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The past week or three have been so full of hot takes about creativity and innovation – or the lack thereof – that it’s feeling like the rhetorical equivalent of a Soviet artillery barrage.

And watching the shells rip by, something about the whole whatever this is just hasn’t sat right with me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I just kinda shut up and screwed around in Fusion 360 since that’s my current hyperfixation.

Rinaldi made a video. Chris Meddings wrote an excellent blog post. So did Jake McKee, taking a more analytical rather than creative look at the nature of innovation. And most recently, Robert Blokker wrote a guest post for Chris’ blog that comes at things from a dioramist’s perspective.

And reading Robert’s post, in particular, connected the dots for me on what hasn’t been sitting right. It’s a solid post. There’s a lot I agree with. And a lot I don’t.

Prisoners of perspective

There’s a saying I’m quite fond of – “we are our incentives”. The shit that we get evaluated on, rewarded for, and punished for shapes our thoughts and actions. Why do people do stupid shit? Careless shit? Selfish shit? Heartless shit? Because of their incentive structures.

But, we’re also our perspectives. Now, there’s a whole rabbit hole about how perspectives are shaped by incentives, but let’s leave that alone for the time being. For our purposes here, perspective is everything about you that makes you, well, you. And that drives how you interpret the world around you.

And from a modeling, err, perspective, it’s a lot easier to narrow this focus, right? Chris Becker is going to look at every aircraft model with an eye toward inflight display. Will Pattison will bring his engineering mindset along for the ride. And Robert Blokker is looking at this whole creativity/innovation donnybrook from the perspective of a dioramist.

I’m not assigning any good or bad value to any of this. It just is. Everyone has their own perspective. And that’s awesome. But it’s also really important to acknowledge it. How much modeling bullshit do you think could be avoided if people were generally more conscientious of perspective?

The limits of my perspective

Robert brings his dioramist sensibilities to his post – and that’s the part that made me initially bristle. The idea that 1) a diorama first and foremost has to tell a story and 2) that story has to be told through a cast of figures.

From my perspective, the overwhelming majority of dioramas don’t tell a story. Even the best ones. A vanishingly small minority do. It’s a challenging thing to pull off with a static medium. But I’ve mused about this side of things before in Against Storytelling. Ultimately, like “art”, I think “storytelling” is a term that’s been stretched over too many things.

I also don’t think story has to be told through people. But here’s the thing. I’m bringing so much into this that’s shaping my perspective.

As a history major, my primary areas of focus were Ancient Rome and early Medieval Europe. Periods well outside of living memory and (largely) outside of reliable, eyewitness narrators. As such, there is a lot of interaction with historical artifacts. Letters. Payment records. Pottery. Excavations. And all of that really impressed upon me just how many stories there are in THINGS.

When I think back to times I was most just completely awed by the weight of history, it’s been in the experience of things and places. Seeing the graffiti on the walls in Pompeii. Or the worn steps of some lesser Roman amphitheater like the one in Verona.

A lot of my favorite static art – photography, painting, etc – isn’t about people. When I was learning photography I was always attracted to texture, to tumbledown buildings and rusting out cars. I’ve always loved a landscape that can make you feel.

And all of that informs my perspective. For me, it’s not about storytelling. It’s about a snapshot. At best, capturing a moment in a story that the viewer can work out without too much contextual knowledge. But without that, capturing a vibe. A feeling. Have you ever looked at a model, vignette, or diorama, and felt cold? Or serene? Or uneasy? Or curious?

From my limited perspective, that’s the good stuff. The vibe. And one of my favorite exemplars of that is Thomas Doyle. His technical execution is not the best, but that’s not the point. He’s an artist using some of the tools that we use, but he’s not hemmed in by the constraints we modelers like to bind everything with. His work is surreal and, at least to me, utterly captivating.

I highly encourage everyone to go check out more of his stuff. If only to stretch out your perspective a bit.

Back to the lack of creativity

Coming back to the central point, the seeming lack of creativity or inspiration or risk-taking or call it what you will, I feel like the various voices are on the trail of something there, until perspective takes the reins. If you’re a hammer, you see every problem as a nail, and so on. Then it starts feeling like we’re dipping into different people in their own different caves all interpreting the shadows slightly differently.

But what if it’s all connected? What if what Rinaldi sees or Robert Blokker sees or Jake sees or I see are just symptoms?

I’ll offer three intertwined explanations for what may be manifesting this lack of creativity.

Different perspectives

Simple enough. We all have our own perspective. And for a lot of modelers, it may not be that carefully interrogated. I don’t really do Nazi subjects, and have doubled down on that since increasing parts of the global population have gotten back to playing footsie with fascism and antisemitism over the past several years. But ask modelers why they build so many German subjects, you get a lot of deeply introspective answers like “they look cool” or “they have the best camo”.

For most of us, this is a hobby. A diversion. A social outlet. I love to prod and interrogate my own motivations, but that’s a me thing.

My hunch is a lot of modelers aren’t putting the diorama they’re working on into some larger artistic perspective, or telling some intimate story. They’re doing a Panther waiting in ambush with pointing Germans because they want to and it’d look neat on their shelf. Hell – the reason I’m working on a Wildcat right now is that back in early August I got an absolute hair up my ass to make an Operation Torch Wildcat. Why? Fuck if I know.

Our dumb monoculture

Thanks to the internet and globalization and the soulless, exploitative succubus that is capitalism, we increasingly live in a kind of weird monoculture. It’s not the monoculture of old, where everyone watched the same three TV shows and listened to the same news anchor and talked about the exact same shit. Where like a whole country would shut down for a horse race (jesus…can you imagine?).

Ours is a different monoculture. One where everything is different and tailored and bespoke and yet somehow the same. Like this:

My dad still regales us with stories of bringing back Coors Light from business trips out to Colorado because it was unobtanium in certain markets. Nowadays, certain cuisines are best enjoyed in specific regions, but you can still get passable Mexican food in Tennessee, or deep dish pizza in Phoenix, or sushi in Texas. Things are generally more available and at a higher average level of quality than ever before.

But that universality also leads to “best practices” and a bit of groupthink and that’s how you end up with axe-throwing bars everywhere.

In our hobby, skills were highly localized. Your access to interesting paints and kits and ideas was entirely dependent on where you lived and how good your local hobby shop was. Now, you can find out someone’s using Mr. Color this way, complete with a multi-series video tutorial, order it, and have it flowing through your airbrush by the weekend. Everyone gets inspired by Night Shift and Mig and Adam Wilder and Rinaldi and follows along, honing their techniques, chasing their results, and slowly collapsing toward a certain similarity of perspective.

The “sea of sameness” effect? How much of it just stems from the simple fact that we’re all learning and pushing and growing from the same places?

Innovation is a fits-and-starts business

Creative innovation isn’t like a funicular railway that just goes up at a constant rate. I conceive it more like water. It flows into areas and it fills them up and as it does, you lose that flow and the basin starts to stagnate. Until the water level gets high enough to crest the banks, and then it flows somewhat aimlessly until it finds the next depression to flow into and fill up, and on and on.

Right now, we’re seeing a lot of innovation in the materials world. How many superlative kits exist now that didn’t exist 10 years ago? How many period and genre doors have been kicked open? I remember when WWI armor just…wasn’t. If you wanted to build a Whippet, you had to endure a shitfest of an Emhar kit. 1/32 biplanes didn’t really exist until Wingnut Wings proved they deserved to. So many Cold War armor subjects were only served by 40+-year-old kits until Takom or whoever decided to revisit them.

You get the idea.

We’re also seeing better, more realistic diorama materials. Leaf punches, much better grass and weed tufts than I’ve ever seen before, better materials for casting water, you name it. Better paints, more paints, more options.

And then there’s 3D printing and all the innovation it brings to the table. Can’t find decent aftermarket tracks? Design your own! Want amazingly detailed tires and manhole covers? They’re out there waiting for you! We’ve really only just barely started tapping this new horizon.

How does that translate?

Growth isn’t constant. Something shoots forward and everything else has to adjust and catch up. People are able to take their increasing executional capabilities and apply them to subjects or ideas that were outside of their range in the past. And there’s enough “new” in that that the water hasn’t turned stagnant for the vast majority of modelers.

Being the change

Is there a lot of same-same in this hobby? Oh yeah. Are there a lot of cliched, uninspiring dioramas? Yes. Just as there are a lot of forgettable models. A lot of copying as a way of learning. A lot of herd mentality and path of least resistance for individual markings and subjects. I don’t think that’s ever going to change. People gonna people. And people just want a mean looking Tiger tank with a pointing Nazi.

I think it’s pretty shitty to sit back and smugly tell people they’re modeling from a place of fear and to “be more innovative”.

Instead of being overly prescriptive, I would just offer this. Make it interesting. Embrace YOUR perspective, but look up, look around. Another dark green/dark earth Battle of Britain Spitfire isn’t interesting. So what can YOU bring to it to make it interesting? It can be how you build it. Or how you paint it, or how you choose to display it. Go full ass Thomas Doyle surreal with it. Just…go for interesting.

Why?

Because striving for interesting shifts your incentives and your definition of success. And that starts to shift your perspective. As modelers we can navel gaze about accurate details or shapes or colors or markings or (gestures vaguely) and lose sight of the bigger picture (and a fair bit of creative possibility). Pegging your goals to “interesting” can get you out of that mode, and I think you’ll find that that by itself can light some creative fires under your ass.

But that’s just my perspective.