The Little World

Well, some people would say when you put your half-completed model out on the road and the council sweeper brushes it up into the bin. That’s DONE!

A little less desperate than that for most of us. Perhaps when the last part goes off the sprue tree and onto the rest of the plastic? Perhaps when the last coat of varnish has dried and just before we turn round and see the decal we’ve forgotten to put on? When it is on the top of the television before the cat bats it to the floor?

If you have read this far you’ll acknowledge that scale modelling is a contact sport, if not a blood one. We all tend to go hard before we go home.

My quit point is when it looks like the image I have been building to. That might be anything from a costly monograph book to a magazine article to the box art to a vague notion. I recognise that all art need not be super-detailed photo-realism…some of the best is impressionistic. I have some pretty impressionist models. In the wrong light they get to the abstract stage…

Look, if you don’t quit – if you keep on buying aftermarket and adding more details and weathering everything within a two-metre radius – they are just going to call in an intervention on you. You want to sit in a therapy circle? Cutting things off a sprue tree?