Who I Am…

Juan Muñoz Ruiz, Madrid, Spain, 1979.

I am a passionate hobbyist model maker since a very young age. I started about 7 years old building airplane kits that I assembled in minutes and then played with for hours. I focused on building airplanes until I was sixteen, when I discovered tanks and the endless possibilities of what we now call "weathering" that they could offer.

I have always dedicated little time to the hobby, with various long interruptions due to studies and work. My professional career as a chef, sometimes abroad, left little room to play with model kits and my entire output barely amounts to a dozen finished models, which made every finished build a significant achievement for me.

My hobby has been always been kept in a completely personal and domestic sphere. The only contact with the world of model making was the specialized stores in my city and the modeling magazines I could find. Around 2015, fully inspired by Paolo Parente's works I saw online, I dared to build my own "walking tank," transforming a Soviet T-34 with parts from a German Tiger I.

That project was immensely satisfying and sparked my passion for scratch-building. However, it wasn't until the fateful lockdown during the early part of 2020 that I fully immersed myself in building a complete model from scratch, with the ambitious idea of being able to reproduce it entirely by casting all its parts in resin. The project was entirely personal, but it carried the secret hope that someone more skilled than me might want to build their own model using my kit.

2022 was the year I returned to a modeling competition for the first time since my university days. The experience was positive, and the results were spectacular. It was at that moment I thought that perhaps what I was doing with my HAND SHAKE MODELS might be of interest to other modelers.

In 2023, I became a member of my city's modeling club, Almería Modelismo, where I connected with other modelers from whom I learn week after week. Despite how unusual my style of modeling might seem to them, I have always received very positive feedback.

And fully back in the world of modeling since 2021, this project is what now fills me with excitement and joy.