About PK

A little about PK

I was born in 1970. Too late to see the first man on the moon, even too late to consciously have seen any of the other manned moon landings at all as they happened. I missed Skylab and ASTP, too. I just was too young. When my grandfather got me interested in spaceflight by telling me what he knew about it, I was 7 and the U.S had stopped bringing people into orbit for two years already and it would take four more years before John Young and Bob Crippen took Columbia for her first ride.
I had a lot of catching up to do. I read a lot about spaceflight and devoured all information on the subject I could lay my hands on. By the time Columbia took to the skies I could name almost all American (and most Russian!) space flights with crew and all, backwards and forward.
I have been intrigued in spaceflight ever since.

11 year old me, hacking away in a 1/144 shuttle model. I literally threw them together and mostly didn't even paint them properly. While the other kids on my birthday party were playing games, I sometimes sneaked upstairs and started gluing together the new model kits I got as presents. I wasn't that interested in parties, I guess. And I apparently also didn't really care about the wallpaper....

Around that same time I also got into scale modelling. On birthdays I always got some kits of aircraft or sometimes spacecraft. Revell, Airfix, Heller, I threw most of those kits together in an hour, unpainted and quite crude. After my 12th or so, I kind of stopped modelling all together, until I picked it up again when I was about 25.

One year later. Note the new wallpaper. The same shuttle gets a black layer of paint (why?) and I made a fairly decent Dakota too. These were my last models for a long time. Note the Gemini in the left corner of the photo..

Of course, the first thing I built was plastic. A Sukhoi Su-34 if I recall correctly. After that everything slowly came back. When I bought the 1/96th Revell Saturn V in 2009 I was very disappointed on how badly detailed this big expensive kit was and how much I needed to change to make it look fairly decent and realistic. I bought some resin and photo-etched kits which together cost more than the original kit itself, of which I only used half of the parts. The result was quite good but I soon saw the gross lack of detail at every available (and affordable) space model. Aftermarket resin kits were an option but although I was amazed about their quality, they were often too expensive for my level of skills.

On the internet I found the most beautiful paper models of all kinds of space subjects, but also planes, trains, automobiles, animals and other fun stuff. That was in 2010 and from that moment on I have been modelling in paper and more or less abandoned plastic.
I still do make an occasional model in plastic now and then but the joy that paper modelling brings is many times larger.  The creation of a 3D object from a flat sheet of paper is so much more satisfying than gluing together pre-shaped stuff. And it doesn't smell bad either. So, stop reading and make yourself a paper model! I have put a busload of links in the sidebar, there's something interesting for everyone there.

42 years old me in 2012, armed with some new weapons in the battle of ageing to keep on making small models.

PK lives somewhere in Groningen, NL. One of his official occupations is documentary film maker.