Guest Post - Building a Tervigon

Here's a guest post from local gamer Blaise St. Laurent on his journey to find the perfect tervigon!

Take it away Blaise



I had a tournament that's going to require 2 tervigons, yet sadly I only have the one. So when I set about to build another I got a few requests to document the process.

Here's a spoiler, what the first one looks like:

This time I wanted to keep the same look, but have the abdomen behind the tervigon as if it was moving rather than laying.

Step one: cut a carnifex in two. For this one I bought one off TradeMe (Kiwi eBay) and it had been glued together rather well, but, no worries. A good saw solves most problems:

I cut out 3 pieces of plasticard (2mm or so) around the same size as the torso

I then laminated them together using Tamiya plastic brush on glue and clamps.Leave this to dry overnight.

I then cut them to shape using my rotozip dremel bit. Not a fine instrument by any means but I didn't have access to a scroll saw... :(

Glue the whole thing together and you've got a well expanded carnifex torso.

Now I need a second row of vents. On the first one, I used the plasticard and filed / carved / futzed about to try and get a reasonable looking simulacrum of the originals. I Wasn't all that happy with that so I went another route:

I recently picked up some Oyumaru (it's a mould making plastic that goes soft when dunked in hot water but can be used to cast parts when it's at room temperature. Not a replacement for a proper casting system as it only sort of works with resin but good enough for greenstuff parts) and since I had the bits from a large tyranid I thought I'd get creative :

and since i'm cheap i filled some of the space in the moulds with sprue.

And the results:

So then it was simply a case of attaching one to the other and greenstuffing the result:

Here you can see that I filled the stock vents with greenstuff and had a little play to match the moulded ones. Think I did ok!

In the mean time, I was working on the tail section - starting with paper balls I found at Spotlight (Kiwi Michaels)

I strung 4 of them on a piece of wire and used a hot glue gun to attach the rest of the balls to get the shape I was looking for (should be about the same shape as the other)

I've since started filling the gaps with greenstuff.

I'll be rolling out some very thin sheets of greenstuff to cover the the rest and smooth the whole thing out.

Finally the head bits started getting chopped up:

This will be more or less the same as the other one. The bits are actually glued now waiting for the gaps to be filled.

Finishing up the basics of the torso and getting started on the egg sacks:

A couple of notes: Managed to make the neck look reasonably ok. I've also detailed the underside, though I'm not as sure about it yet.

Got the head / face together and applied some greenstuff..

I chose to use the old acid maw tongue on this one instead of the Malwoc on the other Tervigon. I like the look though I wonder how she closes her mouth!

And now some skin! after filling in the gaps between the paper balls (can be seen on the first photo of the post)

I used a rolling pin, some baking paper / parchement paper / wax paper (depending on where you're from) and got it nice and thin, then applied and with lots of effort and spit (what else do you use to lube up your fingers to greenstuff? :*) ) It's reasonably smooth as is,
though I suspect I'll need to do some more "patching" before I can work on the details.

While I was at it, I had some spare bits from one of my Trygons and thought it would look nice on the underside of the sack.

And finally I got the head attached to the torso:

Missed one step with the camera, smoothing out the basic egg sac shape and adding the armor padding to the top of it. Not particularly interesting to photograph and I just forgot.

I've got the torso and egg sac attached and some basic GS work to make the join look OK. Not super happy with it, but given this was a recycled carnifex to begin with I'll live with it:

You can see the veins I've sculpted onto the egg sac the armor and the joint between the two. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get the surface as smooth as possible and so far haven't been having a ton of luck. I think I'll use some more tamiya putty once the whole thing is assembled after I prime to get any spots that show up over the white primer.

Details of the sphincter I've sculpted. Where I had to sand off a few finger prints makes it look a little naff, but I'm pretty sure that once primed it'll look ok.

More details on the veins. I really need to get better at smoothing greenstuff, but it'll do for now. We'll see how the armor plate turns out. I tried to texture it a bit, and, after 3 different styles, decided on whats on there. Not sure it'll work but there's always more greenstuff later :)

And finally, painted up the base that she'll go on. It's from Iron Halo in their Fens range and it's what I've been using for most of the army.

Got the legs attached and had to do some last minute emergency greenstuffing. Notice that there's holes for the claws to sink into.
That way I'm using the claws as the pins that hold it to the base.
There's a fair amount of work on the waist to attach the two together.
I'm not particularly happy with that bit. May redo it at a later date.

And then of course I had to paint it! To be honest, there' still another couple of hours of highlighting, details and clean up to do but I thought I'd share some photos of the model as it was at its "unveiling" at NiCon

Detail of the egg sack.

Some shots next to its sister:

So there you have it.


Thanks Blaise, great conversion. And a real surprise for those that thought Charlie would be the first to describe his sac and sphincter on this blog.