A Modeller Confesses (Part 2):

Beginning the habit

My grandfather was the only member of my family who showed any interest in models. When I was five, I spent hours watching him as he meticulously constructed aeroplanes from balsa wood and tissue paper. I don’t remember any of the models ever being finished but that was beside the point. Like fishing, the pleasure was in the activity itself.

The habit of making things for entertainment stuck with me through my childhood. Every afternoon, while the adults took a nap, I’d cut up bits of cardboard or whittle at wood with grand designs in my head. This was the 60’s before tv took over our lives, and I don’t think I was that different from most kids of my age. There was always some craze at my school for toys made out of cotton-reels or bits of wire.

And then there were the kits that came as presents or from saved up pocket money . . .

An Airfix Lancaster bomber. A Revell “Visible Man” that caused me many nights of sleepless excitement before it arrived, and then lay botched and uncompleted in its box. Later on: a couple of Airfix historical figures, an Aurora Knight or two, and finally, around the age of fifteen, a James Bond Gyrocopter – remember that one?

None were built with any adult help and all ended up, as kid’s kits do, with gluey thumbprints, cracked decals and paint-jobs that never lived up to the shiny pictures on the box . . . and in your mind.

(I always thought it was a particularly cruel trick to sell enamel paints to kids; one of the hardest and gloopiest paints to work with. Luckily there’s more choice now).

As a teenager, I built model theatres out of balsa wood but by the time I left school, I’d left all that behind me.

Or so I believed at the time.

Then, in the early 80’s, I was doing one of a series of boring jobs to supplement my meagre earnings as a writer when I found a five-pound note lying in the road. Feeling recklessly wealthy, I went out in my lunch hour and on an impulse squandered it on a fantasy board game.

The shop I bought it from was an early branch of Games Workshop, soon to become the Microsoft of the gaming world. I enjoyed the game but if I was honest what really attracted me were the brightly painted figures in the display cases. I was briefly bitten by the games bug all the same and became a games freak, collecting all the D&D paraphernalia and joining a local role-play gaming group.

But the game playing never lived up to my expectations, it was really an excuse to collect and paint the figures. My technique improved and I started to buy sets of figures, paint them up and re-sell them through games shops. I didn’t make much money at it, but psychologically it gave me an excuse to collect and paint figures. (After all, I wasn’t actually keeping the things).

I sold all my small scale gaming figures a few years ago and, as I didn’t have a camera then, I’ve got no record of my painting work anymore. I’ve only kept a handful of figures that went with Talisman and Dungeonquest; two board-games I was quite fond of at the time.

(In hindsight, I’d say I was only an averagely skilled painter, even by the much lower standards of those days. There was no culture of mini-painting then and I suppose I mostly painted for the table-top, sealing everything with varnish so it could be handled. I have noticed that both the quality of painting and sculpting has improved enormously since then  – see my article on “Return of The Mini“).

I wasn’t ready yet to come out as a fully fledged model geek; that happened more gradually.

By the late 80’s I’d pretty well lost interest in gaming figures, finding the scale restrictive. The gaming boom had crested in England by then and many of the independent games shops were shutting down. Games Workshop had moved on from sword & sorcery to the techno-fantasy of Warhammer which never much appealed to me (Ironically I see the recent success of the Tolkien films has caused them to haul out the hobbits again).

About this time I started to notice the world of military modelling which has always been a very strong hobby in the UK. Here was a whole raft of small companies producing kits in scales up to 200 mm that were more realistically sculpted than the often crude gaming figures. Of course, most of the kits were military subjects which did nothing for me; but scattered amongst them was some great stuff. There were fantasy figures and subjects that appealed to my romantic side: samurai, Zulus, American Indians and figures from the old west.

This branch of modelling is mail order centered; there were few shops and most of them were in the Midlands and north of the UK. Consequently, the only way to learn about and keep track of new kits was through magazines and by attending the occasional convention.

I did this for many years but truthfully I always felt like an outsider. Most people in the hobby were genuinely drawn to military subjects whereas I was sniffing out the tiny percentage of kits that interested me. Came a time when I’d unearthed all that was available in the current ranges; leaving only occasional new releases to stir my enthusiasm.

It might have mattered less if I had been building the kits I acquired but that wasn’t the case. I’d already entered into the stage of modelaholicism known as the “bulging closet” – without admitting it to myself, I’d become a model miser.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Up to this point, I’d only really been dabbling; the hardcore stuff was still to come . . .

The world’s biggest hobby shop

The web changed everything . . .

In the late 80’s I ordered a few kits from America but it was a big deal and I only found out about them by chance. The internet opened up a new world of US and Japanese kits and made them available to anybody with a credit card.

It also made me aware there were people out there who shared my predilections; a whole community which had been flourishing for some time. Of course, I’d seen garage kits before: the few imported examples that reached us at hugely inflated prices, and I’d even read some of the magazines, but it hadn’t really registered.

Apart from the joke price labels, the quality and scope of the kits had left something to be desired. My first few purchases were from British dealers and were basically rip-offs in every sense; re-casts – although I didn’t know that term then –  badly cast, pitted with millions of pin-holes, disappointing in every sense.

But the kits I discovered now were of a different order: much better sculpted and professionally produced. Best of all, fantasy ruled, it wasn’t just a minority taste. And this was harder-edged fantasy than I had seen before: bizarre, subversive, sometimes erotic, and even occasionally disturbing.

For me these kits connected (as I’m sure they did for others of my generation) with the underground culture of my youth; with magazines like “Oz” and “It“, comics like Heavy Metal and “Epic“, writers like Harlan Ellison and Mick Farren.

They pressed buttons the way no kits had before.

If we go back to Stephen King again, you might say I had finally found my “needful things”, and without selling my soul to Max Von Sydow either.

Alright, so I guess nostalgia gets us all in the end . . .

It helped that at the time this new world opened up for me, I was earning a reasonable salary because these things still weren’t cheap. For a while there I got a little obsessive: on e-bay every day, firing off questions to every dealer I could find, and spending each moment I wasn’t thinking about kits, thinking about paints, techniques, tools – all the other paraphernalia that goes with modelling.

Within a relatively short space of time I’d tracked down most of the really great kits I’d seen in magazines and on sites, even managed to acquire a few very rare ones. I also made some crap purchases – impulse buys I regretted – but pretty soon I had, in my terms, a pretty fine collection.

The problem was still the same, however: I wasn’t getting around to building them. This was history repeating itself again. I had to ask myself why.

The simple answer is that during both the periods I’m describing I had no satisfactory outlet for my creative impulses. I was caught up in a daily grind of commuting, working long hours, coming home dog-tired at night. Acquiring new kits was a kind of reward for the boredom; a form of retail therapy at its most banal level.

But the more complex reason was to do with guilt. As a creative professional I’m always feeling the constant pressure to be doing something more purposeful with my time.

It’s isn’t because I don’t enjoy modelling. At the best of times, with a brush in my hand, I feel like I enter a state that’s almost zen-like, calm and focused. I’m talking about the good times of course; when your fingers obey you and the paint goes on smoothly. At such times I know what attracted me to the hobby and there are few things I would rather be doing.

It’s a conundrum I still haven’t satisfactorily resolved but I have at least come to terms with it. Models are something that fire my imagination and in the end, I don’t believe it actually matters a whole lot where that impulse comes from. It’s no more or less pointless than most things people do for fun – bungee jumping, morris dancing or macramé.

While it is sad I don’t get as much time as I’d like to do it the hobby still gives me pleasure.  I wear my geek badge with pride.

At the time of writing this, (2004), I haven’t picked up a brush for a year. I have an unfinished kit gathering dust on my workbench. Despite frequent temptations, I haven’t bought any new kits either. Career pressures, financial pressures, the everyday hassle of living; they all conspire against the time I can get back to it again.

I calculate that if I did have the time to do nothing but build kits, it would take me something like five years to get through my collection (this assuming I built them to an acceptable standard). Maybe I’ll get to do that when I’m an old fart in retirement  – except that, the way things are going, they’re gonna work us all til we drop.

But before you start shaking your head over that, you should know that I don’t regret a single one.

I believe that if you buy into the idea of models at all, you’re really buying into the idea of fantasies given form. And if you dig a little deeper, you might also admit that the real attraction of fantasy lies in its potential. All my fantasies curled up in their styrofoam chips and bubble-wrap contain that potential – and the promise of fun.

If I didn’t believe that fun was important, then I’d really be a sad human being.

David Clough©2004