The Little World

Well there you go. You are now officially trying to out-think the designers and manufacturers of the model kit in the box. You may also be about to transcend the thinking of the original equipment makers. It’s your 30 bucks and your tube of glue, so more power to you and keep out of the way of the flying Xacto knife…

One of the best intellectual exercises you can undertake is to buy a large and complex plastic, metal, or wood kit of something with which you are unfamiliar; an airplane, or building, or sailing ship. Then throw away the instructions and take yourself from that point to a fully finished scale model. It will be roughly equivalent to putting on a blindfold and walking through an operating steel rolling mill.

You may have sources of help – the internet is rife with pictures of whatever it is you have in front of you. Original images of the equipment, diagrams, plans, exploded views, colour charts, museum relics, etc. There are forums, contest reports, YouTube videos, etc.

Or there is nothing at all. Some things have never seen the light of day until they were moulded and a packed in a box, and yours is the only one that was ever sold in this state. And the garbo has called and taken away the bin with the kit instructions. Here is your barbed wire canoe – no paddle, and guess where you are?

You are left to use your native intelligence and mechanical ability to imagine what each part of the kit does. You will be thinking in prototypical terms as well as on the model, because the prototypical parts had to do something to help the real object live. The spars had to hold the wing skins that had to ride the air to keep the aircraft up. The car engine had to transfer rotary motion to tyres at some stage to move forward. The house had to have a roof at the top and needed to have a house underneath that roof. Think. Think and draw it out for yourself.

If you are stumped as to a finish or a colour, go look at similar objects in real life. Look at what age, weather, and bad maintenance will do. Look at oil landscapes in the art gallery and see how distance and time lighten all shades. ( Note: If you are assembling a nude resin figurine you are allowed to look at the rude pictures too, but do not base a lot of your planning on the Picassos…)

Your greatest asset is real life – go see what 1:1 scale objects look like and the odd shapes of kit parts will become more intelligible. Occasionally this will work in reverse when you see something in real life that you understand from having made a model of it. Again, not the Picassos…