The Little World

We have all had one…and those of us with bad luck have had several kits that make us doubt whether we should have even started them.

Sometimes it has been commenced in a hurry with blithe disregard to warnings from the internet. Sometimes we have been seduced by box art. Plastic porn, if you will.

Sometimes we have studied the subject carefully and made sensible plans to get stuck in the mud. There is a streak of self-destruction in the best of us.

However we got there, the morass is still the same. Badly-cast parts that do not fit. Badly-written instructions that leave us no wiser as to what the actual kit should look like. Decals that will not release…or fracture into a dozen pieces.

Or my favourite…the model that has some form of contamination in the plastic. It may be the inclusion of a foreign body, an air bubble, or some chemical that causes even the best paint to pull away. It waits until all the hard work is done and then makes it futile.

What to do? Well, flinging the thing into the bin comes to mind, but you’ll only feel bad about it on many levels…including the waste of money. Better to try another tack:

a. Finish it as best you can and then weather it to buggery. You will learn a lot in the process and sometimes be rewarded with a good result.

b. Finish it as a toy. Eschew the fine detail, smooth out all the flaws, and paint it in clean colours. Mount it on a stand and pretend you intended to do that all along.

c. Make a wreck as part of a diorama. There is a sense of vengeance in this that does our character no credit, but everyone has a dark side.

d. Put it on a shelf of doom and avoid it. This is a good way of developing cowardice to a fine art.