Barbed Wire

Barbed wire can be a useful addition to many terrain pieces and in this article we look at a variety of ways to model it.
The first, and possibly the most realistic, shows a piece by Neal Crankshaw:

The four pictures below illustrate Neal's technique:

1. Take a length of multi-strand electrical cable.
2. After stripping off the insulation, take three of the copper strands and twist them loosely together.
3. Tie knots at regular intervals.
4. Now, use a craft knife, to cut one of the strands close to the knots. Hey Presto! Barbed wire.

The next two pictures, by 'Ariss' illustrate a slightly less realist but almost certainly sturdier technique that should stand up to a fair amount of handling:

The technique is illustrated in the images below.

In a nutshell, a thin wire is wrapped around a thicker wire before wrapping the whole thing around a pen. It is interesting to note that Ariss has chosen to use insulated wire for the thicker wire because this makes it "easier to handle, as the thinner wire won't slip on it".
Ariss also suggests the application of a couple of dabs of superglue to keep everything in place prior to painting.
The photo below shows a variation that 'Bushdoctor' calls the 'double twist method'. Instead of wrapping the thin wire at equal intervals as shown above, Bushdoctor makes two wraps very close to each other and then leaves a gap before making another two tight wraps:

In the image to the right Andrew 'Kishkumen' Nelson illustrates what must surely be the easiest method of creating the look of barbed wire. Andrew has simply taken a piece of vinyl window screen and cut the mesh such that he ends up with strands with 'barbs' on them. What could be simpler?
Dragonflies7033 combines this with the previous method and twisted the strands of mesh around another wire to achieve the effects in the image below. To the left of the image he has used it as straight lengths whereas to the right he has created coils as illustrated above by Ariss' images.
Andrew Nelson and dragonflies7033 have both used their barbed wire in conjunction with Czech hedgehogs.