Warp Gate sculpting

Jack, a friend in my gaming club, asked me to work on a Warp Gate to use as terrain for the chaos table. We're in a big push right now to put together enough terrain to host a tournament. Here's what I've come up with so far.

What Jack handed off to me was a shallow lucite dome, filled with plaster and stuff, that will set in the middle of the chaos temple ruins scenery. (The dome is fitted with a rod that will slide into the temple ruins base.)

How to model the gate? My main inspiration came from descriptions of the Gellar Field and the visicious, swirling, protean mass of malignant daemons gnawing at it. I say "inspiration" but not in a literal sense. I just wanted to capture the idea of the Warp as a seething mass of semi-sentient matter and malignancy.

To that end, on the back I decided to sculpt a gigantic, disembodied hand, meant to look as if some daemonic power is cupping a piece of warp stuff to generate a portal:



I wanted it to look hand-like, but not precisely like a hand:


Then I turned to the other side of the portal, the part depicting the membrane between Materium and Immaterium. Jack had started some work on that, but I ended up clipping most of that off and starting over. (Sorry Jack.)

It's not done yet, but here's what I have so far:


The idea is to make the surface look like reality bubbling open, with half-formed creatures starting to pierce through...

There's one daemoness (from the daemonette sprue) just breaching, and indeterminate faces, claws and tendrils starting to pierce through too.

So it's coming together. Still some more sculpting to do on the "membrane" side. Then of course painting...