This years Austin IPMS show was held at the Crockett Center on August 25, 2001 in Austin ,Texas.This is not the first show for this group; they have been putting this one on for several years, bringing in modelers from all around Texas; Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and some as far as Mexico City.
This year I volunteered as a judge for the Figure Model category.I wanted to see how a non-Figure person would judge these kits.In our group , there were a total of four judges, and head judge to make decisions if a question came up. In our group, there was only person who worked strictly on figure kits; myself.
Kits were being judged by general appearance. Then I had made a small suggestion that maybe we should judge them as most shows do. What I have gathered before, is that kits should be judged on three things: Assembly, Paint Job, and Presentation.Assembly is just making sure joints are puttied, seam lines removed, and a generally good build up.Paint job was looking for overpainting i.e. flesh color on a shirt or vice versa, and on some military kits, making sure they had the proper paint scheme.Presentation was seeing if the kit was being shown as it was meant to be built straight out of the box, or had the person put a little effort into it like lighting a torch the kit is holding, etc.
I had always felt that most IPMS members don't really appreciate the work that goes into building figure models. But as I was looking at each and every figure, I began to see what they had been looking at.Almost all kits had some sort of small defect on it; overpaint, missed area left unpainted, seam lines, and so on. When it got this point of there not being a kit that didn't have some kind of flaw, we had to count up how many we saw on each kit, and give it to the kits that had the fewest.There was only one kit that we had found that was considered "perfect"; a WW 2 Nazi with an MG-32 machine gun in 120 mm. Looking a this kit with magnifying glasses, we could not see any flaws. I bowed to the other judges on the color scheme, but I agreed that I had not found anything "wrong" with this kit.Needless to say, it was awarded 1st in military figures and Best Figure.
I was starting to understand them as we went on through the 80mm and smaller,80mm and larger,120 mm and larger, Mounted, and Misc. Military figures.But then we came to Horror category,Sci-Fi category, and Comic Book/Superhero category. This is where the old rumors about not knowing how to judge a figure came into play.In a few categories, I had to argue with the other judges about the winners.We had some kits that had more flaws than others, but they liked another kit over what should have won.Our group was the last one to finish; I belive it was because I had been arguing with the other judges, who were leaving the rules behind just because they 'liked' one kit over another.I finally had to say, "Fine pick what you want, but I'll have you know I am against your decision.".Some kits there were winners from the Las Vegas figure show, that won an award over close to a hundred other figure models.
So, in the long run, you have to respect the way they judge military kits, but not how they decide on the winners of non-Military figures. |
