The remainder of the landscape can be your own creation, using any materials at hand.
Model railroads offer a lot more than just trains. For a start, there’s the artistic aspect, whether your child likes to model with clay, build tiny houses out of toothpicks, or paint realistic trees. Every family member can contribute. And then there is the educational aspect.
Finding out about trains involves many different topics. Any vehicle enthusiast will enjoy learning about engineering and how trains move (as well as how your trains toys actually operate). There are steam trains, electric trains, coal-burning trains, and so on. Trains are also historically important, which can lead to conversations about immigration patterns, the settlement of new areas, and moving goods around. Trains are used around the world and can form the basis for looking at other countries and their transportation systems. All those geographic details that make the track interesting also introduce concepts like mountains and valleys, along with bridge construction and other practicalities.
It’s not all academic, of course. Building a Model Railroad involves some basic skills like hammering, sawing, and wiring. Kids love to build tiny things out of scraps of wood and other materials, which also helps develop their hand-eye coordination, imagination, and concentration. Then there’s detailed painting to be done - on a teeny-tiny scale. There is no end to what can be added, and many kids learn excellent researching skills while figuring out how to make a realistic coal mine or log cabin.
Before you envision being housebound with this hobby, consider the social possibilities. Not only are there many groups who communicate online and meet to share ideas and skills, but there are model contests and potential excursions. Some communities have larger scale trains that can carry passengers, often maintained by enthusiasts. Families enjoy trips to railroads of all sizes, from city subways to small-gauge railways, from San Francisco to Paris and Disneyland to England’s Lake District. You’ll also meet plenty of interesting people, coming from every walk of life to share in the fun of model scale trains.
So if you are looking for something to keep the family entertained and off the couch, have a look at model trains toys. You’ll find yourself in good company; many well-known faces have also shared this interest - from Tom Hanks and Frank Sinatra to Bruce Springsteen and Joe DiMaggio.
About the Author
Joe Kanooga is a father of two kids, a successful business owner and the author of numerous articles about model scale trains. Click here to download our free trains toys guidebook filled with hobby tips, ideas and information.
Scale Painted Figures
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how to paint flames on my wall?
alrighty, so i'm going to paint flames on my wall, and i'm not too worried about the color choice i've got that pretty much handled i can figure out the shading...but what i'm unsure of how to do is actually draw the flames on the wall. I can't seem to make them look right, on a bigger scale. I'm making the flames about 2 and a half-3 feet high, and the whole length of my wall..going horizontally so that's about 12 feet long. Any help would be awesome!
1) Get it exactly right by downloading an image of what you want and modifying it in Photoshop or similar graphics editing program (copy, paste, crop, stretch, etc)
2) Next, if you want your tracing process to be easiest, in the graphics program do an "edge-trace", an emboss, or a negative (or some combination of the three) and make it greyscale or b/w.
(EVEN EASIER: some graphics programs have a "colouring book" filter to do #2 for you with one click)
You do not have to do step 2. I often skip it and just trace the image once it's enlarged, but it IS easier to trace if the outline is as clear as possible. It doesn't HAVE to be black and white, either.
3) If you have access to a LCD projector, project this new "coloring book" image on the wall and trace it.
~or~ if you only have access to an overhead projector:
3) printout as large as possible on 8.5x11 and then print to or photocopy to an 8.5x11 transparency ...put that on an overhead projector and shine it on the wall to trace. You want it as big as possible on the transparency so you do not have to place the projector very far back to make the image as large as you want. Even if you print it directly to special printer-ready transparency, have a paper printout to refer to while you work.
~or~ if you have only access to a slide projector:
3) printout and photocopy (or print directly) to a transparency, but do it the size of a photo slide, trim transparency, and use a slide projector to enlarge and trace to wall.
~or~ if you have NO access to ANY projector:
3) time to go old-school... printout on a piece of 1/2" graph paper, or print a 1/2" square grid over the flame outline printout. Caculate # of squares your drawing is wide. Let's say it's 6 squares wide, then, on the wall draw 2ft squares on the wall (2ft x 6 = 12ft wide wall) and then manually draw whatever is in each square on the paper in each square on the wall. This is the tried-and-true textbook method of enlarging anything 2D
Aside from just taking an image to Kinkos or similar, and having them make you a vinyl banner, this is how to enlarge anything you can put on your computer screen.