Nekroplanet Fungi

The fungal tone contines into this month. I had two terrain projects on my February to-do list, and I'll be telling you about the first one in this post: Nekroplanet vegetation. Continuing to flesh out the setting, I wanted to show off the existence of fungi and other growths on the surface of Grob. It was only suggested in the very earliest scenic images I've made, but hasn't been touched on since. In the above image you can see the sketches for the builds I had in mind.

As always with the Nekroplanet there's a lot of Beksinski behind this; and so is some of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaa. I thoroughly enjoyed messing about with hot glue and an eclectic mix of other materials to create these organic shapes. I'm happy with how my plans worked out with the assorted materials used coming together:

• styrofoam balls
• marbles
• air-drying clay
• cork
• sand
• Q-tips
• toy parts
• card
• wooden skewers and toothpicks
• PVA
• spackle
• string
• wire
• hot glue gun
• blade
• brush
• soldering iron
• hot wire cutter

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The builds all had more or less the same general procedure. In this example the core is wooden skewers and a ping pong ball, mounted on a cork base.

This was then fleshed out with a copious amount of hot glue. It's excellent for such organic shapes, if sometimes not the easiest to control. The tiny white balls are styrofoam, and the strands hanging between mushrooms are string covered in several thick layers of PVA.

The cap of this large mushroom tree (below) is half of a large styrofoam ball. I added dents, texture, and deep gorges with a hot wire cutter and solder iron. Another one has clear marbles built in. I wanted to show a few different species.

I finished off each build with a coat of water, PVA, and filler. This added texture on the overly smooth hot glue and blended everything together (see below).

Here are the finished growths in their natural environment!

The second project I got done in February was for my fantasy gaming. UMS "Agram", my local tabletop club, hosted their annual exhibition and hobby/painting competition Black Queen Feb 22-23. Friends from abroad came over and I played a my first game of Cauldron, for which I wanted to prepare a nice swamp themed board and scenery. That meant crafting more mushrooms (this time far more cartoony ones). But that's a topic for another time.

As always, thanks to my paying Patreon members! Making this stuff takes time and effort, and becoming a paying member is one way you can reward it.