Paper People

The Krakus is a paddlewheel tour boat. Therefore, in order to make it look realistic, I decided that it needed people on board. So I set out to design some 1:250 scale people.

This was tough – these guys are tiny. A six-foot person winds up being just over ¼ inch tall.

I have tried a couple of different designs and have not yet decided which I like best. Note, that the mini-cutout sheets here are not to any particular scale. To print them I just embedded them into a Word document and scaled them by eye to ¼ inch high.

● This design uses a single thickness of cardstock for the people and lets you use watercolors to add the clothing. 1/3 mm is really too thin for scale, but these were easy to bend into a sitting position. Notice that you have to bend the shoes out at 90°.

● These crewmen were designed to be made from a folded double-thickness (except for the shoes). Notice the extra piece for the sailor-cap. The double thickness readily de-laminates when manipulated at such a tiny scale, so I soaked these guys in thin cyanoacrylate glue first. However, that makes it very hard to manipulate the limbs for realistic poses.

Seeing the searchlight right next to the crewman, it is obvious that the searchlight is out of scale. This is a scaling problem from the original model that still needs to be corrected.

● These passengers were also designed to be double-thick. Pretty fashionable aren't they.