My project at the moment is a spotting balloon for use in wargames. Now when I first had the idea of making this, the thing keeping my from starting was, how am I going to make that actual balloon? A rather important part, so I thought about it. Ideas of using paper mache or maybe even using one of the models available at the wonderful http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/ but they just weren't going to give me the "toy look" that I wanted to go for. Then lo and behold, I laid my eyes upon the styrofoam ball I had lying around from some long forgotten project, so I got to work.
I began by painting on a few layers of white glue to the ball to give it just a little more strength, then began to paint the whole thing white before I realised that was a little ridiculous as I was just going to go over half with black anyway. So I taped off the stripes and got to painting
Here we see the basket (and the mess created during its creation), constructed out of foamcore, and two of its future inhabitants. I would have liked something more wicker like, but couldn't think of a way to go about it, so I settled on a wood plank look.
And here is the current state of things, the basket needs an interior paint job and the balloon could use some touching up in a few places. Overall looking good. Making the net that holds down the balloon and the tethers that attach the basket, a rather important step, and it should be ready for the table top!
