The Little World

Is your little world being made around your ideas, or are your ideas being made around those of the retail trade?

For some modellers – the model engineers in particular and to some extent the R/C model boaters – they are in control of their desires. Both groups make what they like…and spend a very great deal of time and money in the process. They may not be buying products from a hobby trade, however, as most of what they do is scratch building.

Their shops are raw material warehouses, hardware stores, timber merchants, and tool sellers. There are few kits for what they want to do, and the most help they may ever get is from a set of museum plans.

For we in the plastic model world, the situation is reversed. We tend to shop for kits to build, and only after the purchase do we tend to think away from the box or add other elements. Even when we expand our vision to add surroundings and other models, we fall into line with what we can buy. Our visual story telling can become only that of the aftermarket supplier…I call it the Verlindenisation of history.

The remedy for it is to think out of the box by not going into the box in the first instance. Devise a small scene from the little world and build it before you populate it or add an interesting vehicle or plane. Then add mechanicals and humanity.

Note that the best printed exponents of this I ever saw were the Kalmbach publishing firm in Milwaukee when they put out MODEL RAILROADER. Many of their articles showed miniature construction of geologic forms, water courses, trees and forests, with great line drawings and few references to the actual railroads that would go through them. If you followed their advice you really did create a little world.