Tauster's Tentacles

[tauster]

Varnished the bodies, based the tentacles aain with Rotting Flesh, then gave them a dark green wash (Thraka Green)...




The tentacles look a bit too clean, so another brown-ish wash is in order.

[bluecloud2k2]

That's some f***ed up s***, man... I LOVE IT!

[adamsouza]

Some pretty nightmarish creations there !!

[tauster]

Thanks for the praise, guys!

Got the washing done and decided this little duo is finished. I really like them. I was surprised how well the green compliments the flesh and bone color scheme!




Now it is time to come up with a personality for a giant snail and a few cool abilities that both together scream Underdark, Torog, Madness (yes, with a capital M) and weirdness. Then, an encounter (two, actually), plus something the party could want from it so they don't kill the critter in round two.

[skunkape]

Those are some creepy figures!

[deafnala]

These are DELIGHTFULLY creepy creations. As WONDERFULLY IMAGINATIVE as always!

[Draklith]

"That image shall haunt me in my dreams forever"

Brutally fantastic, I really love the way you were somehow able to capture that really horrific "OH MY GOD" look at that !!! in those creations

absolutely awesome

[tauster]

Glad you like it.

What's really fantastic with this fleshy creations is that the effect is so ridiculously easy to achieve: Just roll a piece wood with a rough bark over clay, or use hotglue like I did with the 'giant brain snail'. Coloring it requires only two colors, a flesh color (which is kind of an orange with a bit of pink mixed in - but you can buy that color pre-mixed) plus a reddish violet wash. Let it dry and go over it with gloss varnish. Done.

I would really love to see others around here play around with it, yet I seem to be the only one who's making those brutal, creepy, ugly, dream-hunting... wait. Oh, I see.

[tauster]

Since I want to make a few crawling heads, I need tentacles. I still have a box full, but not the right sizes, so I broke out the milliput and got on rolling!

First, in case you missed it, here's the tutorial of the tentacle maker. I can't stress enough how great this tool is: dirt-cheap, ridiculously easy to make, durable like hell, and oh so versatile. I used tentacles to make beholder eyestalks, flumphes, and lots of other stuff. Man, I probably sound like a salesman...


Take some milliput and mix it. I used about 2-3 cm of each component.



A small ball like this will give you a good-sized and quite thick tentacle. Dumb as I am, I didn't take a shot of the tentacle resulting from that ball, but it's not that important. If you're not sold on tentacles, a well-documented quantitative input-output analysis would probably do exactly nothing to convince you.




How to:
For tentacles, take a bit and roll it over the zig-zag surface. What kind of texture you get is determined by the rolling direction relative to the ridges. The tentacles below where rolled 'along the grain' to get that segmented look. If you roll sideways or diagonally, you get totally different textures. Just try it, it's loads of fun.

Btw: You don't really need two tentacle makers. The left one is newly made and I wanted to see if it works as well as my 2 year old original (it does). So one is totally enough.

That's what happened after 30min: tentacles, feeler/antennae, maggots and eggs. *happy dance*

Maggots are a totally new thing, at least for me. They're the result of another serendipity moment: Sometimes when I roll tentacles over the ridged board, it gets stuck and I don't stop fast enough, so the roll gets smeared and flattened. So I took a deep breath and started again. I never took a real good look at the shape of these accidents. Until I realized today that they look like maggots and other creepy crawling critters.



[update]
It took me a while to realize that they miss something crucial: A mouth!
I used a thin needle-like sculpting tool and gave them the much-needed orifice. I made them irregular and like the result. Tto be honest, making them symmetric would be much more time-consuming and difficult



I overcame the temptation to mess around with eyes. I'll definitely make some cartoonish versions later, but this clutch should be as maggot-like as possible.

Eggs
Still euphoric by the maggots^*, I played around a bit more and rolled a small ball in circles over the board. I came up with cool shapes and had to force myself to stop before I spent all the remaining milliput on them. After all I needed small tentacles, the rest was just added bonus. I'll try coming up with larger eggs soon, because these textures are just great. I guess that's a good way to do dragon eggs.

^{* Yep, that's one of the phrases you can only write in a community like ours without getting banned immediately, and probably an unpleasant visit by some federal employees.}




Antlers/feelers
When you roll the tentacles too thin, sometimes segments break off. Use them as antlers or stingers, or weird plants, or, or, or... there are probably a dozen more uses for these teeny tiny things.




So that wraps it up... Some promotion for a free dyi tool and two new things to make with it. I'm happy with the results, and whould love to see what you guys come up with a tentacle maker!

[deafnala]

That does look WONDERFULLY creepy; just the thing to kill one's appetite. Keep up the inspired work!

[tauster]

Half a dozen basepainted with skin color, and a few experiments where I just put washes and an ink on the otherwise unpainted creepies. If I don't like the results, I can always overpaint them without losing any details because washes and inks are very thin.




When I buy those colors for miniature painting, I always look for buying them as a lot and always bargain hunt until I get a bundle real cheap. That way I get some colors I normally wouldn't have bought individually. The yellow ink is such an example. I haven't found a use for it but keep playing with it from time to time. For all those painting beginners out there, a word about inks: I didn't have any inks before, so I never really thought about what the difference between inks and washes is. Going from that yellow ink, it is exactly as fluid as the washes but seems to have a lot more pigments, as it's 'coloring power' is much higher. You see this difference best on your fingers: The washes can be wiped away mostly with a paper towel, while the yellow ink must be cleaned up with a handbrush and a good soap.

Where would you use yellow ink?

[tauster]

Those savoy cabbage pieces I made a while ago...

 

I loved the texture - still love it - but the clay simply isn't a material for the game table. It chips and breaks just by looking hard at it. So I made silicone molds from some of the pieces.



I'll wait until the mass is fully cured (I pried the clay pieces out after only 3-4 hrs and haven't yet cleaned up the molds), but it looks very promising. Now I can not only 'mass-produce' very durable pieces - the real advantage is that I don't have to wait for cabbage season.

These pieces will go great with the Torog tile set, the organic texture is just awesome.

The next challenge is finding a way to make molds of the tentacle shapes:




As an afterthought: The more often I make moulds, the faster I get (training effect, obviously) and the less I postpone it. At the first few moldmakings I dreaded the inevitable huge mess, the difficulty of getting the 'recipe' right (it is almost impossible to get it wrong, and it is easyly corrected by adding what's missing after mixing the three ingredients), the necessity for enough originals to make the casting effective (it usually makes no sense to start just because one or two originals, unless you need them very badly), etc... there's always a reason or two why you break out the silicone, corn starch and acrylic color and start making a mold.

Nowadays the threshold is near zero. As soon as I have a couple of things I want to cast, I just start because I know that it will take me probably less than half an hour from start to finish. That has a huge influence on my crafting because it opens up much more possibilities.

So for all crafters out there who always wanted to make molds: Just buy a tube (or two) of cheap silicone, a box of corn starch, get one of the colors you never use, a little round plastic bin and an old screwdriver to stir things. Have paper towels at hand and an old handbrush. And don't forget to put some newspaper on the table that you can simply fold up and throw away when you're done to make cleaning up easier. In no time at all you will be mass-producing cool stuff!

[update]
Basepainted in skin color. Looks like the details survived. Tomorrow night I'll get the wash and hopefully the gloss done.

 

[tauster]

The lighting is crappy and the colors are different than on the pic but I wanted to share a quick update anyways.



Nothing really new apart from the combination of texture and color scheme. I think these pieces work great as either flexible scatter terrain or as elements in a cavern or tunnel piece, old DM Scotty style. And thanks to the molds, I can make as many as I need.

[tauster]

I had already closed shop for tonight when I realized that I hadn't tried the two largest cabbage molds. I couldn't possibly go to bed without making at least a first cast with each, so I fired up the glue gun once again. Since I had only two gluesticks left (the other 2kg are stashed away somewhere else), I tried to make the casts as thin as possible. This would leave the resulting copy with a few holes, but I can always seal those up with hotglue.

Turned out I can do even more than just sealing...


By another lucky accident, I squirted more glue into a hole than was necessary to close it, so the glue formed a little bulb on the outside. Neat!

...I mean, gross!

I had a lot more holes, so I ran with it and reached a new level of grossness. Seriously, this stuff looks ugly.



Not sure how I'll paint those things up. They could be organic sacks filled with fluid (that burst open and cause whatever weird effect the DM has in mind) or if painted like a mushroom (the cabbage texture is great for fungus terrain!), spore sacks.

If you have any painting ideas, please fire away!

Two more close-ups, just in case you made your WIL save on the first picture.

[kgstanley81]

Almost looks like ticks that have grabbed hold of something, some more full than others

[Deleted]

Yeah, bloated blood ticks feasting on meat chunks... *shudder*... love it!

[skunkape]

Yeah, those things really do look creepy!

[dragon722]

All of your stuff still to this day amazes me and inspires sir!!!  Cannot wait to see what's next...

[tauster]

Great to hear you like it!

Re: inspiration: I always hope that others try the stuff I shared. Many of the things I did were shameless copies of other user's creations, and in each of these copycat projects I learned a lot. I did almost always come out with a different result, which is part of the fun.

So please take whatever you want, run with it and share where it took you!

[dragon722]

I think I may just do that...thanks for the insight