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kingjayko: It worked out at about £130+ cheaper than buying a gargantuan Squiggoth from forgeworld but a little more than buying the other Squiggoth. Think I may give a full run down of costs at the end if people are interested. Green stuff when bought on ebay is SO much cheaper than buying from GW. I bought a meter length for £14 on ebay, which was everything I needed + a little more. Far cheaper then buying through GW for the equivilent ammount.

Next on the list was to create my monster some lips. The lips needed to be uniform, look squishy and interestingly textured to make them distinct from the skin of the squiggoth.
They needed to provide strong destinguishing line between the skin on the squiggoth and the gums and inside mouth. After a quick studdy of peoples lips I came up with:



Also missing as yet and added at this stage was the skin covering the top of the tusks. This was added with stretch marks similar but far deeper to those on the gums.



The mouth was now done, this was the last step I did before moving onto the body.

This looks amazing!!

You givin' me lip?

Looking good as usual!

As many of you have already mentioned the War Mumak is a bit of a leggy beast. This isn't very squiggoth like and that really needed changing. So now with the head done and before I started sticking the body together I needed to sort that out. Widening the leg came later when I had more on the proportions of the body right.

I wanted to do two things:
Shorten the height of the legs.
Reposition the legs so that it wasn't in the striding pose that the War Mumak is in.

The first was far easier I simply shortened each leg by ~1.5cm.
The second was far harder. I wanted a running pose something aching to a rhino charge would be ideal. This lead me to the idea of having the front left leg raised from the ground, this would make for an attacking like gallop, and the back left leg pushing/scrapping the floor as if propelling the Squiggoth.

All "mesurements" were done on the base to get the right pose before an "adjustments" were made.

At this stage the ... ahem ... gonads were removed for reasons that will become apparent soon.



After repositioning the front left leg the hole created was filled with a piece of plasti-card. This like before was there so that I had something to mold my green stuff onto that would fill the gap.

Why did you have to take his gibblies? WHY!?!?!

They had gonads?!!

lol they had to model every detail. Sorry for going OT it looks great, cant wait to see it finished.

All: Yes the giblies had to go so I could widen the model and not have the love spuds hanging too far right They may yet make a return

Aswell as finding the beast a bit on the leggy side it was also thinner then I wanted. To add bulk keep detail and get it how I wanted I decided that I needed to widen my Squiggoth to be.

So on one half of the still in bits model I, roughly, went around and glued on two sprue thick sprue lengths all the way around the edge of the Mumak body.





I then simply glued the two halves together giving me a wider heavier looking body.

Looks good wider and the legs look a lot more dynamic. Nice work

Are you going to make the legs fatter?

SilverMK2: Thanks, looked through your deviant art stuff you have some cool shots of models I didn't see at Silver Skull.
Rose_Mountainz: Yes I will be widening the legs - soon, very soon.

Sorry for the late update today and the missed update yesterday. Did a double shift at work yesterday, was bad.

Anyway

After now having the body mostly together I felt it about time I added the, so large it was obscene, head to the model.

Now that I had extended the jaw (or more built it a jaw) it was now critical that I got the head in the best pose possible and attached firmly to the body using plastic glue that looked proportional and "realistic". (Realistic for 40k anyway)

Using sprue bits, some filling and a lot of possing I finally setled on this.





Once I was happy with this it was then a case of green stuffing the gaps (and then widening the legs) untill I had a completed squiggoth ready to have a howdah built.

ceorron wrote:SilverMK2: Thanks, looked through your deviant art stuff you have some cool shots of models I didn't see at Silver Skull.

Thank you. I think I took most of the models I have in my gallery to SS certainly most of the CSM stuff anyway. If they are ready and I have had a few games with them before hand, I might take my Eldar to the next one

Any that squig has a gihumongous jaw

Look forward to see how you tie it into the body (and also bad luck on the double shift).

As mentioned already I now needed to fill in the "gaps" in my Squiggoth to make it appear much more realistic. Big challenges on the list included covering over the area I made when I widened the body, filling the gap between the body and head/mouth giving the realistic impression of a neck ontop of what I have, green stuffing the gaps where I had reshapped the legs.

For texturing this involved a mix of continuing the wrinkles in the skin of the War Murmak and creating some of my own in the correct places.

The widening and leg filling was done first.



Followed by the neck filling, this was definitely the longest and took the most work. For realism the wrinkles were made deeper on the side which the head was angled towards where as more streched and not as deep on the other side.





One of the last things I did to the neck that was really a spur of the moment addition was some skin flaps that help define it as a neck and are similar to what you might see on old people once their skin begins to thin and age.

Interesting!

Next up would be the highly anticipated widening of the legs. Yay Woooo....

Pretty happy with how it was generally I decided to keep it modest and only widen them to keep them proportional with the rest of the beast.
On the front two legs I also sculpted some new hooves as the War Mumak strangely only has three on the front two legs where as it has 4 on the back two. Wonder if thats how JRR Tolkien wanted it?
Anyway here it is, ready for me to start on the tail.





The gonads make a return at this stage fixed with super glue to the widened area of the squiggoths body. Leaving me with a no doubt happier Squiggoth.

Ahhhh.... No replies.



Moving on. Next as I mentioned was the tail. Still taking my clues from the gargantuan squiggoth. I first created, using plasticard, a set of slidding metal armour plates that the forgeworld squiggoth has covering most of its body. In a continuing theme this gave me a base to sculpt the tail into and gave the tail a sharp and brutal look reminicent of dinos that had large clubbed and scaled tails as attacking weapons.





The squiggoth itself was finished (bar some more armour plates like that on the tail) so it was onto the howdah.

Hi, I've been lurking about this thread for a while, I love the work you've done on on the legs and I love the idea of the club tail but feel it could do with a bit of beefing up a bit, otherwise great project.

It is really coming along now! I think the armour plates really help to make it look more orky and can't wait to see it covered in them

Must have been the nads scaring everyone off

Love the armour plating.

this is turning out very nice.

sweet stuff man, love it

I'm loving this post! Your GS skills are very good.

Could we get a few good quality shots though... perhaps even some overall progress so far shots, i.e. ones where you can see the whole beast rather than just sections of it??

FTL

Mu: Yeah I agree with you, Mu. Could for certain do with some beefing up. But short of sculpting a squiggoth myself I just couldn't get any more onto the War Mumak without terribly distorting the proportions. I suppose one of the major downsides of doing it this way is that you will no dout end up with something that looks like a squiggoth but is substancially smaller then the Forgeworld Gargantuan one.

Commander Cain: Certainly more get added soon.

SilverMK2: Must have been the nads, must have been.

fasterthanlight: Thanks See below for some full body shots. Not so sure about good quality. Think you need to be stood five miles away from something in order for this camera to get in focus, even in macro mode.

After many hours of skulpting I now get to the far easier part of sticking the howdah together. At this point I see my progress rapidly increase and the howdah is completed is just a couple of days.
Those that know the battlewagon kit will no doubt be able to tell how I did this. Basically I wanted 5 compartments one for the driver, 2 for the twin big shoota gunners, one central compartment with a larger flat bed area for the boyz that the squiggoth can carry to stand, this will also house the first supa lobba and finally a rear compartment that will also house a supa lobba.





The supa lobbas were converted using the kannon you get in the battlewagon kit and the killa kan blundabuss. The shells for the main supa lobba converted from varrying ork rokkits.





Some full shots of the near complete howdah, still in need of some crew. Note the ladders made from trukk boarding planks and the driver compartment made from an upturned battlewagon ram, just some of the more inspired parts.
I especially like the variety of differing geometry that goes into the new battlewagon kit makes it look thrown together. I wanted to capitalise on this and get some interesting thrown together shapes into my howdah. What do people think?

Wow, looking pretty cool now it is coming together

Still can't quite get over how huge the mouth is

Your GS work is excellent and the howdah is coming along really nicely. I think my only problem with the head is the squareness of the mouth/jaw. My bigger issue is the mismatch in size between the head and body - oh and that the tail looks a bit limp. I really hope you are planing to extend the armour plating over the body though! (Which may mitigate these issues somewhat...)

The head is a bit big for the body, and as others have said, it looks very square. Still, sufficient armor plating should remedy this.

_Tim?

The head is almost in proportion, And the Orky Gubbinz in the Howdah are great. I think it should have another (shorter) horn on the head (like a rhino).

Looking forwards to seeing it completed, with Orks swarming over it.

I really like the giant head, looking forward to seeing it painted.

I think this looks seriously awesome