I have to admit to not knowing much about mosques, but I do know that they can be key points in the fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Naturally, I wanted to make this the most elaborate building in the village, so I bought some of the Warbases windows to use. I chose the leaded light windows as, whilst the pattern is not perfect for the Muslim world, it is at least ornate and makes it look like someone has taken care with it. I do know that imagery is not allowed in their faith, but geometrical designs are seen as an illustration of the greatness of Allah, so I wanted the whole structure to have some geometry about it. In the end I decided on a cruciform structure with some embellishments. I stated like this….
…and then went on to this. You can see that the windows on all faces are balanced and the smaller corner pieces make to an over-all twenty sides structure,. which is as geometrical as I’m going to get with polystyrene!
And yes, that is fresh claret on the corner and it bloody hurt. A salutary lesson in how important it is to be careful with a sharp blade!
The next step was to make the roofs. I had now decided that MDF was the way forward here. Each roof would have some feature or other, maybe a pot or an air conditioning unit, which would in truth be a handle with which the lid could be lifted off. MDF would be solid and robust enough to stand lots of handling. It is also easily cut with a saw. As can be seen below. The mosque dome was a polystyrene piece which I purchased when I bought the 2″ blue poly sheet. It cost about thirty bob and was a great buy at that price.
So the village was now roofed. The next step was to prep it for the gloop which would form the surface and give it that “freshly made with camel shit” look that I so aspired to.
The first step was to fill some gaps. I used Milliput to do this. It was a tedious job, but it is simple enough and I watched a couple of episodes of Ross Kemp swearing his way around the green zone while I did it.
Next comes a key stage. Where car undercoat paint touches polystyrene it will eat it up like acid. If there are any parts of the model where the polystyrene could be exposed you MUST cover this up with PVA glue to forma protective barrier. For me, this was the following places.
1. Where I had drawn on exposed rocky sections…
2. Where the wall ends and the doors begin. I want to keep this clear of the gloop or it looks like the doors have been set in concrete.
3. Where the wall lip houses the flat roof. The roofs have been cut to fit. A big dollop of gloop here will mess this up badly, so just PVA here.
Finally, I added the wooden structures which would support some other roofing. I am intwo minds where to leave this as a tarpaulin type material or use a rough thatch. Either way, this structure of match sticks with a liberal application of PVA glue, will serve to support it.
And that’s it for Day Four. Tomorrow sees us apply the magic camel shit gloop with a big brush. Imagine how photogenic that will be…!