You've Got Too Much Time on Your Hands!

Of all the comments made about my little hobby of doing diecast dioramas, the dumbest one that I hear quite often is: "You've got too much time on your hands."
I think the commenter is trying to say "I'm busier than you". It's the sad, modern version of being "holier than thou". It's a miserable symptom of modern life that some people think it's a terrible thing to do something creative with your spare time. You're meant to be tired, worn out and exhausted by work – how can you have spare energy to burn?
I guess we're all meant to spend our tiny allocation of spare time on nights and weekends by wearily slumping down on the couch and watching TV? Or sitting at the computer and clicking "Like" on Facebook until it's bed-time?
Well, for this ranty posting I'd like to celebrate hobbyists everywhere by posting a few photos of the dioramas which have taken the most time to do. And at the end, I've found some great videos compiled by other people who also, fortunately, have too much time on their hands.

You've got too much time on your hands!

These old people came from a marketplace elsewhere, and deep-etching their
shadows took quite a while. I had to reconstruct the village behind, too.
Not sure how much time on my hands I wasted... many many hours though!

The whole background for this Australian Golden Fleece Service Station was
a black and white photo, so colourising it slowly happened over a period of
a week or two. Adding the Holdens and the bystanders only took a few hours,
right at the end of the very enjoyable and satisfying project.

The killer with this Vincent HRD bike (and all the other bikes I put against
this same background) was deep-etching the wheel spokes. Ages, it took.

This is another colourised black and white photo. It's one of those projects
that you do when you have some of that wickedly wasteful spare time to spend,
and from start to finish took a couple of weeks. Though this isn't my model
car in the image (it's a real one) I do have a model of the very same car, so
at least I had a starting point when trying to figure out the color scheme.

This, too, is a colourised black and white photo, and again I also have a
scale model of this Renault 4CV Barquette driven by Guy Michel in the
1953 Bol d'Or to help with the color choices. Like the other colourised
black and white photo projects, this took several weeks from start to finish.

And so fooling around in Photoshop is just one of the ways that I waste my precious spare time on weekends. I also manage to maintain an even busier little gardening blog at the same time, and so I think it comes down to what you do with the time available, rather than how much time you have to spare.

So now, to finish off this "up yours" to the sad fools who like to tell people with hobbies that they "have too much time on their hands", here's three entertaining little videos compiled by other people with too much time on their hands...

First, Madmen star Don Draper says "what?" in countless different ways