WHAT SCALE ARE THEY?

What Is Scale, Anyway?

Occasionally I get a quite firm email from someone demanding to know if the miniatures will fit in with every other miniature they own. It's a tricky question, because I don't know what they own and every miniatures business tends to work to their own definition of what constitutes 'scale' anyway.

Ah, people say, but surely '28mm' is a scale? Or 'True 28mm' or 'Heroic 28mm' But what about the heads size, I respond? SOme companies say that their figures are in a scale of 28mm to the top of the head, but then they sculpt the figures so that their heads are 1/5th of their total height. You get these giant bobble-headed figures that look awful. Equally, some companies sculpt to 28mm to the top of the head but make the heads 1/8th height, which whilst it's a little more anatomically accurate means that the figures look unaccountably tiny compared to the first batch of figures and even if their faces are sculpted at mindbogglingly accurate detail levels, by the time the average painter has undercoated them all those wonderful details have been completely obscured.

So here at Heresy these days - and you can perhaps spot on some of the older figures how the sculpting has changed over the years as Andy Foster has gotten better at it (note: a lot of the oldest figures have been discontinued, and not all the figures are sculpted by Andy!) - the figures are sculpted to around 6- 6.5 heads height, at 28mm to the eyes, or 30mm to the top of an average, upright, unarmoured human head. This gives a nice mix of proportion to size, meaning that the figures will fit in well with most other ranges available, especially certain figures made by world-dominating Evil Empire types. However, don't confuse 'Scale' and 'height'. Some figures are taller than others, some are shorter, as in life. All are scultped to the same scale, but you'll find that demons, monsters and what-not are bigger and more intimidating, Barbarians and Elves tower over humans and so on and so forth.

So in summary, if you're used to '28mm to the eyes' type figures, these should fit right in.