I can’t learn anything from Sam Dwyer.

OK, that’s not at all true, but bear with me while I make a point.

  • Sam Dwyer is a well known, immensely talented scale modeler who is so revered that people call him “The Sam Dwyer”. His work is amazing.
  • Per Olav Lund won a gold medal at Scale Model Challenge for “Men and Whales” and just thinks differently than I can. As the Sprue Cutter’s Union podcast guys pointed out, he painted the water on that piece to represent reflected light off the bits and particles in the water. Amazing work.
  • Jean Diorama does some absolutely amazing work in ways that I can’t believe are possible with today’s materials and knowledge.

This list of amazing, talented artists could go on and on. The true masters of the craft that just operate at a higher level. The Lance Armstrong’s of the scale model world.

One of my high school buddies was a guy named Tyler Crook. If you’re a comic book fan, you know his work. His work is insanely good and it has been since he was 14 (and probably before then too). He just sees the world in a different way than mere mortals. At some point in high school we had a pep rally in the stadium at some point near Halloween. One of the event activities was a timed contest to carve a pumpkin. Everyone but Tyler started in on the traditional method: cut a hole at the top, scope guts out, carve triangles and a jagged mouth. Tyler took his knife and started scraping off the outer orange pumpkin skin to reveal the yellow pumpkin wall. In no time at all he had a beautiful design across 50% of the pumpkin. Before the three other competitors got in the game, he’d already completed a masterpiece. I asked him later what made him create that design that way. He said he didn’t really think about it, it was just what he thought to do.

I’m convinced people like Per or Sam or Jean are like Lance Armstrong because they were born with extra talent that is just baked into their brains from the start. This by no means implies I don’t think they practice and work and grind harder than the rest of us. But Lance Armstrong was able be the champion he was because he had a larger heart than most people. Literally. His heart pumped more blood, allowing him to take greater advantage of all that practice and grinding.

UPDATE: People have voiced concerned about the Lance Armstrong metaphor because of his doping. So let’s try this again. 

I’m convinced people like Per or Sam or Jean are like Michael Jordan because they were born with extra talent that is just baked into their brains from the start. This by no means implies I don’t think they practice and work and grind harder than the rest of us. But Jordan was just born with a different set of abilities than the rest of us. No matter how much I practice, no matter how much other people not named Michael Jordan practice, it’s almost certain that they aren’t going to be as good as he was. I can’t necessarily take a talented, 7 foot tall, dedicated athlete and train them every day all day for the rest of their lives and how they end up being Jordan level successful.

Many of the books, podcasts, videos, etc. that feature modelers as guest experts are wonderful to listen for inspiration but hard to translate into daily practice. We spend a lot of time featuring guys like Sam Dwyer because their work is so good. But it’s hard to actually learn practical, actionable take aways from them. I find myself really wishing for more voices from the middle tier of scale modeling: folks who are good but have had to grind to learn and are still very much learning core concepts. Folks who don’t have an enlarged modeling heart, pumping a stream of ideas and skills at a faster pace than the rest of us. Folks who have made and recovered from basic mistakes… and are willing to share that journey with us. Folks that look more like me, an average modeler who is still very much training his brain to see the most basic techniques without having to reinvent the wheel every time I start a project.

This isn’t a call for marginal content. It’s a call for:

  • A large group of skill diverse voices. Help me get inspiration for grand ideas but also help me get practical advice from people who are still down in the weed where I am.
  • Instruction that hits the middle tier. I feel like we see a lot of books/articles/videos where there is either an assumption of no knowledge and content is super basic, or an level of expertise that is significant and hard to wrap my brain around.
  • Better instruction. One of the things that makes Nightshift such a great teacher is how well he targets that middle tier and how he picks just the right things to share that address the areas where folks who have a fair amount of knowledge still get stuck.

So it’s not that I can’t learn anything from Sam Dwyer (or Per or Jean or any of the other bad asses). It’s that I also want and need to learn from people more like me.

(And yes, that’s Per’s photo at the top, not Sam’s)