Digital Sculpting a Norn Princess, Part 2

So, it turns out my "minor notes" about my previous sculpt were still wriggling in the back of my mind. Irritated, I decided to take another whack at it, incorporating elements from the backstory I had written in the meantime. This technique was inspired by the Tyranid blogger Mr Pink, who I'm a very big fan of. I'm paraphrasing here, but he talks often about letting the intended role of a Tyranid guide it's design. A sort of form-follows-function. And I think that was what made me feel like redoing my sculpt; it was an incomplete execution of my core idea. So I got back to sculpting!

I returned to my inspiration image board. At this point, I knew the discrete elements of what I wanted, but I then had to combine them into a cohesive creature. I drew inspiration from slightly different sources, this time looking to one of my favorite animes, "Claymore" for that style of elegant feminine deadliness. The "awakening" mechanics of that show were definitely an inspiration while writing the backstory. I also brought in some images of an equal parts obscure and memorable part of the 2005 King Kong movie, the scene where Andy Serkis' character gets his head absolutely chomped by some nasty worm. I knew I wanted that pink fleshy grossness going on. I also used an image of a Hero Forge miniature to base my proportions on; I think the original sculpt was too slight and willowy, and didn't looked a tad too real-life proportions and not a miniature.

I also took care to design it with the traditional six limbs of a Tyranid, with the carapaced back. I had originally intended the middle limb to be a set of hands hooking into the victim, but this got reworked during the sculpting process into a set of openable ribs to wrap around the target creature. The long bony limbs and legs then appear to be pushed through the victim. Maybe one of these days I'll do a separate set of sculpts, with the two separated just for fun story reasons.

With all the planning done, I set about sculpting. I pulled some legs from a previous version of the sculpt, since I like the hooves and thigh plates, then added some additional spikes on the shoelace sort of area. I took a base human model and removed the arms and legs, sculpting additional noise near the stumps to indicate a tearing violence to them being gone. I recycled the maggot-head and tail from the previous version too, but sculpted an all-new carapace and ribcage, then modified the human torso underneath so it looks like it's being dug into violently. I added mandibles from another old version, and then reused the bony arms and sculpted more detail onto them. Finally, I grabbed the scything talons from my Screamer-killer sculpt and grafted those on!

Here's some beauty renders of the sculpt, and a really shit paint-over of the rough colors to differentiate the parts visually. Who knows if that's going to be the final color scheme, but it is inspired by my retro Tyranids, what this model is supposed to be a part of.

And here's the resulting print! I'm so excited to have created a mini fully from scratch, it's been an exciting and deeply creative endeavor. I'll probably end up doing more things like this, making original models, since it was so fun, despite all the iteration involved.

Also, since this one's a Miss Captain bear original, I'm excited and able to share the files for it!You can download the STL here, ready for printing. It's not presupported, so you'll have to add them in your slicer of choice. I'd recommend a size of 50mm tall, around the same size as a modern Tyranid Warrior, and the file doesn't come with a base, you'll have to provide your own.

Again, thanks for reading! And stay tuned for my eventual posts about painting this lady up and playing her on the table!

- Miss Captain Bear