Digital Sculpting a Norn Princess

This idea started from Starcraft's Queen of Blades. She's an iconic, larger-than-life character that the story centers around in one way or another. Her design is a banger, right from the early days of SC1, with the green-and-brown coloration. And more than that, I really like her role as a empathetic, human-adjacent character that players can get emotionally invested in the Zerg faction through. So my goal was to make an equivalent heroic creature for my Retro Tyranid army!

While the 'Nids are... eh, alright in the heroic, named-characters department Also, the way they shroud their named creatures with both in-universe obscurity and just general design in-humanity always made me feel like I wanted something to hook onto. So I set out to do a few different things with this creation. 

1. Try to make an original sculpt of my own! Just for fun creative reasons.
2. Make a named, humanoid, matriarchal figure with a cool design that feels heroic.
   
3. Keep it retro, as something that might have been made in the earlier GW days when rules were looser and less defined.

These goals in hand, I set out to the land of concept art, and tried to piece together disparate ideas. I did a lot of iteration, as ideas weren't coalescing quickly. But I kept at it, and accidentally created this mega-image charting all the different art I was inspired with. Alongside it, I made three sculpts in total, two of which I decided I didn't like enough to move forward with. 

I tried out a few different aspects. For the first iteration, I was interested in playing a crown motif using horns, and giving the creature a webbed set of arms opening like an clawed embrace. I also liked the idea of it using flesh whips to give it more dynamic movement and a unique silhouette among Tyranids, with a snakelike body. I got done with the body sculpt for this, and decided against moving forward. The body moved too far away what I had in mind, and while the face and head were cool, I felt there was too much going on there.

From there, I had an idea to incorporate a giant eyeball like the Starcraft's Overmind portrait. I rationalized it by thinking that level of goofiness was right up old sculptor's alleys'. I sketched it out, but didn't really like it either. In a lateral move, I also tried it with the previous sculpts' head.

Again, this wasn't clicking the way I'd hoped. I took a bit of a break on this model; it wasn't coming together the way I'd wanted. Time to take a break. A couple days later, I was just browsing random pictures of old Warhammer/DnD models on pinterest, and I came across this image.

 It's grainy, and I have no idea exactly where it's from - I think it's a "Champion of Slaanesh" but I couldn't track it's source down. But the maggot-like growth on the back of the head and the paddle tail really inspired me. So I got back to it. Using elements of previous sculpts but adding new parts, I came up with this.

And while I have a few minor notes, I think it's pretty much there! It's also inspired some backstory! I'm hoping to get this 3D resin printed after finalizing the model some more, and from there either use it as an objective marker or a proxy in place of another Tyranid model. I'm picturing a pair of specially painted melee Tyranid Warriors, for instance, as if they're her bodyguards (A la Hunter-killers from Starcraft, of course).

Anyway, thanks for reading!

- Miss Captain Bear