Dinosaur (and former dragon)!

I've always been a big fan of dinosaurs. The interest that a lot of kids have in them never really went away for me: it just broadened to include robots, aliens, dragons and other large monsters. Back in the day, when my friends and I were first getting into Warhammer, we visited a non-GW shop in Milton Keynes that sold a wide range of miniatures. (I remember that they had a Cyberpunk 2013 businessman painted grey, in the style of Spitting Image's puppet of John Major, which rather dates things.)

I bought a lead Grenadier Games model called "Blue Dragon", sculpted by Julie Guthrie. It's a weird miniature, as it's obviously a theropod-type dinosaur with wings. The wings kept falling off, and it was something of a figure of fun, even among my Bretonnians.

Recently, I've been looking at a lot of dinosaur models on Instagram. Some of them are terrific, and it's interesting to see a sort of modelmaking that's developed parallel to wargaming. Inspired by this, I got out the Blue Dragon, without wings, and had a go at painting it.

The sculpting is really good. The scales are terrific. I put green stuff over the feeble slots that were supposed hold the wings on, and tried to sculpt some sort of tecture. I actually pressed different grades of sandpaper into the putty. When it came to painting, I used stripes to break up and disguise my iffy work. 

I'm used to using quite bright colours, as fits the Oldhammer models and pulp settings that I tend to prefer. This time, I went for khaki, with brown and green washes. I'm actually really pleased with how this guy's skin came out. I did use a bit of red to make stripes around its eyes. It does make this guy look very hung over.

Anyhow, here it is!

£6 Plastic Dinosaur Paint Set Challenge!

 A few weeks ago, I went to Tring Museum of Natural History with my friend Ruth. This inevitably involved a look around the gift shop. Later, Ruth presented me with this item:

Yes, it's a paint set, complete with brushes and two plastic model dinosaurs! And all that for £6! 

I thought it would be a fun challenge to try to paint the dinosaurs, using only the paints provided (and a white undercoat). The brushes were so awful that they were hardly worthy of the name, so I threw them out and used my own. I stuck the dinosaurs to two bits of plastic and got to work.

The models were surprisingly detailed (and reasonably accurate, as far as I can tell). Given the undercoat and the quality of the paints, I used washes for the main body of the models. Some of the paints were better than others: the blue and green were pretty decent, all things considered, although the yellow was terrible and I might as well have tried to paint the miniatures with an egg yolk.

I had to mix brown for the horns and claws, which was a new experience. I found it easy to make some sort of brown (a mixture of yellow, red and blue) but making it more leathery was really hard. 

Anyhow, here are the results:

Tyrannosaurus:

Triceratops:

And of course here they are locked in mortal combat and ready to be banged against each other! To quote Firefly, "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

Not too shabby, all things considered! This was a fun break from the usual models and just goes to show that anything is a canvas if you're brave enough and get away before the police arrive.