Awesomesaurus

If you've ever looked at people discussing the whole miniatures painting hobby online you'll have inevitably seen those posts where someone walks you through the process of building and painting some great project, with lots of pictures of the work in progress so you can see how everything came together.

This is not one of those posts. Not quite anyway. The sad truth is I didn't actually think to start writing up any of mini painting shenanigans until a while after I'd finished this guy off. I suppose in a way it was thinking about how that could have made a good post that actually prompted me to start doing it all. So much for hindsight.

So, has anyone else ever heard of a Doctor Who novel called Blood Heat? It doesn't really matter if you haven't. The novel itself was okay, but all you really need to know for the purposes of this article is that it features the Silurians (who are one of my favorite monsters) and the cover looks like this:

I think you can see where this is going.

So, the first step was to get a Silurian and a T Rex. Black Tree Design of course have us covered on the Silurian front, and I found a pretty good looking Nanotyrannus on Magister Militum. To these I added a large urban scenic base from Black Cat Bases. All that remained was to sit back and wait for the various components to arrive in the mail. Well, that and then actually build the damn thing.

See, if I'd thought this through I'd have something other than the catalog picture to put here.

The first issue was with the T Rex itself. I hadn't initially counted on it having an integrated base as part of the sculpt. Which it did. Nothing wrong with that of course, except I'd set my heart on doing it on the urban base. So that had to come off. Which turned out to be no small task, it took me most of The 3 Doctors to carefully debase the model and start mounting it on my chosen platform. Then we needed to start work on the rider.

Mind you, it wouldn't be old school Dr Who without a little stock footage.

Of course the first thing to do here was cut him from his tab. That was easy bit. Then I cut of the legs at the hips and the left arm at the shoulder. Thus liberated from interfering limbs I could pin the torso in place to the back of the T Rex, but not before drilling out holes in the bottom of the hips and shoulder to facilitate reattachment of the limbs.

Each leg was sawn about halfway through behind the knees and bent into position, before being pinned back to the torso and superglued to the flanks of the T Rex. The severed arm was cut down, and then attached to a  piece of bent wire connecting it to the shoulder and glued to the front of the chest. Once all this was dry the gaps were filled in with green stuff, as well as resculpting the missing left shoulder. One of the advantages to the man in a suit accurate sculpt of the piece is that there wasn't much on the way of fine detailing to worry about there. To get the reins I drilled a small hole on each side of the T Rexs head, into which I glued a length of wire. Then I added a small ring of green stuff around each hole and then glued the other ends of the wire into a hole drilled in the Silurians hand. The end result?

The Silurian himself was painted in much the same way as the others I've done. I went for a tan hide colour for the T Rex itself. Partly because I was only doing an "inspired by" version rather than a straight up recreation, but mainly because if I'd done it in green I wouldn't be able to look at it without thinking about Dinosaur Comics.

See what I mean?

Anyway, once I'd gotten a handle on that it went pretty well. A brown ink wash finished it off with a little extra highlighting. The base was pretty straightforward. I did think that maybe it should have a dead body or something extra like that, but I didn't have an Adric to hand. Adding a yellow line down by the kerb did help make it both more visually appealing and more british at the same time. I decided to leave the T Rexs eyes as plain white, as I thought it made it look more possessed that way, like the Silurian is controlling it mentally.

As a first attempt at a major conversion after many years I think I managed to pull this off quite well. My only concern really is if the old school Silurian looks a little out of place on the more realistic looking Dino. It may have been better to try finding something that looked a little more within a BBC budget if you get what I mean. However, overall I have to say I'm quite pleased with it. Now if only I can find some game stats for it....