I have a friend with a sizeable collection of spooky oddities that I thought might enjoy adding an evil mushroom specimen to it. I intended to make a hollow core in order to run blue LEDs in it so that the mushroom might have translucent spots that would slowly pulse a color. As I got further into it I abandoned this lighting idea but still ended up with a hollow core. Unfortunately this hollow core caused the whole thing to crack on drying which required a lot of patching and sanding to restore but it was worth the valuable lesson because I won’t make that mistake again! Here you can see the core and then the sculpt:
After patching and sanding I painted it. The paint colors look so wrong in these pictures, in real life it is darker muddier sanguine and the blue in the gills is a gentle hint to the naked eye but pops so bright under the flash of my lousy camera. I am particularly happy with the paint job on the stalk, it took a couple times starting over from scratch but I found that layering dark to light and dry brushing in layers I was able to get just the look I was after. I then cut, routed and stained a base for it that was designed to sit under an apothecary bell jar I picked up. I also fit some very life-life moss into the base around the mushroom “roots” and created an antiqued specimen label for it. As usual I spent *way* too long picking a font and devising a latin name for it! The name, Fungus Veneficus, is in reference to this:
A Venefica was a Roman sorceress who used drugs, potions, and poison for several reasons. Venefica means “a female who poisons” in Latin.
