I often think “Sorry I haven’t been posting much, guys.” Posts are kind of lame. For one thing, they assume people were missing you posting, which is somewhat presumptuous, for another, they don’t really add anything to the general conversation. I always resolved not to make that kind of post.
But here I am. Making an apology for being absent.
The fact is, I’ve been very busy. (I know, everyone is busy, get over myself already.) As you may have read here , I had to call it a day on my publishing business due to the decline of hobby publishing, and Brexit. Of course, I can’t just sit on my hands if I want to eat and pay the bills so I started learning Fusion 360 CAD, and starting designing stuff.
What a frickin’ rabbit hole! Not only has the design sucked me in like like a duck into a jet engine, but the business has taken off and its an endless round of design, send to print, package and dispatch. It is still early days, but it looks very promising. You can see, and shop, what I’m doing at https://www.insidethearmour.com/shop-1
Some of you may know I was a big scratchbuilder (I even published three books on the subject as ITA Publishing, and co-wrote a fourth recently for AK Interactive) and my journey into CAD as a scratchbuilder has been eye opening. A blog will follow on that soon.
So, anyway, between learning Fusion, the new business, building models for others to publish, and recording and editing the Sprue Cutters Union Podcast; there have not been enough hours in the day to do a blog as well. However, you should know by now that a new blog was published recently, a discussion with the incredible Calvin Tan, and more in this style will follow in future, where I take a topic and get a modeller with a particular insight to join me to discuss it.
Thank you for your patience (if you noticed I was gone! And if you didn’t, I hope you enjoy the new blogs upcoming anyway) and thanks for reading
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I too have been busy these past few months and have not taken the opportunity to catch up with your posts but now that I have I find much to think about.
Going back to your ‘The Art of Disagreement’ from last November, I think a lot of the problems you deal with in other columns such as ‘Challenging Modelling part 2′ of January this year stem from your second paragraph of ‘The Art of Disagreement’. In it you say, if I may misquote you, some people don’t think about modelling but just make them, some people think a bit about what they are doing and some people think a lot. In other words, to some people the act of modelling is a non-intellectual activity and to others it does involve thinking to varying degrees. Since we live in a post-modern world in which all beliefs and attitudes must be given equal validity I cannot disapprove of people who don’t think about what they are doing when they make a model, but I can think it is a pity that people don’t think a bit more deeply about what they are doing and why they are doing it.
It seems to me, from having observed modellers and modelling for over half a century, that many, perhaps most, modellers are not able to think about the why and wherefore of what they are doing to any extent through their mental abilities or mental training and education. No blame attaches to this because there are many thing that they can probably do that still makes them valuable people in our society. However, this lack means that they are ill equipped to say much that is ‘intelligent’ about modelling and it would be nice if the simply didn’t say anything. (By way of reciprocation, I am no master modeller when it comes to technique and consequently I don’t waste other modellers’ time expressing myself about it.)
In passing, a quick comment on one quip of yours that I found troubling, not because of the words you used but because of the thinking behind it. In your column ‘STOP IT’ of February this year you conclude a paragraph with the sentence, ‘Stop complaining about other people’s ‘unrealistic’ models as if its some killer criticism, because actually it’s just you, being a dick’. I suspect that you have used the phrase ‘being a dick’ for effect but it is challenging on a personal level, not in a way which might ask a modeller to question their own assumptions. Of course, that modellers might not have been one who could be challenged to think about what they are saying, but the substitution of something like ‘… because actually, you haven’t thought about what you’re saying’, might have been more productive.
And while I’m in a thinking mood, a quick word about dioramas. I write this as a professional historian with a PhD in the subject and thirty years experience in teaching and writing, not one who has been to art school. This might explain our different philosophies on the matter. My first thought is that history is about change over time and a diorama is a snapshot of a moment in time. Since history is the telling of a story about that change over time a diorama can only be a part of a story. What can make a diorama a story is the assumed knowledge that gives context to it such as even knowing that there was a First World War and that men fought each other using various kinds of machines in it. If you don’t come to a diorama with that pre-knowledge then most dioramas might be great technical or artistic achievements, but in terms of history they aren’t story telling.
Having just written that, I don’t think that either of us would like to get bogged down in technical questions about the nature of history or art. I love looking at a good diorama but I look upon it in the same way as I would a piece I see in an art museum – an expression of a moment in time. I should add that what makes the pieces that you showed of Putin and Trump currently have a greater impact because of the pre-knowledge we bring to viewing them and they might look very strange to a New Guinea native who doesn’t know anything about those two men. They may remain good art but the viewer in a hundred years time will see them differently.
Another point and I will quit. What is the difference between a diorama of fighting in Ukraine now or a depiction of a Stug III in action in 1944 or a depiction of part of the Battle of Waterloo. They depict events which had strong political relevance to the people of those times so, I think personally, that depicting any of those scenes should be as potent and challenging as any other event that happened in the past. It was certainly as real and important to those people as events in the Ukraine are to people now. Saying that it is otherwise (as you do in discussing the difference between what you call ‘Historical Military Modelling in ‘Challenging Modelling Part 2′ and current events) is to discount the validity of all human experience in the past, only because it is in the past. Those experiences were as real to those people as our experiences are to us. Perhaps this is just my historian’s view of things and not an artist’s view, and there seem to be more artists active in modelling than historians.
Look, these are just a smattering of thoughts that come to mind after catching up on your posts over the past few months. They are by way of thanking you for the work you have put into writing and publishing them and saying that I think they are a valuable contribution to our hobby. I am sad that the Sprue Cutters Union has gone silent and I can understand why, but I hope you will keep this project going, if only to jog my thinking about what I am doing into gear occasionally.
apologies for the delayed reply Leigh, I did not see that this comment had been made on the blog for some reason
Thank you for your consider and detailed response, its this kind of conversation that I wanted to engender with the blog and podcast.
“It seems to me, from having observed modellers and modelling for over half a century, that many, perhaps most, modellers are not able to think about the why and wherefore of what they are doing to any extent through their mental abilities or mental training and education.” I disagree with this. I kind think of a couple of people who are more intelligent and definitely better educated than I, who just don’t want to apply that to modelling. They want to ‘switch off’ when they build a model and just enjoy it as a physical activity.
” I suspect that you have used the phrase ‘being a dick’ for effect but it is challenging on a personal level, not in a way which might ask a modeller to question their own assumptions. ” It was for affect, sometimes you have to be arresting to make a point. but I do think enforcing your own concept of modelling, in this case that it must be realistic, to your specific standards, is the height of hubristic solipsism,
and finally, the WWII/Modern conflict thing. D-Day is 80 years ago this week. a 19 year old on D-Day is 99 now. Its is mostly outside living experience. Thats the difference for me.