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And one more...
Recently a friend of mine who collects BMW motorcycles was moving some of his cars to a new building he had built on his property, which is part of his motorcycle museum... He usually doesn't take pictures of his cars as the bikes are his real passion... He texted some friends, me included, a picture of the cars arranged outside on the lawn... (BTW, he wasn't bragging, he's a real humble person, it was relevant to some other texts we were sending back and forth)...
In the middle background is a BMW i8... But it's sorta "fake"... It's a hollow plastic showroom prop that BMW had produced for dealerships so they could have display models before production caught up to demand.
Its got real tires, and the lights go on at night... It's actually bolted down outdoors on a concrete display base.
It looks kinda creepy in the dark, like a spooky futuristic "Christine" lurking out on the lawn.
So, anyway... Me being a poor slob, I felt compelled to text him a picture of some of my collection out in my yard...
Unfortunately, my entire collection is 1/24th scale... But just like the i8, some have real rubber tires and working lights.
And I thought you'd send him a render of your cars you collected from DAZ :D
That bird confused me for good, I thought at first the stone bird was real sitting on its nest
Love this! Reminds me of my childhood. I grew up in NYC and went to Central Park almost every day. Those pigeons bring back so many memories! My friend and I got detention in 6th grade for climbing out the ledge of our school window to see baby pigeons hatching on the windowsill LOL.
Ugh, I hate it when promos have one of those untextured white plastic figures in the scene. Why didn't they texture her? (wink wink)
...that GTO looks particularly nice.
Many years ago was into both display and RC aircraft models. My best was an American Airlines 727-100 that I painstakingly detailed and painted with different hued panels some shiny (actually polished), some dull as per the actual aircraft (including the grey no skid panels leading from the over wing exits) and included both weathering along the leading edge of the wings and tail, by the flight deck, and carbon staining on the rear part of the lower tail. I used a lot of photo references, including ones I took on a trip down to O'hare airport for a day.
Sadly no longer have the photos of the model (they were taken almost 50 years ago) but it looked pretty spot on to the real thing below (ironically, the tail registration number used on the model's decals was the same as the photo of the actual plane).
This was the basic kit
This a fun thread, love reading these stories! And some smart observations!
I know that kit, I had the later, early '70s Pan Am version... I'm not sure if the original had a plastic window insert, but by the time I bought that one the windows were just the clear decals covering the holes... I painstakingly (for a kid) backfilled each window with layers of clear paint.
I was so disappointed that windows turned concave when the dried...
My model was painted white (and very amateurishly), back then I'd have never have tried any metallic finish... Nowadays there are so many options, buffable "metalizer" airbrush paints in many shades, thin adhesive foil sheets, various spray paints that can be buffed out and even creams that can create different weathered natural finishes... But back then when you did that, that must have been super difficult as the available paints were really unreliable and difficult to work with... I used to hate using any metallic enamels because they took forever to dry... If they ever actually did.
Sadly now the model building hobby seems to be declining... So many of the great materials and supplies seem to be disappearing... Polly Scale and Floquil, two of my favorite brands of water-based acrylics went out of business a while back, Tenax (solvent adhesive) is gone... Not to mention the prices for a tiny bottle of Testors enamel or acrylic... I can't see how kids will ever get interested in it as most "cheap" kits start at at least $30...
I used to build models.
But even when I was doing it in the '50s and '60s it was a degraded hobby because my father's friends from the '40s had been using basically airplane blueprints to build their models from raw sheets of balsa wood, paper, metal, paint and artistic loving devotion while making incredible machines that actually flew. I was simply gluing numbered plastic pieces together. Like paint-by-number artwork, model building had reached the masses.
However, I freely admit that at the age of nine I even switched religions so that I could build models. In my little town there were two churches. Baptist and Methodist . My family was basically Methodist. My parents rarely attended church but I was spruced up and dutifully sent to walk two blocks to the Methodist sunday school every sunday. But my friends told me that the Baptist's youth group had a model building club. So I started surreptitiously walking to the Baptist sunday school (also only two blocks away) instead and was invited to join their model club (which was, of course, my plan all along
) I used my own allowance money to buy one of the models provided by the model club but they provided paint and glue (the real glue that smelled so gooood). We would gather in the basement of the Baptist church on saturday mornings and sit around the table building our models and having 9-year-old nerd fun. My parents finally caught on because I remember unsuccessfully dodging questions about the models that had started appearing in my bedroom. It wasn't long afterward that I resumed attending the Methodist sunday school but with much less enthusiasm than the little I originally had. 
But in keeping with the title of this thread, my models were real but they definitely looked fake. However, as years went by I got better and eventually tackled things like clipper ships with all the cannons and rigging, and biological models like "The Seeing Eye", "The Visible Man", "The Visible Head" and I even built the "Visible V8" automobile engine. Although, it never operated flawlessly and the lights representing the sparkplugs often didn't "fire" reliably. Unfortunately, my paint jobs on these things were "not precise" and I never had the patience to perfect the gluing either. Model building helped me learn to follow instructions but I finally realized that model building was not to be my career.
@LeatherGryphon cool story bro. I built a couple of models back in my day (80s) but that was about it. I'm sure your parents meant well, but if it wasn't important enough for them to actually go to church with you, they shouldn't care what denomination Sunday school you go to. My father grew up Baptist, but my mother's parents were split - one Baptist, one Methodist. It's funny how people can find the oddest things to split hairs over. Anyway, if I had the time, money and open space, I'd go back to model railroading. It's relaxing, requires focus and creativity and all that, plus you get to play with trains. I think it'd be cool to take a hi-res photo of a train layout and render in some alien invaders or godzilla or something like that.
The plastic model kits I usually built when I was a child were mostly Star Trek ships. The Enterprise, a Klingon ship, the K7 Space Station, etc. etc. Made the Star Trek Exploration Set (I think it was called), which consisted of slightly-scaled-down models of the communicator, phaser, and tricorder, I then proceeded to use the heck out of them in rough play out in the outdoors and stuff until they all fell apart.
There was also a glow-in-the-dark sorta-arrow-shaped UFO ship with a fold-open-dooors docking bay in the top that wasn't Star Trek but was from the same model company, and its picture appeared on the side of the boxes of all the other, Trek models. That ship also had a tiny little scout ship that parked inside the docking bay. I actually still have that glow in the dark UFO sitting in my clothes closet all these years later.
...my other best model was a TWA 747 which actually came with clear plastic windows. I rigged a light system in it (had to "opaque" the inside of the fuselage a coating of paint as the model was made from white plastic). Rigged a switch under the belly by the landing gear to turn the lights on and off. It also included working landing lights, anti collision lights, as well as lights at the trailing edge tips of the horizontal stabiliser.
Used to do a lot of kitbashing, Liked to show all the military modellers that civilian aircraft could be presented in the same high quality "realistic" approach.
Great collection McGyver!
The one on the left (an early Chevelle?) has that lovely "patina" which is so prized these days
, it looks like a recently unearthed barn find.
I know what you mean, a little part of my basement a few years ago:
When I was about eight I got that same Star Trek exploration set and did pretty much the same thing. I also had that glowing UFO model... I actually still have some of the parts somewhere, but they were incorporated into other sci-fi models I kit bashed when I was around 12 or 13... In my garage/shop's attic there are a bunch of boxes of old models I made in my teens... One is a three and a half foot long blockade-runner "armed freighter" made out of all sorts of model kits and unidentifiable parts that I would collect from garage sales, church flea markets and industrial dumpsters (I lived in an industrial area and a lot of companies did injection moulding)...
I looked up that UFO model and found out this info...
"In 1974 AMT included an Interplanetary U.F.O. Mystery Ship into the Star Trek line, thereby suggesting that the design was part of the Star Trek universe, though it was not, its combined advertising on the box sides, pamphlets and catalogs of the time notwithstanding. It did have however, had some behind-the-scenes connections.
First off, the U.F.O. Mystery Ship was originally designed as the Leif Ericson by Matt Jefferies (with the forward bridge module having more than a passing resemblance of the conning tower of the SS Botany Bay) for an abandoned Sci-Fi project named, “Strategic Space Command.”
The concept was thought up by Jefferies together with his friend Stephen Edward Poe.
AMT’s idea behind backing the project was–buoyed on by the success of their first Star Trek model kits–to release a series of Sci-Fi kits accompanied by a worked-out “mini” background story and eventually create a Strategic Space Command universe, beefed out with an accompanying line of model kits. AMT eventually released the model in 1968 as kit No.S954."
That is kinda interesting because although it was never in Star Trek, it always reminded me of the SS Botany Bay for some reason.
Wow, that is some impressive modeling chops there, Colin. The attention to detail is excellent. There are some giveaways, like the concrete bridge abutement is a little too clean in its lines, although the oil and creosote stains down the centre are spot-on. You even put bits of wood lying near the water on top of the ballast. But my favourite part of the whole thing is the train! The grunge on the engines and cars is uncanny. That could easily pass for the real McCoy.
Wow, that does look good. I don't know how I missed that post earlier. Excellent work, Colin.
Or Ron Howard's brother with a pompadoir.
Thanks for the kind words SixDs and Kitsumo!
There are a huge number of tells I could point out, but I guess we're always our own worst critic, right?
Those locos took a fair amount of work. These days you can just go out and buy ones that match the prototype closely but back then there wasn't much available for Canadian roads. I had to take an American style loco, chop off the cab to substitute a different one, shave off the dynamic brake blisters, add an inset brake wheel housing on the long hood, a plow for those endless Canadian snow drifts plus many more smaller details. The fuel tank is all wrong but it's metal and I didn't want to get into milling it to the correct profile.
I'd better stop reminiscing now or I'll find myself back in the basement and won't see daylight again until spring.