J is Just for Fun!

How small is the Smallscaleworld?

Well, we can make it 10-pixels-by-ten-pixels and using an external hard drive could put up to what . . . twenty terabytes . . . fifty terabytes in the single folder? I've got about 45-50 gigabytes at the moment, but a lot of that is 9 years-worth of blog images!

We can of course reduce the title considerably, and throw the folder into space to make it look even smaller! But the Icon is now 18x18 pixels . . . it's grown - Doh!

Ooh, what's this tool here? . . . OK, 9 pixels by 9 pixels; that's better!

Let's reduce the folder title to the minimum and camouflage it!

In fact, why bother with a title? Let's just point at it; now it's hard to see! That's about as small as I could make the Smallscaleworld without Microsoft coming up with new icons!

Or . . .

. . . we can go the Fontanini route and decide the Smallscaleword's over 800mm! Yes, that's nearly a meter!

Of which -  two inches are the base-lump of Italian Carrara marble which caused the behemoth of a figure to come into being. I shot these at the PW show a couple of years ago, it's some show wot 'appens sometimes, don't know when the next one is - probably missed it!

Sold as mantle-pairs, there were 8 sculpts (and a pair of mounted figures with lovely relaxed horses) in the smaller sizes (Fontanini produced these in many sizes from 60mm upwards and many finishes), but I don't know if more than one pair were pantographed-up to this size. You can see some of the 8-inch figures bottom left in the shot.

The Carrara marble gift shops had/have tons of this stuff, and the bases utilised the 'flawed' marble off-cuts, the prime building-material and/or sculpting marble being prized for its pale grey hews; polishing to a lightly striated white, not the dark grey with white bacon-streaks (marbeling!) of most of the bases you find on the Fontanini-supplied figurines.

There is a single figure of the right-hand pose on Etsy at the moment for 103-quid (an odd number, but presumably dollars-into-pounds? I didn't study it too closely!) which is as much as you'd want to pay for a Capodimonte porcelain one, but to be honest, if you keep an eye on charity shops or local auction houses, you can pick these up for £15/20, or only a few quid for the smaller ones; I recently picked-up a couple of the Rococo 'gentry' for 6-quid the pair, and saw a set of six of the chinoisery figures for a pony*!

* That's £25 for the overseas readers . . . £20 is a score, a monkey is £500 and a donkey is a dog is a lemon is a shed is an old car!