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…
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.
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!
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.
LPL11 Round One – Old Sabertooth’s Clan. Pulp Figures 28mm pulp cave-persons!
LPL11 Round 2 – The Patients of Ward 13. Statuesque Miniature’s Pulp Asylum line, 28mm. A strong contender for my favourite set of figures in my LPL11 entries, and they also wound up being my Round 9 entry after the planned ECW figures didn’t get finished in time.
LPL11 Round 3 – Backalley Bruisers. Thugs and petty criminals from Pulp Figures.
LPL11 Round 4 – The Young Majarah And His Minders. 28mm Pulp Figures, probably my favourite group of figures and favourite photo of this LPL!
LPL11 Round 5 – Last Hydrant For 12 Parsecs. Really old 25mm Vargr dog-aliens from the Traveller universe, produced by MegaMinis at least ten years ago and finally finished!
LPL11 Round 6 – For the King And England! 28mm Warlord ECW figures.
LPL11 Round 8 – Parliament And England! 28mm Warlord ECW figures; my least favourite round of all. The figures were rushed and incomplete and the photo is just straight-up bad!
LPL11 Round 10 – Dagon At Dockside. The bonus theme was “Big Brother/Little Brother”, and I happened to have Pulp Figures’ Dagon and fishmen around!
Bonus photo – this was the setup for Round 6’s English Civil War shot, on my dining room table!
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!
The Lead Adventure Forum runs a great painting contest about once a year called the Lead Painter’s League. I’ve participated before but not for a number of years now, but when LPL11 was announced a while ago I decided to get back at it and enter.
LPL was originally conceived as a way to help participants clear their stockpiles and lead mountains of figures, so the requirements for small groups of figures – the minimum entry has to be five figures – and relatively loose theme allow you to paint whatever you feel like. There’s bonus rounds with slightly more specific themes on the first, fifth, and tenth round but they’re intentionally loose as well. This year’s bonus themes are Tribes for Round One, Ship’s Crew for Round Five, and Big Brother/Little Brother for Round 10.
I was able to get ten rounds worth of figures together, including satisfying all three bonus rounds, just from my stockpile of figures, in classic LPL style!
For Round One, Tribes, I used a family group of cavemen (cavepersons?) that Bob Murch of Pulp Figures sculpted. There’s a grizzled old shaman, an older woman, a young mother with baby on her hip, a teenage boy, and a younger child. I think they’re some of Bob’s older sculpts and it looks like he’s taken them out of circulation at the moment – which means we might see resculpts sometime soon!
Old Sabertooth’s Clan, my Round One entry for LPL11. Click for larger.
