Monday, June 6, 2016

Paper Modeling and the Art of Procrastination

Well, Folks, I've done it to you, again.  Last night I had reason to check to check in here on the blog and, while knowing that it had been a while since my last updates, realized that my last post was from A YEAR AGO!!!

Now, I haven't been dormant over the last year, in fact, far from it, but I have indeed been neglecting this page.  This is partly due to some big-time craziness and upheaval in my day-to-day life as a small-business owner, partly due to the family issues that affect everyone occasionally, and partly because I've been really busy in between on working on models instead of writing about models.

Mainly, I've been hammering away in what I last referred to as the "Jefferies-class Frigate" project, which has grown from one model into an entire series, with running changes over the two years and counting incubation of this design.

For added effect, I took these photos with a flashlight during a black out.
The most recent iteration, was initially called the U.S.S. Sternbach, named for artist Rick Sternbach, designer of Star Trek's U.S.S. Voyager.  In a Facebook post, Rick had posited that while all on-screen Federation ships had used warp engines with integral Bussard collectors, there was no reason, within the bounds of the fictional technology of Star Trek, why the collectors could not be mounted remotely from the engines.  Given this as a possibility, he wondered what such a ship might look like.

The U.S.S. Sternbach, though some have called it "Rudolph"
I took this as an opportunity to see if I could come up with something worthy of his idea, and was very pleased when he gave my design his nod of approval.  That made me want to go forward and finish the model to a decent level of detail, but not just that version, but all three models, so, over the last year, they have had their surface details completely re-drawn.

Other projects of note nearing completion include the Eichler House, which is currently in the test build phase, a reworking of my TOS Build Your Own Starfleet set, and an updated higher-resolution version of the Chaffee.

Stay Tuned...