FINAL FANTASY IV
ARACHNE PROJECT #611 CREATED: AUGUST 2018 The Arachne is a potentially lethal foe. More likely than not, Cecil Harvey and his traveling companions only come across her during their trek through the Land of Summoned Monsters; she is one of the beasts who can be called upon by the roving Summoner and provoked into doing battle on his behalf. Like her sister, Talantla, the Arachne is a magic-user, and can utilize the powerful Quake spell to create devastating localized earthquakes. Given the existence of the dangerous and painful hot spots on the cavern floor of the Summoned Monsters cave, Cecil and company are almost certainly already using the magic of Float, which effectively negates the Quake spell entirely. (Unlike many of the monsters in Final Fantasy IV, Arachne retains her original name for the various remakes of the game.) To build Arachne (and her sister-in-arms Talantla), I took a Black Widow action figure from the Avengers toy line and cut off her legs, connecting her upper torso to a spider from the Kong: Skull Island "Creature Contact" playset. The spider legs were hard styrene, strong enough to support the extra weight of another toy glued to the top. The legs were much too spindly, though, so I trimmed down their length somewhat and bulked them up using Sculpey modeling compound. I textured them with a wire brush to give them the external appearance of an arachnid exoskeletal shell. Modifying the legs was a lot of extra work, but it went a long way towards improving the overall look of the project. |
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