Usborne Medieval Port



Jef's Review of the Kit

My daughter Aenea, then 6 and in first grade, and I built the Usborne Medieval Port. I have been building card models (and other models) since childhood, and the joy of turning a flat sheet of inexpensive printed paper into a realistic model has never abandoned me. In this case, inexpensive is the operative word. The model sells for about US$10 and the white glue and additional parts we added could not have added a single dollar. There were dozens of hours of entertainment and togetherness for that low price, and the pride and pleasure my daughter took when she presented the model to her first grade class (then studying the topic of houses) were additional bonuses. The one major glitch, which was so apparent even my daughter noticed it, is the change of scale from one building to another, or even from one side of a building to another side. There is really no excuse for this. Another annoyance was the drawings of people on the buildings. While on a model of this scale, it is easier to draw on features such as half-exposed beams, lintels, and other low relief, I dislike an overt mix of two- and three-dimensional work in the same model. We artfully (I hope) covered most of the painted-on people with plants. The design of the arched doorway is architecturally impossible, the doors could not have opened. We moved the doors to the outside of the arch, where they make sense. Do not consider this model as a paragon of authentic medieval history, it is as much the artist’s imagination as observation. On the other hand, the design cunningly gets printing on both inside and outside where it is needed, and many construction details are well thought out. I am not an absolute purist with regard to models, and so we did not restrict ourselves to paper in this one. The most effective additions we made were some late season weeds that we found alongside the road. They serve nicely as trees. Lichen forms the overgrown fields, and we went to the beach for some sand and small pebbles that made sand and rocks in the model. A few short pieces of a scrap of dowel formed the bollards at waterfront locations. Aside from adding a pair of shark fins in the lagoon, our modifications included opening up doors and windows, painting insides of buildings black, and modifying some of the pieces for better fit. The fit, overall, was reasonably good, but definitely not excellent. The fit to the base was quite a ways off in places, and we covered the errors with glued-on sand. Some parts, such as the roof of the round building and some of the simpler buildings were made entirely by Aenea, which shows what a motivated youngster can do. At the beginning her job was just to find the numbered parts in the book. Then she graduated to rough-cutting them out, and then to doing the parts that were best done with scissors while I used the straight edge and X-acto knife. Then she learned how to fold the lines I had scored, and apply the right amount of glue. At first, I did the gluing, but eventually she copied my technique of using a scrap of cardboard to apply the glue with precision. Making curves by pulling the paper over the edge of our glass building surface or rolling it on a small dowel came easily to her, and by the time we were finished, she had most of the techniques in hand, if not the requisite precision. We were not able to get the big boat model that came in the book to fit at all, and regretfully discarded it. The flat cut-out people and boats we didn’t even bother with. For us, it was 3-D or nothing. At bottom, I think that this model represents good value, but the artist could have done better for the same effort.