A MODELMAKER’S LIFE: TIME TO RECHARGE THE BATTERIES…

8th September 2025

Well, that’s it. The studio has been cleaned, the lights turned off and I’m ready to go on holiday for week.

Truth be told, I’m ready for the break. The last few months or so seem to have been really intense in terms of work, with little chance of breaks between the models and books that I’ve completed.

It all started with the decision to build the Airfix Jaguar, a model that perhaps would have taken a lot less time if I hadn’t decided to replicate so closely an actual machine and then turn that build into a detailed book. Compound that work with the highly involved Kingston House project that I built at the same time, and it’s easy to see how much time I spent in the studio over the six weeks during which the models were built. And I haven’t really caught up since then. All subsequent models seemed to have been built at pace, with little time to settle into any of them. They’ve felt rushed and the results, only kind of okay. But that’s the downside of the deadlines: it’s a job, not a hobby!

Look, I get it, I build models for a living, something that most would not consider a real job. Hell, even I sometimes wonder if it is! But it is extremely time-consuming, with deadlines that never move. I have to build at least one model for a feature each month, often doing two, so that not only takes up plenty of time, it drains plenty of enthusiasm when things sometimes go astray! And go astray they do, more often than I care to admit!

So the next week will see Liz and I on holiday, grabbing a chance to do anything but work and in my case, build models. I plan to take nothing with me hobby related, so that will give me the break I need to run into new work, completions and shows that are coming up over the next few months. Don’t worry though, I will, as I did earlier this year, still keep this diary going, with I hope some interesting updates from our travels. Hopefully, you will all come along for the ride.

And with that I’m done and off out for a pint. See you tomorrow!