My son has been studying World War One at school. His optional project is to depict life in the trenches so we had a go over the holidays.

We started with a model bought from ebay. It seemed cheaper than starting from scratch.
We then took a cardboard box and reshaped it to extend the scene into No Man's Land.

We fashioned a piece of cardboard to bridge the gap between the box and the model and made sure all the cardboard bits were securely fastened together with masking tape and PVA glue.

A lick of paint (ok several coats of paint), corrugated cardboard, model barbed wire, sandbags made from toilet paper and soil (aka loose leaf tea) and the model comes alive.