The Rules

1) Forget about what you painfully learned from your previous models. There is always room for invention –and oblivion.

2) Gather a reasonable number of references. Don’t even look at them until you are finished.

3) If you want to try something risky, and you got that very complex and time-consuming model almost ready, now it’s the time.

4) Write down a suitable sequence for painting and gluing parts that will alleviate your burden during building and save you time. Leave it underneath some reference books and forget about it.

5) Glue the interior parts using the cement sparingly, as not to make a mess. Knock the model against a hard surface when close to completion. Now you are in the possession of a very musical maraca.

6) Set apart the more delicate parts in a separate tray. Go and do something. Anything will do. Come back and sit on top of them. That’ll teach’em.

7) For painting your beloved masterpiece, choose a windy, dusty day. Do it out there, on the balcony or in the garage with the gate opened. Ah, fresh air. You may feel as if you were Lawrence of Arabia making models in the wild. And you will probably obtain alike results.

8) Start building a model and once you are half-way, meticulously store the thing in the darkest crag of your closet/cabinet. Come back to it by the time you have forgotten all the insights you had regarding construction and ways to correct/improve it.

9) Scratch-build a model of the plane of your dreams and carefully finish it by the time a kit is finally mass produced and on the hobby store shelves for a ridiculously low price

10) Need the right tool but it's out of reach? Nah, use the other one that’s just on the bench. It won’t work the same, or probably won’t work at all, but in the process you will manage to ruin the part. That will give you the chance to get more practice time doing it all over again and learn a bit of scratchbuilding.

11) Get carried away and glue all the pointy/fragile bits before you are completely finished, let’s say before masking for painting or decaling. Then look at the model in a state of dismay. Put it in a box until the next season (see point 8).

12) Run out of the paint you were using in the middle of the job? May be you can use that tin at the back of the drawer you forgot you have from ages ago; then you will achieve two things: the colors will never match and/or the coat underneath will crackle/blister/melt and/or otherwise produce remarkable –although not necessarily desired- special effects.

13) Go back to 1