Another little tutorial for my Tyranids, this time we will concentrate on How to sculpt crab legs and pincers that can be very valuable for different projects, from crustaceans to insect segmented legs or just a nasty chaos mutation.

Step 1: Things I need

• Modeling putty (green stuff)
• Water
• Hobby knife (cutter)
• Pin vice
• Clay shaper brush
• Sculpting tool
• Paper clips
• Toothpick
• Flat surface

Step 2: Structure

For starting with a strong internal structure I opened a paper clip and bended it to the desired shape.

Mixed a bit of green stuff and apply it directly on to the wire, with no precautions concerning smooth or clean green stuff surface, since it is just a skeleton sketch of the final crab leg.

Step 3: Smooth shapes

After green stuff is cured its time to start building the final shape, so I mix a bit of the paste and apply it to the structure. It’s better to work on one side of the structure and let it dry before going for the other half, so we start with the left side of the crab leg.

Use the clay shaper brush dipped in water and start smoothing the edges of the green stuff, take your time here and use always lots of water.

So, when left side is sculpted and smoothed let it dry and only then, go for the right side of the crab leg. You can sculpt the shape you wish just avoid it to be to uniform since it’s a crab leg irregular shapes work best. You should now have something like this.

Step 4: Spikes and final contour

And the fun begins, while the stress of waiting for curing times is growing on you we can use one of those endless curing breaks to sculpt some little spikes for our crab legs, do some random sizes and shapes. And for those that say crabs don’t have spikes on legs I say: Who cares it looks great. 😉

I hope everyone knows how to sculpt spikes but for the more hesitant sculptors here is how I do them. Do one little ball of green stuff and put it on a flat surface, then dip fingers on water and start pressing green stuff against surface with vertical movements, just let it dry. Piece of cake.

Now, with all stuff cured, choose one cool spike and mix a ball of green stuff, to use its sticky properties, for “gluing” the spike to the leg.

For better blending the spike to the crab leg lay a layer of green stuff over the junction

Its time for the final claw spike and this time we will use the paper clip extremity for a stronger merge. First with a cutter do a cut on another spike and then use a pin vice to do a small hole in it. Mix a bit of green stuff and squeeze the spike against it passing the hole on to the paper clip. This should make a stronger bond, but before you finish you need to smooth the paste with clay shaper dipped in water.

Step 5: Texture

With all shapes finished its time for texturing those legs. I started by putting some spikes on the legs, since you already sculpted several spikes just cut them to the desired size and use green stuff for gluing them to the leg. In this process I use mainly sculpting tool and toothpick dipped in water to sculpt the junction of spike to leg. You could also use pins but since the spikes are small there’s no need for that.

Finally I will try to do those micro organisms and corals that usually we see on crustaceans. Simply cut several random sized small balls of green stuff and again with the help of a toothpick and sculpting tool stick them randomly on the crab leg, also try to shape the balls on the leg with interesting forms.

Conclusion

Well that’s it, you now can sculpt crab legs for your projects, if you noticed you can do different shapes on legs or even more segmented ones, funny thing I noticed is that the smaller legs look like scorpions tails’ hope you enjoyed it.

— Pedro Navarro

Our former member, Zolwik, posted this step-by-step tutorial showing how to make a biovore in a pretty different way. I think his idea is pretty interesting for somebody who want to have a special and non-typical hivefleet 🙂
Enjoy!

This is a tutorial how to make some interesting non-standard Tyranids from bits that you can find in plastic Tyranid kits and some greenstuff. Conversions are very easy and fast to do, as they are generally thought to be useful mostly for players, who want nice looking army in short time.
I’m not good at writing so I’ve taken a few photos at every stage.

This time it will be how to make a biovore.

What we need

Parts needed for a plastic biovore:
• warrior body
• set of warrior scything talons
• set of hormagaunt scything talons
• one ripper
• left arm from warrior barbed strangler
• chitinous armour plate from gaunt weapon sprue
• green stuff

Carving and glueing

The first thing to do is preparing the warrior’s body. Cut off the shoulder armour plates to make some space for front legs.

Remember to round the edges with knife.

Cut off the rear part of the neck to achieve a flat surface- this will be the place for the ripper’s head.

Cut the ripper in half and match the head to the body.

Remove the plastic triangle that is standing out in lower part of warrior’s body and glue there chitinous armour plate from a gaunt

Take the barbed strangler arm and cut off the bag with spore mines.

Prepare the chest by flattening it with a knife and place the spore mines bag there.

Now it’s time for the legs. Take a scything talon and cut it apart as in the picture. Make the end of it round and make sure that it fits the holes in the main body.

Standard scything talons aren’t identical so you have to adjust angles or legs won’t fit on standard biovore base.

If you have done all the previous things you should now glue legs into place. The best method to do it, is gluing all legs at once. You should find a good pose and look out not to place them very wide because they wouldn’t fit onto base.

Green stuff time!

The next step is to hide the leg-body connections. The fastest way to do it is placing there some greenstuff. Make a small roller and place it directly on the connection. Then push some small channels with a sharp knife. This will give you a nice looking pattern.

Fill in any gaps near the bag with green stuff. To achieve smooth surface stroke it with wet finger several times.

The final stage is making his rear part 😉 Load lots of green stuff into the hole and push the pattern similar to that from legs.

Make the central channel a bit wider than the rest by pushing it with bigger knife or sculpting tool.

Done!

And that’s all. Biovore is ready for a battle err… I mean painting 🙂

And do you create your own variants of Tyranid creatures? Or do you go with the standard ones? Or maybe you have interesting ideas of conversions which could be made with Tyranid models? Why don’t you share them with us here?