In addition to the poo-er plant I built, my next Mighty Protectors session will feature a fair number of eggs laid by an insectoid alien queen, so I wanted to make some eerie-creepy egg piles to help set the scene.
I started out by just making a few simple bases and a couple of corner pieces with scrap chipboard and white glue:
For the eggs themselves, I decided to just use a bunch of cheap wooden beads – I have a big tube of them I bought to use for some furniture pieces, and I didn’t think it likely I’d be using more of them anytime soon. Sure, they have holes in them, but I was hoping they’d be obscured enough by the time I was finished that they wouldn’t be noticeable short of a close inspection.
Beads were layered on with hot glue, which was left deliberately sloppy in the hopes it would look like some sort of slimy substance among the eggs.
After a coat of gray spray primer I slathered on some fairly dark blue craft paint, and then dry I dribbled clear gloss on them for a wet look.
I wanted more interesting coloration on the eggs so I brushed on a bit of lighter blue.
Next came a fairly thick version of the neon-green wash I used on the power plant, followed by some more drizzling of clear gloss. At the end of this process my egg piles looked sufficiently slimy and disgusting.
Weaving a tangled web
Though the creatures that spawned these eggs aren’t actually spiders, I still wanted to add a web/cocoon effect around the piles. Besides adding more visual detail, this would help obscure the bead holes and the edges of the bases.
I have a box of baby wipes sitting by my computer that I bought to use as a gentle cleaner on my VR setup on those occasions when the goggles get sweaty. (I’m a mild Beat Saber addict living in a humid region.) I pulled out a couple of these and let them dry out for a few days, then stretched them out and glued pieces of them around the bases. To make the webbing less fragile I gave all the pieces a light spray of watered-down PVA glue once a day for a couple of days.
When the webbing was initially glued on, I was happy with the visibility of the eggs inside it – enough details were showing through, but the holes weren’t too visible. Something happened during the drying process, though:
It seems like the stretched material re-contracted a bit as the PVA glue dried, and possibly the glue accumulation thickened the strands a little as well. The end result is that the eggs don’t show through as much as I’d hoped for. I’ve tried pulling at some of it to try to re-stretch or even remove it to replace it with a thinner sheet, but it’s attached well enough from all that glue that it can only be torn apart, leaving a mess of strands. So I’m going to leave them as is for now, but if I need, for instance, spider eggs in the future, I’ll probably try to find something else as the webbing, or stretch the pieces much more thoroughly.