Well, well, well... no updates since May. Though in my defence, I've not stopped working on projects, builds, or stuff for mags; balancing as I was the Three Childs (teenagers now), my increasingly time-consuming day job, some Real Life Drama, and... trying to pack up our house (and a separate workshop) for a move. A somewhat protracted move; we looked at the house in July, and finally moved in at the end of November.
So anyway, every other model-making blog on the planet does a post like this, looking back at a year of work, so I thought I'd jump on that bandwagon too. Partly to remind myself what I've been up to, and partly in case anyone still bothers to look at this blog and see that I have in fact been working.
Starting the year, a shot published in BRM from an old project, the industrial-themed Cakebox layout.
I continued producing work for Hornby, for the Collectors Club.
Things not off to a good start; the garden railway suffered its final catastrophe, when the Spring storms bought down a fence, and a load of plants onto the line. With the need to remove it and replace it for some scaffolding work, I got fed up of the whole damned thing and ripped it up for scrap. Thus ended several years of trying to be a garden-railway modeller.
At least, temporarily, as it turned out.
Gerry Anderson Day saw an attempt to do some pics using some old kits from Captain Scarlet; the original plan for shooting outdoors scuppered by poor weather...
...which also scuppered the shoot for The Collector, which resulted in a hastily-built set on the kitchen table, in the Kitchen-Workshop-Laundry in our little end-of-terrace.
Big props to the designers at Hornby for saving that project on the page, though I'd gone to a lot of trouble with the mocked-up fake website pages, posters, and catalogues, to make up for the poor photoshoot.
So by about a third of the way into the year; the garden railway had been destroyed and scrapped, I'd not been able to undertake any outdoor shoots at home, I was struggling to produce anything in our little house (thus causing a considerable amount of stress within the home and family), and I was close to stopping the whole model-making thing anyway, as I was finding it tricky balancing it with the Day Job.
Funny how a change of scenery can lift the spirits. OK so the weather was often still poor, but there were the odd sunny days which allowed a bit of location shooting, including some non-railway content.
Finally a chance to do the Captain Scarlet shoot I hadn't managed (involving standing in the sea early one morning). Also to indicate how busy a year it's been creatively, if for non-miniature related reasons, this was following two hours of myself and Elder Child batting inflatables around for a photoshoot done for a gallery open call; thank goodness Kitsch is still in fashion, and some of my older projects have come back around in popularity again.
More for Hornby; still struggling with the low-and-no budget shoots, built in a cramped kitchen, one based on Pensnett in the West Midlands. Quite a fitting one, given it was the nearest railway to where I grew up, and this was shortly after my immediate family had moved away to Wales, thus pretty well severing my connection to the West Mids.
An old project which kept on giving; the 0 gauge tinplate, re-shot for British Railway Modelling, who published it at the end of the Summer.
There was another project for Hornby over the summer, closer to home; Damems, on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. Well, home for the time being, as at this point the need for a bigger house had finally become so pressing that we'd jumped, and were in the process of moving.
There'd been an interesting development with the garden railway modelling; with the G-gauge line having died a death, me and Amy picked up a regular joint gig with Garden Rail Magazine documenting the build of a new 32mm line. This has seen the production of monthly articles; a good trick considering we didn't have a garden railway at this point.
Mindyou, it did mean a shoot or two up in the mountains in Wales.
Speaking of location shoots up in Wales; some more of the Warhammer stuff as a pallette-cleanser from the otherwise endless railways.
Oh look, there's the Damems one in print...
...and the Garden Railway pieces starting. Of course, a major problem at this point was trying like hell to bank some articles, as the house move was on the horizon (and thanks to some delays, stayed on the horizon for several months longer than intended). What this meant was trying to do a load of model-making back-to-back, at the same time as the Day Job went bonkers again, and whilst trying to pack up the house. Something about burning the candle at both ends comes to mind.
The last Hornby project of the year, but one I was really happy with. Probably too big a project, consisting as it did of three dioramas, effectively a whole model railway layout built on next to no budget and very little time.
So, where am I now? Well, for a start, I'm no longer in Keighley, for the first time in over a decade. I have a workshop (well at the moment its a basement full of boxes) so once the move is properly finished then I'll have loads of space to do work in. There is a plan to restart the comic (he threatens), new art style and sets, because effectively it's my Mindfulness task and calming mechanism. I've still got regular contributions planned for Hornby, we have room for a new garden railway for all these articles we're writing for Garden Rail. During the move I've uncovered box after box of part-built kits and projects, abandoned along the way.
So; busy busy. In a better place (both metaphorically, and literally) than this time last year, at least as far as the model-making is concerned. Raising three teenagers continues to be a bit of a slowly-unfolding car crash, but then that's teenagers for you. Hopefully the model-making will compensate for the other dramas, so I'm hoping to get this all going again on here soon.
In the meantime, happy new year, and bring on 2025.
