At the IPMS Nationals 2023, I was lucky enough to receive an incredible award. It wasn’t an official medal from the IPMS judges. Nope. I got a couple of those and they were cool, but not as cool as the real award. A poker chip.

This chip was from one of the members of the Las Vegas club. They put a few of them down on their favorite creations as a way to say “good work”. These are “challenge coins” as people commonly call them.

Receiving one of these was a fantastic feeling. It wasn’t an award that comes from rules and judges and comparison and some level of randomness that comes from a particular group of judges. It was a single person saying “Damn, this is cool”.

The day that coin showed up next to my diorama, Matt McDougall and I were at lunch talking about how cool it would be to create an alternative judging “system” for folks that attend shows. Basically… individual modelers, groups, vendors, podcast teams, anyone could drop a coin next to the models they think rock for whatever reason they say it rocks. Could be a single technique they want to call out. Or an emotional response they get from the piece. Or a well executed concept (regardless of build quality). Or a theme that they set in advance. Or anything else. Maybe this approach has rules (e.g. every group/person can drop no more than 3 coins at each show) or it could just be totally free flowing.

I was in. I loved the idea. As soon as I got home that night, I started researching how to get medal coins produced. Since it cost money and I didn’t have any clear idea for the coin design, I set the whole thing aside.

Until last week, the night before Winterblitz 2024.

Between that conversation with Matt at Nats23 and last week, I’d learned how to use Fusion 360. It dawned on me that I could just make my own coins. So in about 1.5 hours, I banged out a mk.1 coin and printed 5 (the most that would fit on my printer’s build plate). I didn’t paint them in any way, just took them in raw resin gray. (The last thing I did before I left the house to drive to the show was cure them… that’s how close I cut it)

On the coin, I included a URL pointing to a page on this site explaining the coin.

I absolutely encourage all of y’all to create similar coins and pick your favorites. There’s something magical about getting one of these things next to your model and the magic is what a competition is all about in the first place, right??

—

At Winterblitz picked 5 models that moved me. That was my criteria… stuff that made me say “WOW” when I first saw it and/or returned to it again and again through the show. Here’s my picks:

This was a great junior category entry. I liked that it showed some intelligent layout, great groundwork, and good weathering.

This was a fantastic little diorama. The construction is tight, the scene is well laid it out, it felt alive. But what really got me was how awesome the blueish green wood color made the entire dio pop off the base. I kept coming back to look at this one.

This figure was painted but the immensely (alien-like) talented Doug Cohen. Overall the figure is amazing, but when I walked around to see the back, I was absolutely treated to some of my all time favorite paint work. This dog image was hand painted. Wow. And the closer I looked the more I was impressed. Including the black outlining.

I loved the “aliveness” of this one. It felt like real people were really painting. It didn’t look like a toy model… but instead a real scene. Just looked fun and I kept going back to enjoy it.

Wonderful diorama all around. I am a sucker for the foam buildings with brick texture. <Drool> I thought this was a great all around well executed piece.