Thursday, March 22, 2012

Mission San Miguel Arcángel


The California 4th Grade Mission Project has been a part of the curriculum in many Californian public schools for quite some time. I'm not really sure when this tradition started, since I don't remember anyone doing this when I was in 4th grade, but it is certainly something I've been aware of since my kids started going to school.

Anyway, my daughter asked me to help her make a model of Mission San Miguel, so I blew up some drawings of the mission to approximately 1/72 scale, and used them as a template to cut out parts in cardboard and Styrofoam for her to paint and assemble.

East Elevation



West Elevation



Arcade with a couple of friars and a visitor



Mission Chapel



A friar and his flock


The friars are made of regular modeling clay, and the sheep and cow are from a set of farm animals.

When I helped my daughter deliver the mission to school this morning, I saw that other kids seemed to use more manageable scales like 1/250 or so, but 1/72 looks much more impressive in comparison, and there's the bonus of being able to use it in gaming.

Still, the footprint of Mission San Miguel is already so huge that I think I'm just going to give up on the scale model of Mission San Gabriel Arcángel that I had wanted to build at one time.


4 comments:

  1. very nice. I hope that it won first prize (if there is one). hope that it will prove usful in future.

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  2. Nice model! Please, take a look at this other San Miguel Mission/Chapel, from Brazil. It is a rela chapel here in Sao Paulo and one of the most ancient of Brazil.

    Link:http://papermau.blogspot.com.br/2011/08/st-michael-old-chapel-by-papermau.html

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  3. Thanks for the comments everyone. The model is only graded, so there's no prize, but I think we did a good job as well.

    @mauther
    Thanks for that link. There seems to be a lot of other great looking papercraft models there as well.

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