I’ve been meaning to post this for quite a while – since sometime around October, I think? But with the problems the site was having I didn’t bother at the time… and then I, er… sort of just forgot. But now that I’ve had time to rebuild the site, I wanted to actually post something new… so here we are!
I’ve been a subscriber to Loot Studios‘ monthly STL releases for a while and have amassed quite a collection of their files now, though I’ve actually printed only a few of them so far. But last year a SpellJammer-themed release of theirs featured a… skull.,. squid… crab… thing that really caught my eye. Besides being a great sculpt, it had potential for a little customization of the sort that’s within my still-developing skill set. So I fired up the Elegoo for the first time in a while and soon enough had all the parts printed.
The sculpt came in three parts – front and back pieces of the creature itself, plus a base with some texture and rocky formations on it. I glued the skull together first and found there was a quite visible line where the parts met, so I mixed up some Green Stuff to smooth over the area. Because I’m completely incapable of estimating how much Green Stuff I’ll need, I ended up with a bunch of extra. Rather than let it go to waste I decided to make some undersea life to add to the base. I twisted most of it up into little tubes and stuck bits of fishing line into the narrow ends to look like some kind of feeder/feeler/tongue thing extending out; the rest was made, in a somewhat random choice, into a little ball I poked full of holes.
After test-fitting the base and skull together I took note of where my little coral formations could be placed so as to not get in the way. I glued them on, adding a little sand around them and in a few random other places just to add some more varying textures. It seemed like it would be much easier to paint the parts separately than once they were assembled, so I primed them separately. At this point I already had something that looked pretty damned cool.
I started the base by painting the dirt brown and the rocks grey, enhanced with some washes to add subtle color to the stone and some dry brushing to bring out texture details. My little coral additions were painted with a couple of different colors of fluorescent paint… which mostly disappointed. The green wasn’t bad, so I added some of it over the sandy areas to try for the look of some kind of phosphorescent plant life. On some of the flat areas of the rocks, I added some grass flock which was later dabbed with more of the fluorescent paint.
It still didn’t seem quite done, though, so I took some grass tufts and painted them with bright colors including a pink fluorescent I hadn’t used on the initial base. The paint made the fibers kind of clump together, but this wasn’t a bad look.
Painting the creature itself involved a lot of experimentation and unfortunately I didn’t think to document the process at the time. Lots of Contrast Paints and Speedpaints were used (and then sometimes painted over) in a color scheme derived from elements of a bunch of photos of hermit crabs. Somewhat-successful attempts were made to wet-blend the tentacles so they’d fade from red to orange, and on the forelimbs to try to make them fade from a very dark blue into a purple. The spiky bits covering the exoskeleton were done in orange with white tips that, yes, make them look a little bit like candy corn.
I was pretty proud of the paint job, but I wanted to add a little more to this before calling it done. I pictured this thing crawling up out of the deeps covered in seaweed and other aquatic plants, so that’s what it needed!
I cut a few pieces of string in increments of an inch or so and soaked it in brown paint; once that dried, I dipped in white glue and sprinkled grass flock all over it. This was glued around the skull and treated with brown and green washes to vary the color in patches, and the end result was a soggy-looking vine that had caught on the creature some time ago and been traveling with it for a while. Next, I soaked some cotton in green paints and draped those soggy bits and pieces around it in various places to create the look of clumped algae.
Lastly, I tore open a packet of silica and glued a bunch of the little clear pellets inside the empty eye socket. A little bit of green paint, and something unpleasant had clearly placed some eggs in this monster’s face!
