I have been modeling since I was a kid.....

I started when I met Mr. Clyman, a neighbor, while I was selling light bulbs in Catholic school, around the 4th grade.  His ceiling was full of meticulously built, hand-painted kits, all war planes.  I also lived near Reginald Denny's Hobby Shop at Sunset and Western, across from the 20th Century Fox lot in Hollywood (all of it is gone now).  I was in heaven looking at all the precision-made, authenticity-driven models on display.  

I sucked at it.  Globs of glue, no concern for instructions, no painting...hey, I was a kid; I just wanted it done.  When I got into college, in the 70s, I got more serious about painting, but things were only so-so.....I still had no patience.

Things changed in my recent years as a veteran teacher.  I started a model/war-game club at Madison Junior High and the kids and I seriously consulted books, magazines, and the folks at Valley Plaza Hobbies (they, alas, are gone now, too) to make better quality models, miniatures, and dioramas.  

One big motivation for painting well was the micro-armor I got enthusiastic about.  I actually got started on that in the late 1970s, when I went to a Sci-Fi shop in Orlando, Florida, appropriately named Enterprise 1701 (now an exclusively Sci-Fi/Fantasy store).  First, I just painted WW-2 German stuff panzer grey, then I realized that camouflage was a German standard, and forced myself to get complicated.  The other gamers and kids expected it.  That is when I started getting serious.  

Another factor in getting more detailed was the influence of model builders for films like Star Wars and other science-fiction genre creations.  Not only was a model painted in them, it was created from scratch, detailed, and made to look used.  This became a goal as well.

So, now, I cannot build something and leave it the way it is in the kit.  I have two reasons for building models now:  1:  school "realia"--three dimensional representation of something interesting to our studies and 2:  science fiction/general interest--I want it to look as it was used in the film I saw.  

You will see those kits I have been building since I bought a house and have a safe place to display them (so far the garage, but it is a start).  I hope you like them.

This page was last updated on 03/12/06.