Snailtime's Invertebrate Sculpts

[snailtime]

Here are a couple of sculptures I've made that I thought I would share, starting with my solifuges (aka camel spiders, wind scorpions, red romans, etc etc these have a million common names).

Solifuges are my second favorite creature (after land snails/slugs of course). Sadly, to my knowledge there are zero solifuge figure out there besides the "Giant Spider" models from the show Primeval, which depict a fantasy creature based off of a solifuge rather than intending to be an accurate departure of a real creature. I'm surprised they have't popped up in a Kaiyodo line yet since they are such interesting and distinct creatures. Anyways, I saw this fantastic photo of a colorful in the Rhagodidae family posted by MSB@Photography on Flickr and gave it a go.

I thought this would be easy but then realized there are virtually no quality images of the underside of a solifuge anywhere. I had to do some extreme digging to find good reference photos and still have to do a fair amount of guessing. I wasn't totally happy with how this came out so I ended up selling it.





Eager to do better after fighting through the anatomy on the first sculpture, I tried again. This time I made a less colorful figurine of a generic solifuge in the family Eremobatidae.





It's not perfect, but I am very pleased with how this one came out! This may be one of the first pieces of art to showcase proper and detailed solifuge anatomy. I think I did a great job showing the structures, especially the malleoli.

[snailtime]

A while later, I decided to attempt a snail, since I'm a huge fan of them and I wanted to do a really striking, colorful one. There's a real shortage of unique snail figures. There aren't many snail figures to begin with out there, but those that exist are primarily Cepaea hortensis or Helix pomatia. It's a bit of a bummer because there are hundreds of extremely cool and colorful tropical lands snails out there that fit right in with the beautiful nudibranchs people are familiar with. I decided to make a Platymma tweediei, also known as a 'Fire Snail.'

Here's the real deal for reference:


And here's my figurine:



Details of the spire, umbilicus, and other species identifying features. I made sure that the shell exactly matched that of the real animal.


Next to models by Schleich, Bullyland, and Papo for scale:


I think next time I'll add shading around the "pupil" to represent the optic nerve to make it look more realistic. I would also like to try a different glaze. The glaze I used was matte but it still came out way more glossy than I prefer.

[Isidro]

I tought it was a repaint of an existing model, but I realize it's actually an original sculpt, and it's of atonishing quality! You should start a brand!

[bmathison1972]

As a fellow insect/invertebrate enthusiast, I think those are stunning!

BTW is it just the angle or do your two Papo snails look like different sculpts? Did you alter one of them so they don't look the same?

[snailtime]

I tought it was a repaint of an existing model, but I realize it's actually an original sculpt, and it's of atonishing quality! You should start a brand!

Thank you so much! I actually made a silicone mold of the snail sculpt because I was interested in seeing if I could make copies. Perhaps I will have to pick up the experiments again some time

[snailtime]

As a fellow insect/invertebrate enthusiast, I think those are stunning!

BTW is it just the angle or do your two Papo snails look like different sculpts? Did you alter one of them so they don't look the same?

Thank you! Those are actually two original and different snail sculpts made by Papo. I never see anyone post the larger 2022 figure and it was quite hard (for me) to come by. You can find some right now on eBay.de for cheap but I don't think the seller ships outside of Germany. I wish I had more information since I think it's odd that no one seems to know about the larger model. German/EU release only perhaps? Still seems strange. I'm going to make a huge land snail/slug master post of my collection soon but here's some pics of the Papo snails now:

[bmathison1972]

Oh wow; I will have to hunt down that 2022 larger one, for sure! Thanks!