Ths month’s editorial

David Grummitt Managing Editor Guideline Publications david@guidelinepublications.co.uk 

In the aftermath of this year’s Scale Model Challenge show, there was some debate online about the future of armour and diorama modelling and a perceived lack of challenge in the approach to the hobby taken by some of its leading exponents. Much of the furore was about an ill-considered and, to many, offensive video report posted on YouTube by a well-known US modeller who had been invited to be a judge at SMC. Leaving to one side his rantings, several observers noted that there were not the stand-out pieces – whether dioramas or individual pieces – that had literally leapt out from among the dozens of beautifully finished models in the competition. This had been a ‘thing’ at previous SMCs and many other model shows I have attended over the years (I still remember, for example, when I first saw Mirko Bayerl’s and Phil Stucinskas’s pieces at Euro Militaire years ago). This observation, made by a few online after the show, is not to denigrate any individual modeller or to say that the modelling today is not to the standard it was a decade ago. It is to say that there is a certain homogeneity to the styles and techniques used today and that there are probably more modellers producing pieces to that standard than there were a decade ago. We are waiting for the next paradigm shift in model painting and weathering, but we shouldn’t expect this to come along every couple of years or for it to be an uninterrupted linear progression. From Shep Paine and Francois Verlinden in the 80s, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that the likes of Mig Jimenez, Marijn van Gils, Adam Wilder and others moved the hobby forward in a giant leap. We shouldn’t expect that to happen at regular intervals or presume that modellers are or should be aiming to do that. What we have is truly a golden age of the hobby, with more kits, more choice of paints and styles, more information on how to improve our skills, and great shows like SMC. We need to celebrate that and enjoy the making models.