Born and bred in a small shack somewhere in darkest South Wales, sometime during the last century, it quickly became apparent to my parents that I had a problem: I liked “aeroplanes”.
Their groans of despair soon turned to veritable squeals of delight when I made my first kit, a tiny 1/72 Airfix MiG-15 that came in a small plastic bag with the instructions stapled to the top. Built, flown and crashed all in one glorious afternoon. If I had nothing to build I would stand for hours, seemingly catatonic, gazing at the shelves in my local toy shop, at the unrestrained beauty of the Roy Cross artwork decorating the larger series Airfix kits. I was waiting for Christmas or a birthday to come along, so I could get my eager little mitts on them.
It took about 30(+) years for me to get any good at making them of course and in the mean time I discovered that there was a lot more to this hobby than just Airfix. Over the intervening years I’ve worked for a number of magazines who were desperate enough to print my work, including Scale Aviation Modeller International, Model Airplane International and Fine Scale Modeler. I wrote a whole book on How To Build Tamiya Beaufighters for ADH Publishing and now work primarily for Valiant Wings Publishing here in the UK and FineScale Modeler in the US.