FINAL FANTASY IV
TALANTLA PROJECT #612 CREATED: AUGUST 2018 The Talantla was a rare monster, difficult to find, and it was entirely possible Cecil Harvey might have gone on his world-spanning adventures without ever encountering her at all. She was indigenous to a very small spot of land deep in the Underground, accessible only by a heat-protected airship that can traverse the magma oceans. A twisted mutation of nature, she existed as a half-woman, half-spider abomination. She typically appeared with a pet BlackCat at her side. She was capable of using the magic spell Quake, which caused the very Earth to shake and swallow up anyone within range. The fact that Cecil and his friends had already thought to cast the Float spell before encountering her was an act of utter serendipity. (Her odd name seems to be the result of both the game's limit of alphanumeric characters as well as a phoneme mistranslation. It was almost certainly intended to be Tarantla, short for Tarantula. (In other versions of the game, she is renamed Alraune.) To build the Talantla, I fused the upper body of an Avengers Black Widow action figure to the body of a spider from the Kong: Skull Island toy line. This was one of the most ambitious projects I've tackled to date. Not only did I have to connect two totally unrelated toys to each other, but I also needed to rebuild the spider legs and give them a bulkier, meatier look. I thought the extra weight of all that Sculpey might be a problem, so I built a complicated internal assembly so that I could screw the body halves of the spider together, instead of relying on just glue to do the job. Black Widow had shoulder and elbow joints that could both pivot and swivel, but I was concerned about paint scraping off, so I immobilized the hinge joints with glue. The shoulders and elbows can still swivel freely, and the spider legs are articulated at the base. Talantla has a decidedly alien skin tone compared to Arachne, who shares the same game sprite design. I used an airbrush to create the gradient from her blue humanoid skin tone to the green colors of her spider exoskeleton. |
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