The Giant Spiders can be easily made more exciting with some basic leg positioning. Just look at some still photos of real spiders walking, stalking or in a defensive (arms up) position and duplicate it. Be careful because the legs do break easily if moved too far or too fast (voice of experience
). Plus they will have a tendency to bend everywhere EXCEPT on a joint.
Making one look like it's coming out of a hole is simply a matter of cutting it appropriately, building up a small mound of GS on the base with a hole in place, and mounting the front of the spider. Again, just try Google. Here's a cool one:
http://people.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/~ubcg60a/malaysia/trapdoorSpider1.jpg
For a Spider Queen conversion I like the effect of mixing the Queen with Shelob. I'm about 50% of the way thru the version that puts the back of the Queen on the front of Shelob. I started this one first because I like the head of the Shelob model far more than the SQ model, and the work to get the legs right seems far less involved. After the initial cut and a three-wire join between the two parts I built up the join with GS. I still need to do the surface sculpt of GS now to blend the two parts together and then attach the legs, but I think it will look pretty good. I saw this done on GW's site initially and really liked the effect.