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.


5 comments:

Daisy Gowan Ditchburn said...

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

west1871 said...

Great looking building!

Sean said...

Win, win. It came out nice.

Mauther Papermau said...

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

EY said...

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.