The Little World

I think the most important thing in building a scale model is to learn how to judge between a good thing and a bad one.

This might be the case in a lot of other aspects of life as well – but here we need to know what we are dealing with, what we can do to it, and what we have finally done.

It’s clues, mostly. What the box art looks like – what the parts on the sprue trees look like – what the plastic feels like. It takes time to recognise good from bad…but when we see it, we remember it. Sometimes the makers change their game and we get the opposite of what we have been used to.

Likewise it is clues we pick up from paint – the consistency, the smell, the stream of paint as it sprays out. The reflection from an advancing wall of colour that tells us to bear down or ease up.

And at the end we need to know whether the job we’ve done is good enough or as bad as we can make it. Like Will Rogers said – when we are in a hole we need to know when to stop digging.