Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

Little kids are fascinated by things in miniature. Maybe it?s the idea of a world where they?re the big people, maybe it?s the idea of seeing everything all at once, or maybe there?s an instinct to see the small and vulnerable as cute.

As adults we might seek larger things; owning a house, buying an SUV, or, ahem, admiring other large objects of our affection, but the miniature still holds an appeal. Witness bonsai, toy trains, and those miniature villages you see everywhere during the holiday season. The small has an important place in the life of apartment dwellers, from small dogs to small plants to small appliances.

Making your own world-in-miniature is an easy task, and creating a cardboard village is inexpensive, made with readily-available materials, and gives you room for endless creativity. Cut your cardboard into walls and roofs; gables and chimneys, porches and additions all make your houses personal and real. Score the cardboard (cut halfway through) to make folds and bends. After you cut the cardboard, color the pieces before assembly. This allows you to color the edges and avoid getting your paint or marker all over the rest of the building. Cut squares of black paper for windows, using a white pencil to add ?reflections? to make them look more real ? alternatively, square hole punches can cut real holes in your walls, with far less risk of injury than if you use an X-Acto knife. Assemble and glue with Elmer?s, and you have a house.

A Shelter Sketchbook by John Taylor is a good reference for different styles and reasons behind the elements of these styles. This little book consists largely of pen-and-ink drawings of homes from all over the world; while it concentrates on those of humans, it shows animal creations as illustrations of a design principle ? such as the mounds built by termites as an efficient use of local materials to keep cool in a hot climate. Follow the A Shelter Sketchbook, and you can create tropical huts, desert villages, or anything you want. There are also many wonderful architectural guides that will help you make a Queen Anne, saltbox, or Victorian stick house.

And don?t stick religiously to cardboard. A tropical hut will probably be more easily made with twigs or cloth; an igloo might call for styrofoam cut with an X-Acto knife. Whittle down matchsticks to make logs; a bit of brown marker, a dab of glue, and you have a log home.

Creating your own trees and other greenery is difficult to do well on your own. Those triangular trees so popular with the 1960s miniature village crowd have, um, limited appeal. Moss is available at most craft stores in bags, and you can either buy trees or make your own out of wire. Or you can make you village smack dab in the middle of the desert, which is my personal preference.

Remember: practice makes perfect. We expect to be able to create simple things simply, and that simply is not the case. Adults are especially vulnerable to this self-recrimination when our projects turn out wrong. One way around this is to decide beforehand to create a trial 10-house village, one that will be tragically wiped out in the Great Flood of ?06.

Be Sociable, Share!

•