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At 7pm last night my daughter announced that she had to make a model of a World War One trench for her history homework and asked if I could help her. She’s known about it for weeks and it had to be handed in today. 

 

After a a bit of swearing we settled around the dining table to bash something out quick with whatever we had to hand. It’s unlikely to be coming back from school so there was no way I was using any expensive modelling stuff on it, therefore everything that we used could be found lying around in many households. The main landscape is polystyrene, melted a bit with a blowtorch, the sandbags are air dried clay, the duckboards and posts are kitchen matches and lollipop sticks, and the corrugated iron is paper. The wire is just fine beading wire; I didn’t have time to try any kind of barbed effect, and to be honest most model barbed wire just looks out of scale and unrealistic to me anyway. It was painted with some children’s craft paint, total build time was about 5 hours and it sits inside a shoe box.

 

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Well, that's a cracker!

 

Great corrugated iron, great mud, great duckboards, great barbed wire, great sand bags.

I wonder if that's why the called it The Great War?

 

Rearguards,

Badder

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Thanks everyone. Strangely I think it helped to have a deadline with this; I didn’t overthink anything, just  developed an outline idea of what I wanted it to look like and then threw some tricks at it. It’s a bit like writing an essay the night before you have to hand it in; you don’t have time to worry about it, you just crack on.

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Thanks all. It’s fair to say it was a joint effort - I had the daughter fabricating sandbags and duckboards and gave her a tutorial in washes and weathering so there was some educational value. She also had a hand in designing the thing and pointed out the various features (fire step, parapet, parados etc) that it needed. She was up until about 11.30 helping with it and would have been there for the full stretch if I hadn’t sent her to bed. The only annoying thing is that I told her to tidy up the outside of the box in the morning and she didn’t. 

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