The Little World

It started as a fountain of knowledge – then a pool of information – then a flood of images. Now we have a tsunami and modellers are being drowned at their workbenches.

I mean the internet, and specifically the Google images page. The go-to when you are looking for either inspiration or confirmation. You want an idea and would prefer it to be someone else’s.

This may be due to you living in a vacuum. You might be miles from nowhere out beyond the Black Stump with no chance of a news agent, public library, or other source of modelling plans. You might be on dial-up and wait a day for a picture to load. But unless you want to make exactly what the kit maker has put on the box – and some kit makers in the garage-build sector put very little anywhere – you need hard facts and clear photos.

Go to Google and enter the name of the thing you wish to model. You will either be inundated with pictures or shown nothing at all. There are some prototypes that got clear through to the scrap heap and Krasnosteins without being recorded. They are wonderful – because they can be endlessly praised by those who never saw them. Nothing elevates a design like being iconic and invisible.

Or you can have the profile and line drawing produced by a graphic artist who has also heard the rumours and legends and is only too happy to boot ignorance along with a snappy drawing. The classic illustration of this was small uniform books of the 60’s and 70’s that had drawings of army uniforms from the American Civil War. One artist drew a fanciful uniform for some New York volunteers that included braided cuffs and red facings. This was endlessly repeated in all the subsequent enthusiast’s books and the primary evidence for it was cited as that first book. In reality, none of it existed in 1861-65…but it is holy truth to the re-enactors to this day.

Much like the metallic red ME-109 that Aurora moulded. To this day there are people who insist it was a real colour choice that you could make when you bought your new fighter plane…

I use the Googlepit as a source of some of my builds, but I depend upon other evidence before I commit to an entire scheme. I’ve been dampened, but not often.