I have my limits too. That's not to say I won't tackle longer projects, but my attention to the same kit starts to wane after a while...I get itchy for something different. The 'fix' I described was pretty quick though and if I were to model that particular vehicle (it's not out of the question...I like soviet armour too) I might be tempted tp use his templates. But it brings up an issue I may have mentioned before.
I pretty much stopped buying magazines around six months ago. I DID buy april's FineScale because it had an article about weathering natural metal finishes on aircraft...a pretty 'esoteric' subject. The 1/72 P-47 on the cover is just beautiful...I thought it was the 'Vintage' 1/24 kit when I saw it. The articles all started to sound the same...like sports commenators. Cliche after hackneyed phrase. I decided that if I read the words 'to add depth' again I was going to kill somebody (probably myself
). Tiger after Panther after Tiger after Panther. I was getting bored. I like to see models of a high standard in the magazines and I usually do but it's my suspicion that many of the modellers who build for the magazines fill their articles with 'make-work' and even deliberately complicate their builds. I remember reading an article where somebody was building an early war German tank...he thought it was neccessary to add pink to his Panzer Grey for some pointless reason. To my mind, what this does is to make beginner and intermediate modellers feel less adequate and able to produce a good model. That's bad. In my mind, there's no danger of modellers becoming 'extinct' given the mond boggling array of stuff available these days, but it's important to me to see kids put down their games consoles and maybe get into something that doesn't yield 'instant' gratification. The magazines don't help much I don't think. Some of the British aviation model mags are better in this regard. The standard of the models shown isn't quite as high sometimes (outright lousy in some cases) but I still bought them. They had the info I wanted and the less experienced modeller could hold his finished kit up against the pics in the mag and think...'Hey, my model looks pretty good compared to this'. It's about inclusion rather than 'alchemising' and 'esotericising' (yeah...I made those words up) people out of the hobby.