Bugsculptor: Tervigon WIP

I’m hard at work on my second tervigon now, following the basic pattern from my original and incorporating a few subtle variations. The new tervigon is going to be posed much more aggressively and will use the “acid maw” carnifex tongue to represent toxin sacks and look angry, which will help give me some point of differentiation for games where I equip them differently or choose one ‘gon to be my HQ. I started out with a trygon torso and a set of carnifex legs, and the frag spines carnifex carapace plate. To make cluster spines matching my old tervigon I chopped out the four spine banks from the frag spines plate, glued them down and then blended them onto the trygon’s carapace plate with some 50/50 green stuff and apoxy sculpt mixed together. Mixing the sculpting putty gives a soft putty that is quick to work with and keeps detail relatively well, and the green colour makes it easier to see what you’re doing than using pure Apoxy sculpt.

With the cluster spines done I sawed a triangular notch into the back of the trygon torso - this will make space for more tervigon egg sacks later on. To get the posing correct I wired up the torso to the legs with a bit of soft wire and some super glue - this gives a chance to pose and re-pose the legs until you’re happy and stops putty from sagging and ruining your pose in the next stage - if you just jammed putty in the middle you’d spend ages holding or propping your sculpt up while the putty set. Once I had the pose I wanted, I used some apoxy sculpt to reinforce the waist - it’ll all get covered up by egg sacks later on.

Next step was starting on the gaunt babies - I chopped up two gaunts and glued them onto the end of some brass rod to make them easy to hold. Then I added more of my green/apoxy mixture to sculpt up the “birthing tubes” and detail in lots of nice gruesome folds. I’ve finished one gaunt, and still have some work to do on the second.

In the last step so far, added a couple of trygon spines to make mandibles on the head and put a little procreate putty to work to add a nobbly crest to the head. These fit with the nobbles on the trygon torso and the carnifex mace tail, so hopefully add a visual theme that will help tie the model together from the various kits.