The last of this project’s posts until I can show off the painting work in progress photos and all the extra finished photos I didn’t use for the Lead Adventure Forum Build Something Contest 2025!
There was a bunch of pre-priming sanding, puttying and fiddling. The side walls of the fuselage pulled slightly skew during construction somehow, so the side rails that hold the roof panel in place had to be custom-fitted on each side.
The shuttle, complete except for landing gear and roof rails, front quarter view.Rear view of the shuttle, with some final glueup of one of the rear baffle panels in progress.Top view, showing the engraved panel lines in the wings nicely.PRIMER! Here’s the underside, complete except for landing gear, all primered.Primer, top view, with the already finished, painted, and decaled cargo bay masked off.Proper supervision is essential to all well run projects. Sophie la Floof spent quite a bit of time on the rug under my project bench making sure things went smoothly.
The landing gear only went on after painting, decals, and weathering were all done, so I don’t have any photos of that to show off yet.
By the time this posts audience voting on Build Something Contest 2025 should have started over on Lead Adventure! Go check out all the great entries! BSC rules say no sharing WIP or finished painted pictures until either the contest is over or you’re eliminated from it, so there will be a bit of a pause in shuttle pix here, but I do have a gallery fully of painting photos to show eventually.
If you want something done, give it to a busy person to do is a saying that floats around. It’s often true that when you’re in a certain creative groove, you can spin off other projects much faster than you might otherwise get to them!
I had extra plastic kits parts around from the 1/72 LeClerc MBT kit I bought to pillage for kitbashing parts, I had some rather cool pieces of offcut styrene around, and I wanted a landing pad to stage photos of the shuttle on, so it all came together in a trio of related projects.
The Drone
This started life with the top of the LeClerc turret, the cap off an Angosturna bitters bottle rescued from the recycle bin, some googly eyes and other bits from the dollar store, and various styrene bits.
The angosGMBH Distraction-class Autonomous Sensor Drone is set up for planetary and space surveying and exploration, with various sensor loadouts depending on mission. No crew space is available, although the tiny cargo/sample bay on the port side could accommodate a human-sized sophont in a space suit for a very short, very uncomfortable ride, if it hasn’t been adapted into a drone bay for auxiliary sub-drones. Some Distraction-class are themselves autonomous intelligent citizen-drones, although most have only limited-ML minds, and some platforms are old-fashioned remotely operated vehicles.
The drone went together in a single evening and was primed and painted the next day. I got zero photos of it in raw styrene.
Drone primed, side/top view.Primed, underside view.Primed, rear quarter view.Paint in progress.Paint in progress.Paint finished, no decals or weathering yet.Side profile with paint finished.
The Distraction-class has since been decaled and weathered; I’ll try to remember to get some proper finished photos of it soon and post them.
The Sensor/Comms Tower
This started with the increasing amount of styrene offcuts piling up around the edges of my workbench. Many of them were too large and too interesting in shape to just throw away, so I started fiddling around while waiting for solvent cement to cure on the shuttle and built this little tower in a couple of evenings.
It’s about 5″ tall to the top of the actual tower. The side profile is the offcuts from the nose skin of the shuttle, the various circles and hexagons are from building the docking port in the roof of the shuttle. The rest of the thing are either random offcuts from shuttle building or just stuff from my raw materials stash.
The tower, front view, bare styrene.The tower, rear view, in bare styrene.
The Landing Pad
This is from the last big piece of 1/8″ foamed PVC in my stash; I’m going to have to go get more from our local signmaking/plastic supply shop because it’s wonderful to work with. Stronger, cleaner, and easier to cut than foamcore, it can be embossed and engraved easily and cleanly, and it’s less murderous on knives too.
The whole thing is 12 inches by 12 inches, assembled from two 12×6 pieces with some connection strips underneath. It got grey primered, then a messy dampbrush/drybrush combo of various tans and greys over that, followed by a few washes in black, grey, and dark blue. There’s expansion cracks engraved right into the PVC, and after the main paint had dried I did a couple of marking lines with tape and a stippling brush in white and bright yellow-green. (Reaper’s Dungeon Slime paint. Highly recommended if you want an obnoxiously bright hazard warning colour!)
I also did a low wall piece with PVC offcuts. It’s 10″ long and about half an inch high. It got the same paint as the pad, with the top third or so painted white when I did the pavement markings on the pad.
Primed and waiting for paint.Painted and marking lines done. Nice and simple, just a few minutes work over a couple of days. Painted wall piece off to the right.The mostly-complete shuttle posing on the finished landing pad.
I’ve got a few final complete primered shuttle photos to show off soon, and after the Build Something Contest rules allow, I have a bunch of painting progress photos to post. The shuttle was a big painting project and painting took most of March and the first week of April!
The long-overdue fifth installment of my Build Something Contest blog posts! This one takes us from the end of Part Four, where we had the start of detail panels, no wings yet, and the cargo bay just primed.
Per BSC rules I can’t share WIP or finished painted photos yet, so there’s still going to be gaps in this build log. I have a bunch of WIP paint photos taken and will share them when the contest has begun.
Feb 22 – the underside gets detail panels.Feb 22 – underside detail panels, looking aft.22 Feb – the engine pod assembly begins.22 Feb – layout of the two wings on 1mm styrene sheet.22 Feb – engine and wing subassembly taped in place on the fuselage.22 Feb – wings taped to fuselage.22 Feb – wings temporarily mounted to fuselage, overhead view.24 Feb – wings and engine pod details.. Front view, showing the intake grilles.24 Feb – wing and engine subassembly, rear view with jet/rocket nozzles.24 Feb – another view of the rear of the engine pods.2 March – putty work on the engines and wings.3 March – putty and test fit of roof and wings on the fuselage.3 March – decal sheets assembled. There are almost three dozen decals in the cargo bay and another twenty or so on the outside of the finished shuttle.9 March – final test fit of the wing/engine subassemblies9 March – the wings get the vertical stabilizers added.9 March – rear ramp view with detail panels on the insides of the rear fuselage extensions.9 March – the wings finally get glued on! Major construction is finished, on to priming and painting!
Along the way while finishing the shuttle, I built a 12″x12″ landing pad as a photo prop and gaming scenery, a small ‘drone’ using some of the LeClerc MBT parts that hadn’t be used in the shuttle build, and a 6″ tall sensor tower that used up a bunch of the offcut styrene from the shuttle that was too interesting to just throw away. I’ll share photos of them in another post.
Another photo dump of the last ten days or so progress on my Build Something Contest 2025 entry. My LAF project thread is getting much more regular updates (new photos every other day or so at this point) if you want to follow along!
As of the last blog post the nose had been skinned but not much else. Since then I’ve tried several designs for the wings, disliked every single one of them, built and detailed the removable roof for the cargo bay, and started doing detail panels on the nose.
Check the captions of the photos below for more details.
Engine/wing mockup in cardstock. This is the second, smaller, angular wing.Second wing in place, with the first bigger slab-like wing on the cutting mat. Still not happy with either design, so I left the wings alone to do other stuff for a bit!One of the wing mockups taped in place alongside the open cargo bay.The underside, showing the three landing gear bays and the un-skinned belly.Primer! I’m going to be painting the cargo bay before gluing the rear bulkhead & ramp in place, so it got primed.Rear ramp deployed, couple of 28mm figures hanging out for scale.Wider view of the rear bulkhead & ramp with the whole shuttle propped up to about the height it’ll sit on it’s landing gear.The ceiling of the cargo bay all detailed.Roof! The start of the removable roof of the cargo bay.The top of the roof, with the docking port/escape hatch detailed. It’s recessed into the roof.The roof in place, looking foward toward the nose of the shuttle.Detail panels in 0.5mm styrene being installed. When installing across a bend like this, much easier to glue one side down, let the solvent glue cure, then do the other side across the bend!Second detail panel installation, side view.
The belly skin will be installed today, and then I’ll be able to carry the detail panels aft from the nose, down the belly, and around the landing gear bays.
I’ve also (finally) started building the actual landing gear, because I need to set the height of that before I can make some detailing decisions for the underside of the beast.
Then it’ll be back to the engine & wing subassemblies, where I have a third wing planoform I want to try out that I think will work better than attempts 1 and 2!
Decided to go with the nose next instead of the wings and engines, and as predicted in my last post, it required a lot of mockup work, in two stages.
First, I did an internal frame to establish the basic proportions of the nose and give me a nice solid frame to hang the skin from.
I redid parts of the skin mockup three times, including scrapping round three for part of the sides and going back to round two’s ideas. The advantage of all of the fiddling with cardstock and masking tape, of course, is that I knew what I was doing (mostly) when I switched to 1mm sheet styrene and started the real thing.
I also cut back the outer (top/bottom) corners of the sides where they extended forward, and that was the right call, it made integrating the nose and sides easier.
The hammerhead nose was a spur of the moment idea while planning the first mockup piece and I really like how it’s come together; the hammerhead let me play with the angles and bulk of the nose area more than a more straightforward taper would have.
Mockup for the nose frame.Nose frame finished in 1mm styrene. I wound up cutting most of the long thin brace on the outer side off, but all the internal bracing gave me a nice solid, trouble-free start to doing the skin.Finished nose frame. The whole beast is just under 11 inches long, nose to back end, which is perfect.Closeup of the top left with skin mockups in progress.Nose skin mockup in progress, figuring out what to do between the hammerheads and the start of the body/sides.The underside of the nose, mockups in progress.Finally cutting styrene! The big panel behind the hammerheads has a twist to it, so it got anchored down with elastic bands and left for the plastic cement to cure for a bit.Styrene skin in place, sanding and puttying cleanup started. There is going to be a LOT of sanding.Current state of the nose, with putty smeared around a lot of the seams and sanding in progress.
I really like how the whole thing is shaping up, it has a good bulky angular look to it. There’s going to be a round of detail panels over this initial skin, after the endless sanding and puttying is done – some of the seams didn’t come out quite as well fitted as I’d like, so there’s going to be some remediation before detailing can start!
Still to do, in rough order of size/complexity of the subassembly: the engine pods and wings; the roof for the cargo bay; landing gear and landing gear bay doors; skin on the belly.
I’m away this coming long weekend and have some things to get organized before we go away for the long weekend, and as mentioned, the next while is likely to be mostly sanding, so it might be ten days or so before there’s another blog-worthy update to this project!
My Build Something Contest 2025 thread on LAF is here; the rest of the contest has some very cool entries – there’s another couple of shuttles or dropships, some neat magical walking constructs, and a bunch of other cool concepts among the other contestants! Entries just closed on February 8th so everyone who’s in for this year is in!
Mocking up the sides with light card. I didn’t get a photo but there’s three pieces under each of the big side panels to give strength.Mockup stage showing the in-progress underside of the shuttle.Local supervisor hard at work.Styrene sides cut and installed, with the angular extensions at the back.Designing the initial panel of the rear bulkhead.Never enough clamps. Or clothes pins in this case. Adding bulk to the underside of the extension on top of the rear bulkhead.Rear bulkhead and ramp complete and detailed, outside view.Rear bulkhead and ramp, inside view.Rear bulkhead and ramp dry fitted to the body. I won’t be gluing the subassembly in until quite late to make painting the interior easier.Rear subassembly dry fitted, outside view. There will be small panels in each lower corner to cover the groove the ramp hinge pin rides in, and detail panels on the insides of the fuselage extensions.
Very pleased with progress so far. Up next will be either the engine/wing subassemblies on either side, or the nose, depending on my mood. Both are going to require more cardstock mockups, especially figuring out how the nose is going to join up to the front of the current body assembly…
It’s Build Something Competition on the Lead Adventure Forums again and once again I’m running them, so have been a bit behind on my own entry (unlike Brian, who is racing ahead with construction).
This year’s theme is Vessel or Conveyance, so most are doing movable things like shuttles. Although we have law firms, we do have two alcohol-related entries – my distillery and Tarnegol’s brewed. May the best booze win!
Inspiration and initial thoughts
to start, I did a bunch of Googling to find good images. There’s actually a whole 3D printable stl for a distillery by MiniatureLand on MyMiniFactory, so that was a good place to look for inspiration:
Distilling itself is a product of alchemy, which are basically the same art with different outcomes. And historically, people did a lot of a alchemy, but strangely really only started distilling drinkable alcohol in large quantities in the early Renaissance, right as European alchemists started building on what the Arabic scholars had done. That does mean we get lots of great art about alchemy:
Il laboratorio dell’alchimista by Giovanni StradanoThe Alchemist by David Teniers the YoungerThe Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers, by Joseph Wright of Derby
And of distilling itself, it really flourished in Renaissance Italy, which happens to be what I’m based on fantasy city on, so happy times. There are lots pieces of art of the key part of distilling: the still (the vessel from the competition theme):
Planning the building
With all those inspiration pieces done, I start the process of figuring out how big I wanted to make the building. I really want to tie it into my planned sewer/basements I’m doing for my city, so that fixes one part of the building: one edge must be 3″ tall for the basement, with the building on top.
With that set, I drew up some simple plans, ultimately deciding on a 6″x9″ building, with big double doors in the long end. The base of the building will be 3D printed, with foam building on top.
Base of the building including the basement.
And thus ends today’s post – with an initial base printing. Onward to actual construction tomorrow
The campaign funded (just!) which was cool, and I put in for 3 sprues. Molding up an injection molded plastic production run takes time and it was late October 2024 before I got my loot, but communication from Pete was good the whole time.
So what do you get? The sprue is roughly 6″ by 8.5″ and well-supplied with everything from shark jaws to antlers to femurs to hacked-off hands on spikes or hooks! I was mostly interested in the antlers and goat horns, but there’s lots of other neat stuff to accessorize scratchbuilding or kitbashing with!
The front of the Dead Animal Bits sprue. See text for details.The back of the sprue. See text for details!
Right in the centre of the sprue there’s half a dozen big shark jaws; the top of the sprue has two different style of goat/sheep (demon?) horn each in several sizes, and deer/elk antlers in three sizes. Below the shark’s jaws there’s some feathers (the small things off to the left of the front view), some rib cages, a bunch of severed hands on spikes or hooks, another style of curled goat horn in two different sizes, a few individual shark teeth, and finally a batch of femur-looking bones, again in several sizes.
A closeup – this is the top left of the front of the sprue. Horns, antlers, hands and heads on hooks, and shark teeth here.
If you want to do whole units of antlered or horned troops you’ll likely burn through a bunch of sprues, but if you just want to add general weirdness here and there a set of these sprues should keep you happily adding weirdness for a good long while.
I’ll be adding horns and antlers to a batch of undead infantry I have in progress, and they’ll definitely be showing up in some of the stranger plans for my slow-burn 17th C pike and shot fantasy project, and in the best tradition of being inspired by random stuff that’s now in your Pile of Opportunity, I’m sure they’ll be showing up elsewhere too…
For the past year I’ve been building some modular fantasy/medieval city tiles for our Sellswords and Guilders games. It has been a long process of building as I’ve chosen the hardest method possible – laying the cut foam stones individually. But I finally have a full 2′ x 2′ square of them done. The impetus this time was our local move into Mordheim and yet another competition – this time the quarterly painting competition on Bloodbeard’s Garage Discord, which had a theme of “unfinished”. Talk about the ultimate un never finished project!
Building the tiles
As with my other modular boards, these are all based on 3D printed Open Lock tiles. I then used my Proxxon hot wire cutter to cut a few different sizes of tiles. I tested two initially: 1/8″ and 1/4″. Ultimately, I liked the look of 1/8″ (as did my wife, but she thought it was nuts).
First test tiles
I also made a 2nd change early on – for the sidewalk I moved from just 1/4″ cubes to a mixture of 1/2″ squares, 1/2″ by 1/4″ rectangles and 1/4″ cubes, always tessalated so that no two of the same touched fully on their long side.
Original style in the upper right, new style in the other pieces
After a lot of work, I had bits and pieces of a table, but certainly nothing enough for even a 3’x3′ (our standard board size). After a hiatus, I got moving again. I also switched glues – from standard PVA to Aleene’s Tacky, which sped up production. So I planned out my initial 2′ x 2′ planned out (well, sort of, I tweaked it almost immediately):
Initial layout2nd layoutFinal layout
One of the pieces I’m most proud of is the curved road section. I was (w)racking my brain to figure out how to make it look good, thinking I was going to have draw lines at angles, but then I realized I could just lay the stones outward from the inner curve.
Outer curbs laidFully laidPainted but not yet dirty
And then, a few (a small number, really) of hours later, I was finished tiling:
Construction done
Painting
For painting, I started simple – a coat of craft black paint mixed with white glue (and a bit of wetting agent to make it flow better), and then airbrushed on some thinned Vallejo Black Surface Primer (a hateful paint if I’ve ever used one).
The first black primer, to tie to all togetherTaping the edges prior to painting
I then re-watched RP Archive’s inspiring city tile video again and decided to follow his painting and weathering method as much as possible. I highly recommend it – it certainly inspired me in my project.
To start the colour, I airbrushed a neutral grey (Demco Artist acrylic) onto the cobblestones and linen (Folkart craft paint) onto the sidewalks. This is also when I noticed I’d left one 1″ x 3″ piece in the painting box. Oops.
Grey cobblestone base layer (with new tiles in the upper right)Whole board painted
Next up I highlighted some of the cobblestones with a dark grey (Army Painter Gravelord Grey Speed Paint) and light grey (Reaper Paint Misty Grey mixed with a satin glazing medium). I wasn’t too fussed about painting exactly here – there were multiple additional layers of paint and weathering coming to hide any issues.
With highlighted cobblestonesOnly cobblestones, not sidewalk, were highlighted
And then a white dry brush across the whole thing:
To finish off painting, I did a black-brown wash. Unlike RP Archive, I did it a bit heavier in pigment – 6 drops of carbon black, 3-4 of burnt umber and 3-4 of sepia in 50ml (all were Liquitex acrylic Inks). It took ~100ml to coat the full 2′ x 2′ board.
Washed tiles on the left, unwashed on the right
And then we get onto dirt. Here I also differed slightly from RP Archive. I had a dark brown grout, so I mixed it 50/50 with dirt, which I sieved with a 1/4″ chicken wire, then baked for a few hours and then sieved a second time in an old tea strainer. This left me with a very fine powder mixture of dirt/grout.
To apply the dirt, I tried the method he suggested in his video but found it didn’t work for me. So I changed it up:
Sprinkle on dry
Spray lightly with watered PVA + wetting agent
Use my fingers to smear the damp mixture around the tile
Dip my hand in water, thoroughly soak the tile
Use a towel to clean off the tile
Repeat 4 and 5 until I was happy with the level of dirt
I left a fair amount of dirt on the cobblestones, especially in the corners and in deeper pockets, and almost none on the sidewalk pieces. I found the grout and dirt dried almost instantly, so by the time I was finished all the tiles, they were dry enough to take outside and soak in watered PVA to seal them in. I’m going to have to do a 2nd coat, as some of the dirt is still a bit loose.
Comparing dirty (on left) with just painted (on right)Very dirty process of dirty-ing up the tilesDirty tiles 1Dirty tiles 2Dirty tiles 3
Lastly, I had punched a bunch of leaves using an AliExpress leaf punch (non-affiliate link – I used the 05 colour). I dried some straight and soaked some in glycerin first, then dried. I found the glycerin ones were slightly translucent and showed the tile through them, so I’ll use them for something else (I’m going to try dyeing with inks and fabric dye next). Note that some of the colours were lost as they were dried, which was a bit unfortunate but expected.
Punching leaves from leaves.
I glued them down on the edges where leaves would naturally blow to, a truly finnicky process as the dried leaves were quite stiff. I tried soaking them in watered down PVA, but that didn’t seem to help – although I suspect I could rehydrate them by soaking them overnight. Some definitely will still lift (and have), but they are trivial to replace.
Leaves glued in the corners
Painting the Statues
For the statues, I painted them fairly simply. They were both on foam plinths or backgrounds. They were base-coated along with the tiles.
The bleeding eyes girl was quite simple – dry brush various greys on her and her plinth, along with some thinned greys for the streaks. Her eyes are painted with Reaper Fresh Blood.
For the Ganesh statue, I painted the statue itself with Reaper Old Bronze and then found Army Painter’s Verdigris Technical Paint, which I applied in a couple of coats. It works, but honestly this paint job is a bit simple and for larger statues I’d want to follow something like Garden of Hecate’s excellent tutorial. For the stone backing, I tried some stippling and washes, but ultimately went with sponged on greys and whites.
The Tree
The tree is fairly simple – a bunch of pipe-cleaners twisted up and then melted, with a texture paint (in my case, a DIY texture paste of brown paint + sawdust). It isn’t done, but eventually am going to try and match some of the look here:
Finished Look
And just like that, this 2′ x 2′ set of tiles was done.
The finished tiles
But of course, I need a lot more, especially if I want to get a full 4′ x 4′ Mordheim table done. So the next set is already underway:
Well, maybe not. The next set already underway, aided by Halloween candy.
Well, round 1 of the Build Something Competition is done and I have been beat, badly. The vote wasn’t even close. Ouch. Anyway, at least I have a pretty building for my table.
With me out, means I can share some process photos and discussion here. I ended up painting and gluing the building together pieces by piece – paint some, glue some, paint some, just because of the way I needed to paint the inside.
First thing I did was assemble the upper back section (with the walkway) as a separate piece and then paint the inside of it. I also added mud/spackle to cover the 3D printing texture on the lower section and painted the concrete floor (with a few cracks added with an exacto blade).
After that, I added the inside graffiti to both the lower walls and the upper section. After I had added them, I glued the two pieces together and then added some mud/spackle to cover the gaps and then roughly painted it grey. I wasn’t overly worried, as I knew that I was going to be badly painting the inside white again (to partially cover up the graffiti, as if somebody was working to renovate the building).
Assembled back with spackle/mud covering the gap between the foam upper parts and the 3D printed lower bits.
Then I rusted up the hangers and doors. For this I sponged on paint quite thickly – mostly Burnt Umber but some Burnt Sienna and Raw Sienna for accents. This is what gives these the bumpy texture. I would note that the grey paint was not fully dry under the tape here, so I ended up pulling off a fair amount and needing to repaint it. Oops.
Rusty door hangerRusty doors
After that, I glued the front panels on and then the lower walkway (which touched both the back walls and the front walls). You can see the interior has been painted white at this point.
Gluing in the lower walkway, with the inside now painted white.
Once those were done, I cleaned up the front where the joins were to make the grey tones more consistent. I then masked off the green sections and the upper ghost lettering.
The lettering was over-sprayed with Golden’s Shading Grey, a semi-transparent grey that was amazing for darkening things subtly. I pulled off the letters, which were cut out of Oracal mask on my Silhouette, in a random order, spraying a bit more of the shading grey over the whole area each time.
The last bits I didn’t get any photos of, but this is the “draw the rest of the owl” directions:
The green lower sections I added blue stuff to mask off the damaged sections where the exposed rebar was and then sprayed the lower area, hangers and the doors with chipping medium, and then all three with a random mixture of greens roughly mixed in the airbrush. To chip it I used three methods – light sanding, using tape to pull off random sections and water with a brush. If you use water with a brush, you get lighter sections. I ended up putting an undercoat of white on the doors after I tried just straight green, but that wasn’t covering the rust well.
Lastly, I glued in the windows after painting them separately, painted the exposed rebar and then weathered with oil paints. Overall, the painting felt a bit rushed and I should have taken more time. I also missed a bunch of small details that I’d like to get back to.
And voila! The final product:
Oblique angle shotGraffiti detail 1Graffiti detail 2Inside looking at doorsInside looking at walkwayOther main door
