Tag Archives: LAF

BSC 2025 – Wirelizard’s Shuttle, Part Three

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.

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!

Links of Interest, 9 January 2022

First LoI post of the new year! Just a couple of things, mostly to get the BSC link out while entries are still open!

On the scenery front, this trio of useful little bridges with a neat construction trick involved to keep them more game-friendly from Olicanalad’s Games blog.

Over on the excellent Lead Adventure Forum, the Build Something Contest 2022 is accepting entries and already some some great discussions and ideas being posted. Highly recommended, the BSC always has some fun and gorgeously executed projects coming out of it. I don’t think I’ll be participating this year, but I’ll be watching the whole thing closely!

BCS 2021 & A Blog Update

Well, “a few weeks” in my last update apparently turned into two months of radio silence here. Oops.

Build Something Contest 2021 over on LAF had the end date pushed back by two weeks due to the organizer having an attack of Real Life, but it’s wrapped up and voting should start this week over on Lead Adventure!

I’ll get a full gallery of all my build shots up after voting begins, but in the meantime here’s a teaser from early in construction of my entry, which wound up named the “Dark Pool of Dark Darkness”…

The piece with most of the basic groundwork laid down and the rock formations just started. 28mm gnolls on 25mm bases for scale; the whole thing is about 10″ long by 9″ wide or so. Click for larger, as usual.

Build Something Contest 2021

Quiet here the last week or so because I’ve been thoroughly distracted by Lead Adventure Forum’s Build Something Contest 2021!

Lots of cool entries in progress over on the BSC subforum of LAF. Posting WIP photos elsewhere is discouraged but I’ve taken lots of photos so far of the rocky moor piece I’m doing and I’ll be sharing them here in a month or so when the contest is concluded.

I do have some other stuff I’ll be showing off, including some scatter pieces I just finished that I’m quite happy with, so it won’t be totally dead here but go check out the BSC and look for my updates there!

Lead Painters League 11 Gallery

I posted my Round 1 entry for the recently concluded Lead Painters League 11 (run over on the awesome Lead Adventure Forum) way back in mid-April but never got around to posting my other entries.

So here they are all at once, including Round 1 again for completeness sake.

Note that I repeated one entry in a later round, so there are only nine entries here instead of ten. My Round 2 entry, Patients of Ward 13, were re-run as my Round 9 entry after the English Civil War musketeers I’d hoped to run didn’t get finished in time. Interestingly, the Patients lost their initial round but won their re-appearance, which is unusual as repeat figures rarely win LPL rounds in my experience!

There’s captions for each photo with more details, including manufacturer info for all the figures.

If you want to see all 300+ entries (30+ participants, 10 rounds!) you can head over to the LPL 11 forum on Lead Adventure Forum. I highly recommend it, loads of awesomely talented painters participate, not just hacks like me!

Lead Painters League 7, Round Nine

Second-to-last round of the 7th Lead Painters League over on the Lead Adventure Forum, and it’s more Pulp Figures for me, with a cadre of suspicious characters lurking in a back alley somewhere!

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Suspicious Characters! 28mm Pulp Figures. Click for full size, as always.

These guys will be great fun in our Pulp Alley games, I’m sure. I’ll be doing up a League for them as soon as I’m back in Victoria and back into my usual gaming haunts!

Off to the last round of the LPL today! It’s been a lot of fun to participate, even if real life has kind of cramped my painting schedule.

Lead Painters League 7, Round Eight

Back to the Russian Civil War again this LPL round with some Copplestone 28mm Bolsheviks. I really like the whole Copplestone Back of Beyond range, even the “rank and file” infantry have loads of character and lots of really nice details.

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28mm Bolsheviks from Copplestone. Click for full size, as usual.

The tan background and khaki on the Bolshies gives this photo quite a nice sepia tone overall; that wasn’t really planned but looks good!

Lead Painters League 7, Round Seven

Round Seven of the LPL is up, and here’s my entry. These guys are 28mm U.S. Navy gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. I used the famous movie The Sand Pebbles as my source for the uniform colours, as I’m pretty sure Bob Murch did when he sculpted these figures.

The all-white uniform is striking, but hard to do and keep interesting. I used a couple of shades of Reaper Master Series paint – they have a very nice triad of off-whites – and these sailors have come up very nicely.

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28mm US Navy gunboat sailors from Pulp Figures. Click for full size, as usual.

Over on LAF the LPL is continuing for another couple of weeks, go check out the current round!

Lead Painters League 7, Round Six

Over to fantasy figures for the first time in this LPL for me, with a team of Reaper dwarves. Lovely figures loaded with detail, as you’d expect from Reaper. These short fellows are a lot of fun to paint, although picking out all the buckles, belt bags and bits can seem like an endless process.

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The Blackstone Guard – Reaper Minis dwarven fighters. Click to see full size, as usual.

I’ve painted these warriors up in almost all black livery, although the main colour on them is their extravagant dwarven beards and long hair. Apparently this particular clan of dwarves runs strongly toward red hair.

The current round of the Lead Painters League is ongoing over on the Lead Adventure Forum; go check out all the awesome painting on display!

Lead Painters League 7, Round Five

Round Five of LPL7 was one of three Theme Rounds; this time the theme was “Historical Civil Wars”. This fits perfectly into my ongoing Russian Civil War project, and was one of the reasons I pushed myself to participate in this year’s LPL.

I pulled out some RCW figures that I’d finished very quickly and roughly, stripped them, and repainted them to a much, much higher standard. The main scene depicts a group of raiding Cossack cavalrymen coming around the corner of a village church to find the locals armed and waiting for them, with a big farm wagon pushed across the road as a barricade.

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Russian Civil War action – village militia vs Cossack raiders. Click for full size.

The local militia are Copplestone Castings Russian Partisan figures; they’re great figures loaded with character. I own twenty or thirty of these guys (at least two packs worth, maybe three, I’ve lost track!) and I have very few duplicate figures in that collection. I pulled out seven favourite poses to repaint for this scene. I painted them up as a mix of young men & old. The young men would likely be returned frontovik (Russian veterans of the Great War) or, if this is a Bolshevik militia, young radical Bolshies come out from the cities. There were rural militias for every political flavour of the Russian Civil War, and quite a lot of no distinct flavour at all — the “Greens”, who were either peasant militias formed for self-defence or anti-revolutionary bandits, depending on who was telling the story!

The Cossacks are from Brigade Games. Brigade’s Russian Civil War/WW1 in the East range doesn’t get as much attention as the Copplestone Back of Beyond ranges, but there are some lovely figures in that range, including these fairly recent Cossack cavalrymen. There’s a pack of regular riders with swords and slung rifles, and a command pack with officer, trumpeter and standard bearer; all six of these guys are from the regular Cossack pack. They’re very nice figures, a bit more fine-boned than the Copplestone figures but very compatible. The one downside to these Cossack figures is that some of the details are quite delicate, especially the sabres and scabbards.

By the time you read this my Round Six figures will be competing in the LPL; head over to the Lead Adventure Forum to see how they’re doing!