Catching the Bug: Quick and Dirty Mycetic Spores

After playing a game of 40k for the first time in what feels like a billion years at the Ajax GW 40K 25th Anniversary, I've kind of gotten bitten by a bug to get back to my bugs with the end goal of actually getting them on the table and playing some games with them. That has meant some stripping and some basing...

...but mostly I have been wishing I had some actual mycetic spore models to put on the table. Though I've got fully sculpting and possibly casting my own spores on the back burner, based on the original design I came up with for the Casavant Prime board, I wanted something that could be done quicker to stand in in the interim.

I had some of my cast Tyranid Barricades lying around that I wasn't using, so I propped them up on some extra insulation foam, covered over them with some Apoxie sculpt to make it look like ploughed-up dirt, and VOILA!

The Infestation of Casavant Prime

To build up some content on the site, I'm going to be posting a few of my past projects that were kind of like milestones in my development as a sculptor. I'll call them "Old Strains," and you can feel free to check them out if you're curious.



With my budding work on Tyranid Scenery from scratch coming along, I was asked by some friends in Toronto to breathe some Tyranid life into their table build for Games Day Toronto 2008. These guys had been bringing original tables to Games Day for a couple of years, and the previous year their extensive trenchwork table had been beaten out by a PC speaker and a smoke machine. This year they were determined to bring the pain to their long-time table nemeses.

The meat and bones of the table were actually constructed by the original build team and took the form of a cityscape with a canal running down the center, and me, Accommodator, and our creative ilk were given free reign to add some flare to the cityscape by transforming it into one that was in the beginning stages of a full-blown Tyranid infestation. I jumped at the opportunity to have a focus for my until-now-largely-aimless Tyranid scenery building.

Tyranid Barricades

To build up some content on the site, I'm going to be posting a few of my past projects that were kind of like milestones in my development as a sculptor. I'll call them "Old Strains," and you can feel free to check them out if you're curious.




Well, repurposing walnuts, coral, and lotus seed pods is all well and good for some quick-and-dirty Tyranid terrain, but I've never been much of one for quick-and-dirty as far as modelling is concerned. So I listened to that little voice that every 40K player has inside his/her head: the one that looks at the foam packaging that your new monitor came in and thinks "that would make a pretty bad-ass piece of scenery." Except, I followed this voice a little further down the rabbit hole than most do, seeing a fantastic-piece-of-Tyranid-scenery-to-be in this: