Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Last night I painted the latest two cactus pots that I sculpted.These come from chatting with Nefarious about potential pots while we were reading, at which point we took a break and each drew our idea and I quickly brought them to 3D life. Her design actually turned out better — it’s the one with the cactus that looks more like an upside-down geriatric scrotum. Of course it’s some sort of spider beast, with a cactus for a hairdo. The more normal cactus not needing a gross-out metaphor to describe it is my design, a cactus in disguise. The masquerade mask is festooned with 4mm Swarovski crystals, which is also what the red pupils in the spider are made of. Both are coated with automotive engine enamel which I like because it’s much, much tougher than normal clear sprays and quite chip proof.

As should be no surprise, I had plenty of fun making these, even though I had to replace the legs on the spider twice on account of my dropping misadventures. There are lots more views from different angles after the break if you would like to see more detail.

First a few more pictures of the cactus in disguise since there’s one less of those… By the way, I don’t have a good reason why he would appear to have real feet when he obviously has no human head and no human arms. Nothing but feet somehow. Perhaps the cactus sought the services of a warlock but the transformation spell was quit shortly after starting or something like that…

And now let me finish up with more of the spider beast. I think what I might like best about this is the really simple paint job. Sometimes I get carried away and do too much and wreck it in the progress. The little black hairs are actually holes that are black because before doing the “real” paint job I gave it a black wash.

I’m sure you guessed, but I’ll mention that both of these were made with Apoxie Sculpt (grey in color), which after the hand/dental-tool sculpted models hardened were finished off using my Dremel, and then painted with Vallejo model paints.