Late last year, we were approached by some people who’d come to Fen Model Show and been inspired to resurrect a painting competition at the Diceni gaming show in Norwich. I’d been to Diceni a few times and even witnessed the last time it had run a painting competition. Back then, the competition was to paint the show figure, which was a Boudicca-type character that the show had been selling for a couple of years. Predictably, it wasn’t a hugely popular competition when I saw it. I think there were three entries.
But that was in the mists of time; pre-Covid; back when all ambition to run a model show might be quashed by the dominance of Euro Militaire, IPMS debacles, and lazy affairs like Salute and Golden Demon. Now we live in the future: model shows can aspire to do new things without being told what they should be like! Of course, model shows do need to achieve a small number of things, so when they approached us for advice, I let them in on a few key elements that I think need to be right first and foremost.
Given the show was to be set in a place that relies on some fairly ropey lights in the ceiling, this turned out to be good advice, as the organisers then borrowed our lights and stands to help the displays look a bit better and to make sure the models could be seen. I think the environment could stand to have more lighting, as you’ll see in my pictures, but it was certainly better than the alternative.
Before getting onto the meat of the review, as is tradition, I present my terrible photography so that you can squint at a few pixels and wonder if it’s a model, a tumour or a saucy photograph of a vegetable I’ve dressed up.
For this show, I decided to try out using my new phone, which supposedly takes very good pictures. I’m not convinced. I think it too accurately conveys the low light levels, rather than compensating to get a good picture. Maybe there’s a setting to fix that, but I’ll probably just take my DSLR to future shows because at least the colours look accurate to the figures. I also felt compelled to get closer to models when using my phone, which puts me uncomfortably close to dropping my phone on models. I’d rather not do that. My DSLR can take pictures from much farther away and has a handy strap to keep it attached to me.
Anyway, while we did give the show organisers some advice, there were a few little bits that hadn’t occurred to us, one of which was critical to my mental wellbeing, while another was simply a matter of practicality.
The first of these was around registration, which gave me severe anxiety as soon as I saw it in action: the person taking registration was also taking the entrants’ models and placing them on a table behind him to then be shuttled into the exhibition area.
This is BAD.
I don’t care how many shows handle registration this way, and I don’t care that one of those shows is Golden Demon. The worst thing that can happen to someone’s model is that it gets damaged. Painters spend potentially hundreds of hours on models, and these models are often extraordinarily fragile.
The best way to avoid having a model damaged is to minimise how much handling is done by people other than the painter. This is especially important if your show is staffed by people who aren’t dedicated painters. Gamers, I’m looking at you. You have a different relationship with your models. It’s horrifying to us (“that model’s dead, I’ll just flick him over then toss him into a pile with his mates”). It was horrifying when I saw someone hand over a dragon that was then moved to the second table by handling the dragon itself, not just the base. I couldn’t stick around to see how it was manhandled into the exhibition.
This is why, when I got to the front of the registration queue, I told them I’d put the models on display myself. That wasn’t negotiable, and it should really be the default. It would have made registration much, much quicker, too.
The second significant issue – practicality – was that the exhibition area was in a horseshoe shape. That’s not necessarily a problem unless you’re running a small show with only five tables, like Black Dragon, which means the horseshoe is now a traffic jam. Given there was only an hour between the end of registration and the start of judging, this also made it tough for everyone to actually see what was on display. I’m pretty confident this is the sort of thing the show will sort out for next year – if they compensate for more entries by adding more tables, they should find themselves with more space and thus more access by default.
The only other notable issues were really in the run-up to the show, and demonstrated a sort of panic, I guess – it felt like the organisers were afraid the competition would be too successful. For one, there was a limit on the number of entries anyone could bring: up to two models per category (except vehicles and dioramas, which were limited to one), and up to five entries maximum.
I think this is silly, especially in an open competition. If you’re worried about one person getting too many medals, make each category a display. If you’re worried about space, don’t: that’s literally the best problem for a model show to have. Model shows feel amazing when there are too many models to look at. As long as the space is open so you can get in to see them (or to bask in the overwhelming number of models), it’s fantastic.
Related to this was the categories themselves, which ended up being entirely ignored – I certainly didn’t see any evidence that they were being considered. This annoyed me a bit, as I try to take rules seriously (granted, usually to the point that I expose how silly they often are), and this meant that I didn’t bring some pieces that I would have liked to. I wanted to show off my new zombie diorama, but the rules said only one diorama and I think my cyberpunk diorama is a bit more avant garde and striking. I also thought about bringing all the bagworms, but the language for the ‘group’ category suggested they wouldn’t fit in there, so I only brought one of them.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I talk about categories being limiting: if I read the rules and want to abide by them, I’m forced to remove some of my work from consideration.
Anyway, this probably all sounds very negative, but it’s essentially teething problems for a bunch of people who clearly want to run a good competition. Experience teaches everyone, and I’d be surprised if any of these issues persist next year (other than maybe categories, because it is still a competition at a gaming show and I can’t think of a single gaming show that doesn’t have silly gaming categories, but hopefully they’ll be a bit more open).
Norwich itself is a great city and the venue is a prime location right in the centre, which also means it’s conveniently very close to a number of quite good pubs. The Garnet, a mere 60 metres from the show, is a personal favourite when the weather is good. It turns out there’s even a tapas stall right next to it now, so we could have a decidedly bourgeois lunch with our show beers. Top points for the show beers go to Black Dragon. There aren’t many shows that have done so well in that regard.
The people running the competition also clearly have a lot of enthusiasm for it, which should translate into something that gets better each year and draws a bigger crowd.
One final bit of advice to models shows in the UK: don’t give Martin best of show. I have enough trouble keeping his ego in check as it is.
Fet Paints 