Transcript
Do you know there are people out there who build models that aren’t for tabletop games? I know, shocker! Of course you knew that, that’s a silly question. But have you ever bothered to check out some of these other hobby niches? How about a plastic model show, have you ever attended one of those? Some of us undoubtedly have. And some of us undoubtedly might want to!
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we check out other niche hobbies that are right next door to our own!
So, back before I matured into the dashing, uber-clever professional talking at you now, I worked two jobs. My main gig was assistant managing a Starbucks and the other was working part time at my friend’s hobby shop. Incidentally, working at that hobby shop is how I got into the special fx industry to begin with but that’s a story for another day. You never know where life will take you.
Anyway, working weekends at the hobby shop, mostly for that coveted employee discount, I would hang out with all kinds of hobbyists. At one point, I even used to go to this military modeler’s club with a close friend of mine who was really into historical WWII modeling and this hobby club was run by the famous Bill Horan. Now most of you are probably wondering who Bill Horan is. He’s a master figure painter, often focusing on Napoleonic or historical miniatures. Not game stuff. Looking at his stuff now, his work might seem like a lot of top tier painting you see every day on instagram but back then, there were very few people painting at his level. Most of the guys in his club painted with oils or were into historical dioramas. I was basically just into the gaming minis but it was pretty awesome to see all this other stuff.
So, I was out of the hobby for a long time, a quarter of a century give or take. And when I got back into it, I went right back to the gaming miniatures. Here’s the very first mini I purchased and painted, maybe five years ago. A few months back, my buddy who I’d gone to the Bill Horan club with, invited me to a small model show. You know, just to hang out and see all the cool stuff.
The show was put on by an IPMS chapter – that’s the International Plastic Modelers’ Society. It ran for a around six hours on a Saturday and was essentially a display and contest event. A bunch of hobbyists brought their models to display and take part in a friendly judged competition. On a whim, I decided to take a couple of my minis because, you know, it’s always fun to display your stuff, right, and it only cost a few bucks to enter. I didn’t expect there to be many tabletop game miniatures there and I was not wrong about that. I ended up entering my minis in the sci-fi / fantasy open category. But the main reason for going was just to hangout and look at a bunch of cool models. And I was not disappointed.
I think these smaller shows can be super cool for kids too, a lot of the shows don’t even charge if you’re not actually entering a model in the contest. So you can just like walk around and look at the cool stuff. A show like this can be a really cool way to see, in person, a wide variety of models and modeling techniques. You can take closeup shots of things or techniques you want to remember or study in the future, and seeing stuff in person is just always better than seeing an image on a screen.
Like being able to walk around this nut’s crazy scratch built Star Wars Rebel Cruiser. It was enormous and had excellent nurnie application, as well as LED lighting! He even had a like home-printed booklet showing build progress and describing what he’d actually done work-wise.
Before I go any further with my little virtual scrapbook here, I do have to point out that I did not get any of the builders’ names for crediting them. This was not really my fault – each paper tag with a model’s name on the table specifically did not have a builder’s name and that’s because they were the judging slips for the contest. So the models were all, you know, anonymous.
Anyway, let’s look at some more cool stuff:
Five Star Story mechs are typically done super clean and polished like this but I’ve always wanted to do one weathered up like these Gundam style models. I really liked the weathering and the sticker decal application on these. And the weathering on this tank is also really nice, very WWII style.
This is just a cool mech design and beaten up, weathered yellow is always a good look, right?
This trippy ship is obviously an airbrush, and the LED lighting is really cool. I found out later that this is or was an actual kit you could purchase.
Where else you gonna see a little rusty chibi gundam in a medieval courtyard? I mean besides Instagram.
And this diorama was probably my favorite, because of it’s caption, which makes the whole thing. I mean, the build is awesome, but it’s also just a very clever idea, and very funny, which is always a winner.
Here you go – Battlestar Galactica Viper launch tube, super cool little set piece with great lighting, and of course nostalgic for me. I always wanted to be Starbuck, running around with some Lego pistol I’d built in a handkerchief thigh holster, and then I could pretend to be Face from the A Team right?
This diorama has got just at on of trees and the leaves are super cool, the winter frost looks fantastic.
This piece really tells a story in a single build, a family being photographed on a tank, bizarre and interesting and probably historically accurate.
I’m also a fan of model railroad stuff and one thing I always like about model train builds is the ability to incorporate movement and lighting.
Hey, here’s a Warhammer model! Actually two! I really liked the ice floe base, it’s a very cool resin pour with great underpainting.
This is my buddy’s BB8 with a very slick magnetic head that allows the thing to actually rotate like the movie prop. And this is his finely weathered R2D2 kit.
These Japanese Star Wars kits are super nice, detail-wise. And I really like the scale of them, very desktop friendly.
This was an awesome lighting build, very cool idea for explosion crafting. I suppose you can craft explosions with grenades, but this one’s made with cotton balls. Much less expensive. Actually I don’t think it’s cotton balls, I think it might be some kind of spray foam.
Here’s another example of great winter weathering. I could see trying this technique out on some space marines or 40k tanks.
This was one of my favorite pieces. It’s entirely scratch built and the painting and weathering is just top notch. It’s so detailed and it’s smaller than you think. And then there’s the companion model, the outhouse car, again, entirely scratch built and just full of tiny, very fun details. The beer box, the chainlink, the curtain door, all very cool.
And there’s just so many clever artists out there, this little conversion is perfectly adorable and perfectly creepy, and perfectly fits one of my favorite aesthetics. You know, the adorably creepy aesthetic. AKA, the Tim Burton aesthetic.
Here’s another diorama just literally chock full of detail. I really like the signage and just all the little things, you could like study this thing for hours I bet and never catch every single detail and effect. I can’t imagine how long this took to build.
There was way more stuff obviously that I’m not showing, there were probably two hundred model planes and a hundred model tanks, and there were a few odds and ends on the table my miniatures were placed on, like a life-sized bride of Frankenstein bust. There’s just a lot of stuff we don’t see in the tabletop niche specifically and I truly am a fan of just about anything in miniature form.
And here are my little minis on that table, and they just look little dark brown blobs. Which is why I was super surprised when I won a 3rd place medal for my troll kin shaman! Having just taken my little guys out for a weekend stroll, it was pretty neat to go home with one of the actual metal medals they were giving out as the contest trophies.
In the end, I think going to check out other model makers and hobbyists work in real life is a really fun and often inspiring thing to do on a Saturday. Another completely different but similar niche I find very cool are dollhouse miniatures.
So, maybe check your local area for local model expos or miniature conventions, just take a peek at some other niches in the miniature hobby space. You might find some cool new stuff to inspire you! And, you know, you get outta the house.
And yes most of these shows will have a “dealer room”, where you can spend your ducats on all kinds of weird, old, out of print, unique kits or other types of collectibles or materials, et cetera.
So have fun wandering the proverbial hobby neighborhood! Let me know what you find!
See ya!