Paper Mache

Every year at The Eldest's school, the entire school is required to do a media center reading project.  This year The Eldest chose Space as his theme.  They read books about it and then they have to do something creative.  He chose to do a paper-mache model of the space shuttle.   He plans on having a cargo bay with working doors on it.

This isn't going to be a tiny model either.  It's being built to 1/40th the size of the shuttle, so it will be approximately 3 feet long and 2 feet wide.  It's going to take a lot of glue and newspaper I think.

We started brainstorming and sketching and then broke out the newspaper and masking tape to start making the form:

You can see how large this is going to be when we back up some and look again:

 

This is as far as he got with it.  He still has to finish the back of the cargo bay and add the back and wings, so it has a way to go before we can start layering the newspaper and glue.  Then we're going to install (somehow) a robotic arm (fake of course, we're not ready to tackle robotics yet) that can hold a model of a piece of the International Space Station.

I'm trying to back off this project as much as possible so that he can do the bulk of the work.  I'm mainly serving as artistic director,extra hands and photographer.  I'll give you an update next week after we tackle the next part of the shuttle.