Tervigon WIP (still)

Hello fellow hobbyists!

Yet more WIP pics only, the edited pictures of the completed Baneblade I was to post have been 'misplaced' somewhere on my girlfriends laptop so currently am waiting for the raw pictures to be re-done.

So in the mean time I figured, since there's a lot of hype atm about the Tervigon thanks to the release of the Arachnarok Spider from GW, and over at Dark Future Games Old School Terminator has a Tervigon Scratch Build for $25 going on (currently in parts 1 and 2) as well as having built 1 from combining the Arachnarok Spider with a Carnifex (can be found in parts 1 and 2), I figured it was about time my beast graced the realm of bloggers.

Now, originally this bug was going to be made into something else, something much MUCH bigger (though the leg-span width of this bug is almost equal to the length of a Baneblade, and its as long as a Baneblade is wide), which I still aim to build as soon as I find a polystyrene ball that matches the size of a 1kg Easter egg, but using that design, along with reference pictures of queen ants and spiders, I was able to turn the design away from utter destruction to baby production.

What I needed to do this conversion was the following:
2 x Carnifex kits
Left over Termagaunt
Polystyrene Ball
Florist Wire
Green Stuff
Automotive body filler
Water based Sealer
Hubba Bubba bubble gum wrapper (intact, not ripped apart)

Essentially, the front half is a normally assembled Carnifex, with the exception being that I ground off the nob poking out about its head on the back carapace, and attached a 2nd carapace on the top (after grinding out the insides) with the gap left over being filled with greenstuff and shaped to look like a fleshy sponge of sorts.

At the hip joint, it uses the Carnifex hip, but I have ground off the guide pin and flipped it upside down. This required a bit more thinking than I first thought it would. Once that was done, the tail had to be trimmed off and shaped into a point that I used to stick into the styrene ball. This was then glued on with super glue (prior to this i had coated the ball in many coats of sealer), and then modified 2 Carnifex spine backs to fit around. I put the spine backs on the abdomen rather than the thorax after looking at some footage of tarantulas flicking hairs off there abdomens to dissuade predators, so followed in suit with a similar idea.

Once the body was put together I worked on the legs. For the positioning of the legs, I used the lower of the sets of arm sockets on the Carnifex torso for the front 2 legs, and for the back I created 2 new sockets. So that the legs would support the weight, I had to work out the right stance to put the legs in. For this, I turned to reference pictures of queen ants. Generally they will have 2 longer legs following the length of the body towards the read, with the next set up being more centralized, followed by the front 2 legs being close to the centre also.

I made the legs using a length of florist wire for each as the core, then coated the outside with greenstuff for strength and body, then to make the carapace portion I used and shaped some Body fill from an Automotive Body Repairs shop.

The birthing tube was made using the old wrapper of a bubble gum packet i had lying around. Originally I had emptied the packet from both ends, and sprayed it silver to use in a piece of building terrain hanging down out of the ceiling, but this seemed more a fitting use. I glued 1 end in place, then bent it down over itself, gluing as I went, to form the final shape. Once done and dried in place i coated it with a layer of greenstuff to mold the fleshy look. Once done I then glued in the majority of a Termagaunt body. At this stage I also covered the abdomen of the Tervigon with bulging veins.

This step isn't all that important, but it will explain how I got the shape of the abdomen, considering it started as a ball seeing as I had no polystyrene eggs of the size i needed at the time.

Simply I started to carve an oval shape, using a lemon off the tree for reference, as I didn't want a perfect oval or ending up with an egg. Once I had the general shape I wanted, I took my sisters lighter (she shouldn't be smoking as shes my sister, other people can do what they want) and then using a back and forth motion, moved the ball towards and away from the flame. I did this as the intention wasn't to burn or melt, but to shrink the polystyrene, and doing it in this fashion creates all the random lumps and dints.

Once this was done, I did a positioning on the hip joint, cut a portion off the newly created abdomen so it sat flush once stuck on over the spike I created when making the hip joint. The whole abdomen was then coated in 3-4 good coats of a water based sealer so i could then spray it ready for painting at a later date without damaging the polystyrene.

And there it is, a free standing gaunt producing Tervigon.

The main downside for this thing is that unless the cover is enough to hide a Baneblade, everyone is going to see this thing. It wasn't made for gaming purposes as much as for a conversion comp GW had running for the release of the current Tyranid codex, of which I ended up winning and scoring another Carnifex for my efforts! As it stands, it is still to be painted, as many other projects have gotten in the way, but ill get there eventually.

Til next time all, hope you enjoyed this post.