As much as I wish that title were coming true, what I really mean is that I’ll be building a model of the World Trade Center. So far in the years since 9/11, I’ve had a wall mural of the famous picture with the Brooklyn Bridge, pictures ranging from desktop size to wall size and also a huge U.S. flag draped on my wall in remembrance.

Now, I decided I wanted to have a real, tangible object I could have on display, so after some searching, I finally found a website that has paper models that can be printed out on card stock, folded and glued together to form not only the Twin Towers, but the entire World Trade Center complex as it appeared before that tragic day.

The website I found is SkyscraperModels.us and they actually have a pretty good size list of other buildings as well as a few they’re still working on.

I’ve built a paper model before (the old Disneyland marquee), so I’m pretty familiar with this process. Basically, you print out the hi-rez pictures onto thick photo paper or high quality card stock and then you simply follow the directions on how to fold and glue it all together.

Normally this process takes a couple of hours at most, but I tend to make some adjustments as I go along. These are usually added to increase the element of detail or just to make it more sturdy. In any case, I’ll keep this page updated with my progress as well as adding pictures as I go along.

Stay tuned…

I just found an awesome site that has a bunch of paper models you can build spanning some cool parts of Disneyland, past and present. If you head over to DisneyExperience.com, you’ll find what I’m talking about.

As for this page, I’m going to show you what I’m working on right now:

Once I get a camera in here, I’m going to show you the pics of me actually building it and the slight modifications I made. In the meantime, here’s the mods:

1. Changed the font from the common StartedByAMouse to a commercial font called Kingdom — This cleaned up the overall look since the ‘free’ font is very jagged and is also out of proportion in some areas.
2. Used wood sticks painted yellow to represent the flag poles — Obviously this upped the ante on realism by replacing the paper cutout ones. I used the standard yellow Testors model paint.
3. Used a fine-tipped Sharpie to redraw the dotted fold lines to better hide them — There were a few areas where you could see the fold lines, so using a marker cleared this up and also added a little more definition to these areas.

Click on page 2 to check out the pics.