Where I work and display cabinets

 I live in a two story typical Nth Queensland house, upstairs living, downstairs garage, laundry, work areas etc. Over the years I have taken this lower space and made it work for me in whatever venture was the go at the time -motorcycles, screen printing, photography, golf or now, as it has been since 1996, modelling. These pictures were taken at dusk with  a Nikon D7000 on a tripod, f22 and timer setting. The above shows me at my desk with the current job--a diorama using the Citadel model giant spider Arachnarock, being lured down a cliff by Goblin shamen. This will be the subject of an individual post or two, showing stages of the methods I use.

A view from the front of the house through my work area,,showing storage cabinets (on the floor for models and the wall for paint). Beyond the desk are steel cabinets for woodworking and general heavier tools, my spray booth and the back door.  I am lucky in that I have a very good flowthrough and hence more than adequate ventilation as our temperatures are often well above 30C and humidity  in the  80's.

This is the front of the workshop and shows the plethora of junk a modeller accumulates, from necessary fans to half made dinosaur armatures , shelves of undercoat sprays,  sundry Warhammer figures, plastic rods and tubes and STUFF of all shapes and sizes.

As I was an  aircraft  and armour modeller before I discovered the small world of 28mm fantasy figures and their consequent dioramic delights, I used airbrushes all the time. I have a Badger 155 Anthem for  general work and an Iwata HP-BH  for fine jobs like Italian airforce camo schemes. My air sources are either an 8cu.ft compressor (mounted under  the dinosaur in the previous picture) or the small but very efficient Iwata Smart Jet Pro shown above. They do  their stuff in a homemade spray booth with dual exhausts exiting through the large tube, over the wall into the carport. The blue curled hose feeds the Anthem and also pumps up bike tyres, balls and blows dust to - well you know where dust should go.

     
The other main area of the downstairs space houses my modelling display cabinets of which I have  four.This was my first and contains only 1:72 scale aircraft of WW2,  all sorted by nationality with particular emphasis on the lesser known types such as those of Italy, France and Australia. I really like the weird German Blohm and Voss BV 144 and the Italian SM79 - basically I like weird! Below the cabinet are boxes of artwork from twelve years of screen printing  and on top is an elven tower , some black and white photographs from my darkroom days and the inevitable STUFF.

 My second cabinet is a mirror of my changing interests having quite a number of 1:72 aircraft (this time mainly jets), but also some larger items such as dioramas , figures and the beginnings of some early scratch builds. There is my 'Spider Tank' which really deserves another look at (before the plastic decides its had enough of this uv lark and disintegrates.) The most interesting plane in the cabinet is a BV 288 which you get by joining two BV 144's side by side. I can just see my daughter's take on a Jurrassic Park Velociraptor as a showgirl -  feathers , spangles and all. Below are the many boxes you need if you ever have to move your models. A good idea in this digital camera age is to photograph your actual packing method, then you  can repack the damn things easily.

This is my largest cabinet  (1.8m x3.0m) and is where I started to model armour and Warhammer figures. The photo is of course distorted by the wide angle lens and reflections but I can make out the big figure  at the top left which is my most ambitious sculpt. This is Korpus Festerheart  - champion of Nurgle. I hope to enter this in the 2012 Australian Golden Demon  competition in the Open division.
As you can see, the variety of models has increased if , as is inevitable, the rate of completion has definitely reduced. There are quite a few planes which deserve their decals and some of those tanks really do need a good weathering but what do I really need to do? This blog is like a good modelling session and at least I don't smell of glue or paint.

The last display is a smaller cabinet (550mmx800mm), and is purely for Warhammer40K Space Marines -the good guys. There are nine shelves - one of 120mm , one of 95mm and seven of 75mm. Was there  a reason for this division? That's what I had made before I even thought of putting them altogether and then had to make the case to fit. The hardest part was finding a place to hang it once made -many bookshelves  had a radical re-arrangement, but all to the final good. That big dark 'bookend' was once a diorama for my scratch built  Jailer, from the Darksiders computer game - he might get a 'How I built it post' some time in the future.