My Account
Models of Yoda, a light sabre, helmet and TIE Fighter from Star Wars feature in Phillip Fickling’s Orewa home, along with a paper robot crouched within a glass dome, a carved wooden whale and a 2m long submarine made of fencing wire. The interesting array provides a glimpse into Phillip’s love of Science Fiction, art and model making, which eventually morphed into full time work as a paper engineer. All his models begin as drawings and Phillip’s sketchpad is never far away; it has travelled with him from America to Antarctica and beyond, as he told Terry Moore.
Growing up and even at art college, I was seen as a bit of an outsider, with a different sense of humour to the others – but retaining that quirky sense of fun is essential for a model maker. You also have to have an active imagination. When I was in Antarctica with the Navy, a helicopter would drop us off in the middle of nowhere and it was easy to imagine we were on another planet – or a Star Trek set. We goofed off a lot out there.
I grew up in Seattle where it rains a lot and so I spent a lot of time inside, building things out of paper plates and shoeboxes as children do. I also collected kitset plastic models – hot rods and planes – and was into TV programmes like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea as well as Star Trek and Batman and all those great old shows. I still follow that stuff but don’t go to the conventions – those types of fans seem a bit scary. At school I made paper models in art class – for most people it was a class to goof off in, but it was my favourite and I took it seriously. After school I wanted to be an artist of some kind but couldn’t afford to go to art school, so I went into the US Navy. They had a programme that paid for your education after you’d served your time. For three years I was on an aircraft carrier and that included spending two summers at McMurdo in Antarctica fuelling aircraft. There’s a lot of downtime, which I spent with a sketchpad, taking any opportunity to get out of real work. The Navy must have spotted this because in the 1970s they asked me to design a seal (embroidered patch) for Operation Deep Freeze. I came up with a Snowcat vehicle with engines on it like the Starship Enterprise and the words ‘Antarctica – the Final Frontier’.
I went on to study at the Burnley School of Professional Art in Seattle. I remember that a lot of assignments were to make something and while most people would do a painting, I would make things out of paper. Most of the time I got good grades and at least I was doing something different from everyone else. I finished the course after 18 months, instead of three years, because I was hired out in 1979. A big greeting card company was looking to recruit commercial artists from my course and one of the tutors thought I should go. All the other students had slick portfolios and I had a big blue suitcase with a broken lock filled with spaceships made in white paper from TV shows and Star Wars. The company hired me on the spot, because they were looking to cash in on Star Wars, which was big at the time. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. I only had to work there for a year to qualify for my Diploma, but ended up staying 13 years. I made a lot of model kits and birthday cards with robot models that you could punch out and make, as well as Halloween and Christmas products. It was great but got quite political in the end; it was a family owned company that was bought and sold several times and got more like a sweatshop as time went by, so I moved on. My wife Jenny and I moved to Christchurch in 1993, and I continued working for greeting card companies and doing freelance work.
Being a paper engineer requires good research and you have to think of things in three dimensions. You study pictures of what the subject looks like from all angles and then sketch, breaking it down into simple shapes that can be combined. It’s a challenge to turn complex things, such as the Star Wars TIE Fighter, into a simple form. I have to distil it to the essence of its parts and work out how they go together using tabs and slots. It is quite a slow and detailed process and there are usually around three versions that get tweaked a bit each time. Then I use a drawing programme on the computer but essentially it’s still an old fashioned process. For 10 or so years I did the whole thing by hand, painting with an airbrush or paintbrush and drawing on draughting film, but now the computer can replicate things and is a lot more accurate. I still make a prototype by hand, printing on an inkjet printer and cutting out the pieces with a craft knife. It generally takes a bit of fiddling to get it right. A helmet, of medium complexity, might take roughly 30 hours of work and another 30 for the artwork on the outside of the model. The relatively recent term ‘paper engineering’ covers the model making part of it, but I also do the assembly instructions and illustrations for publications such as the Star Wars Mega Models book. Paper quality is important, as well as grain direction, which has to be correct in order for the paper to fold without cracking. I have a closet full of paper swatch books as well as a collection of around 40 pop up books. You work closely with printers so they manufacture things properly, including making the cutting die, which the printed sheet is run through. Another area that has changed over the years is that I used to spend a lot of time in libraries but now it’s all on the internet. Fans’ websites are useful because they like to get the details right.
I worked in Weta Workshop for a few months on contract, and it was a very creative group of people to work with. I did a model of Frodo’s helmet and another of a place called Mynastirith, which were part of a collectible series of 5000 pieces. They gave you the helmet used in the movie and you had to make it to scale. I never read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – I’m more of a science fiction/fantasy fan and if we had been doing that sort of work at Weta I’d probably still be there. After I broke both my wrists in a motorbike accident in 2008 in Wellington, I was off work for around two years until my neighbour, author Joy Cowley, asked me to work on her Robby and Hoot book. I must have done around seven pop up books now, including The House that Wonky Built as well as some that come as boxed sets of die cut sheets – the latest one enables the owner to build a model Viking ship. Rocket ships are a common theme in my work and I try to include them wherever possible. I also worked for Brother on the NZ Rally TV ad where images of cars are printed out, then turn into real cars and race.
Making fine art is another area that I’m very interested in and there are artists making sculptures out of paper that look as though they’re carved out of stone, but can also expand and move like a slinky. The leading artists in this field are in America and Europe. It’s a direction I’d like to head into; I’ve made a few art pieces already, including a robot in a glass dome made of white paper. It folds into itself, but you can take it out and it stands up. I’m also working with NZ artist Judy Millar on a pop up book of her art called Swell. Changes in technology have meant that books of models, like the Star Wars one I worked on, are coming back because, in the world of e-books, they offer something that is hands-on, interactive and different.
