(Minor Storm King’s Thunder spoilers ahead!)

I’m bouncing between craft projects and playing with a newly acquired 3d printer, juggling a bunch of things but taking a long time to actually finish any of them. So I decided to post a few updates of some of my works-in-progress, starting with this one:

My D&D campaign is going to be starting into Storm King’s Thunder pretty soon. At one point in the adventure, there’s an airship built by dragon cultists that I know my players will want to take over and use to explore, well, pretty much everywhere. So I decided to build one.

I started with the basic layout above but adjusted it in a few ways, in part to match the materials I had on hand.

Whatever kind of balloon floats your boat

Instead of the depicted round balloon, I decided to make a sleeker one using a 2-liter soda bottle. The material it’s supposed to be made of is dragon hide, so I wanted to create a scaly effect by layering on thin bits of XPS foam.

I started making scales by cutting a long piece of foam into a square-ish shape, then sanded the edges off of three corners until it looked from above sort of like a baseball diamond.

Next began the slicing process – another instance where the Proxxon table shines. I experimented until I found the minimal thickness I could slice without making the scales so thin they’d crumble when bent. Once I found a good setting, it was time to slice, and slice, and slice.

Eventually I had a little tub full of baseball-diamond scales and an empty 2-liter bottle which I’d cleaned thoroughly, glued shut, and hit with a few coats of spray primer. I’d also glued a wide lid from some kind of bottled tea drink to the bottle to serve as the hot air intake.

I glued a line of scales across the whole bottle, then started layering on more as I worked my way around. To break up the tedium of this process a little I started experimenting with paint colors for the scales on some scrap pieces.

Eventually it was all covered. Unfortunately, having been stored and worked on in my garage, part of the end of the bottle ended up buckling in a little due to temperature changes (it’s 95 degrees out there today, so it’s probably buckled back out), but the scales themselves seem to camouflage the bottle shape well enough not to worry about it.

Now in possession of an elongated green pineapple stippled with little threads of hot glue, I had to work on a little cleanup and then paint it. I found that by using heat gun on its lowest setting and not getting in too close, I could warm up the hot-glue threads enough to melt them away without getting the XPS hot enough to take damage. I was taking a bit of a chance on the melting points of the two materials being far enough apart, and it worked out.

I started with, of course, the traditional black-and-mod-podge mix to protect and strengthen the foam. In my painting experiments I had experimented with both a standard reddish metallic and one of the color-shifting red craft paints, and I found that both of them seemed to have really poor coverage. I decided to put on a coat of dark red in a standard acrylic, then add a layer of the color-shift on top of that to achieve a dragon-scale sheen.

The balloon would eventually need to be attached to eventual boat portion by some means that would support the balloon while giving the appearance that the balloon was supporting it. I found some thick, coated floral wire and decided to use that to make a harness around the bottle with leads hanging down for connection to the boat. A metallic gray paint made these look acceptably similar to steel cables. Lastly, I added a spike at the front and painted the bottle cap, spike, and hot air intake a metallic bronze.

I’ll be adding a gondola and some netting later when I assemble the whole piece, but it was finished for this phase and it was time to move on to the second part, which would prove more challenging for a number of reasons: the boat.