The Little World

I use the term ” mysterious ” here in a purely personal sense. The subjects that are covered by many modellers and gamers are out of my experience, and I can only gaze upon them with wonder.

I hope they will do the same for me – even if it is just wondering if I have lost my marbles.

In any case, the ones that intrigue and puzzle fall into two broad categories; science fiction and fantasy. These have been a fruitful source of literature, movies, and merchandise for nearly a century. I dabbled as a child in both sorts of fiction, but since I’ve come to adulthood I reserve my fiction reading for my bank statements. And I can get enough horror there, too…

But not so for many. Here are space ships aplenty, both franchised and free. They have the advantage of being colourful and imposing, and lend themselves to embellishment from the spares box as well as from the airbrush.

I would have said that few could call them wrong, no matter what they do, but I see that there are groups of enthusiasts, experts, and students of the cinema who will minutely debate the details of construction and colour. Things have come a long way from Willy Ley and Disney’s World Of Tomorrow. It is tomorrow and nothing looks like the old 1950’s Disneyland versions.

Some of the vehicles are plausible, and some are the product of more imaginative design. The franchised ones can be the most believable, but this may be the effect of having seen the movie representations before we see the models. In any case, the Thunderbirds are definitely real, as the prices for their franchised kits will attest.

The contest, as opposed to club, entries are a little more problematical for me as I have no cultural base upon which to judge models of Japanese anime characters or of movie monsters. I am reduced to admiring them purely as works of new art – perhaps no bad thing. I have been told that the kits that make some of them up are well-built to the extreme, and would welcome this sort of attention within the genres I build – but the Japanese company who makes the best of them keeps to it’s own anime and cartoon last and doesn’t branch out.

Some are amusing, some frightening, all are amazing, and none more than the ones that seem to be painted with surgical precision. I’ve heard people declaim figure modelling as mere paint decoration of a prepared item. Well Michelangelo decorated the Sistine Chapel with paint and that seems to have been somewhat admired…Imagine doing Old-Master painting in three dimensions on things the size of your finger…

I’ve no idea whether the figure painting table in the main hall did a big business, but it was busy with adults and kids whenever I looked, and nobody seemed unhappy.

Well, almost nobody…