Dinosaurs are, after all, the perfect subject for such pursuits, seeing as how the group consists entirely of awesome monstrosities of varying types and sizes. Although scale could well be a consideration as, let's face it, most of the popular Dinosaurs aren't exactly famed for being small.
Try doing THIS in 28mm. I DARE YOU.
However I did recall something from back when I was working on my Silurian conversion. A range of Dinosaur models made in 10mm scale from Magister Militium. So I figured I'd get some and see what happened.
As you can see, that went pretty well. I ordered a bunch just before christmas, and luckily for me they turned up before everything shut down. Meaning I could spend what time off work I had constructively painting and catching up on some of my Big Finish backlog.
Of course, it wasn't all smooth sailing. One of the things I'd decided on before anything had even arrived was that I wanted to have a go at scenic style bases. Which isn't something I normally do. But I had some sand and some glue and basic recall of how the technique was meant to work. Water the glue down, coat the base, dip it in sand then paint it green. Simple. And then I got the Walking With Dinosaurs DVD set because it was cheap in Tescos, and learned from the extras that there wasn't actually any grass back in the Mesozoic. Whilst there were various low lying ferns and such like they weren't really the same sort of thing. Thus I was forced to reconsider how the basing was going to work. As it was I went with a sort of deserty / volcanic plain kind of vibe which I think looks alright.
Painting the Dinosaurs themselves was then simply a matter of deciding what sort of colour scheme and patterning to try for. I didn't want everything to be plain brown and green, as that would look pretty boring overall. So on this Triceratops in addition to trying to tart up the frill display a little I gave it a sort of moo print scheme on the body. It WAS a herbivore after all.
The Allosaurus I gave a fairly drab overall colour, but brightened up the head with ruddy crests. I also tried to use some inking and drybrushing to establish a pattern along the back, but I don't think it showed up as well as it might as I was using black on grey. Probably needs more contrasting colours to really stand out.
I wanted the Eupolcephalus to have a fairly earthy colour scheme. Although this did present some worry as I was using the same colours to do the bases thanks to that whole lack of grass issue. Thanks to the differing base coats and inking however it came out just fine.
One of the biggest problems though was that of the Carnotaurus. Because for some reason the model doesn't actually feature horns. Which, you might remember, are kinda the defining feature of this beast. The horns it ended up with are actually the tips of a pitchfork from an old GW plastic zombie bit. Just needed to drill the head out, pop them in and patch up with a touch of green stuff.
The 6 models shown so far were all from the Dino Might Starter Set. Not only do they make these miniatures, but there is also a ruleset to go with them. Of course, the rules were somewhat counter intuitively sold separately from the Starter. Which is a little odd in my opinion. But then again I initially thought it also came with a Spinosaurus for some reason, despite making no mention of the fact on the website. You'd think that when attempting 10mm scale miniatures one would possess some vague attention to detail, but I guess not.
After the starter set miniatures I also got a few extras for a bit of additional variety. First up is the Cryolophosaurus. Which obviously should be painted blue because the name implies cold. One interesting thing I learned early on is that, whenever possible, you should paint the dinosaurs underside in a lighter or contrasting colour. Somehow it really helps to prevent the mini looking flat or lifeless. With this guy and went for a contrasting yellow belly. I guess just having a bg blue dinosaur with a red Elvis crest wasn't quite cartoony enough for me on it's own or something. Still, I think it works pretty well.
Stygimoloch. Probably just a Pachycephalosaurus going through it's rebellious goth phase of adolescence, but I could hardly ignore anything that metal sounding. I was actually originally thinking of trying to give it some corpsepaint like markings, but there wasn't really room for anything after all the bony growths on it's head were taken into account.
I was really quite pleased with working in 10mm scale for Dinosaurs. It seemed an eminently sensible way of keeping both the miniatures and the costs at a manageable level. Then I decided to try doing some of the smaller Dinosaurs. Here we have Deinonychus, that vicious man sized predator made famous by Michael Crichtons' innability to tell the difference between it ans a feral chicken. Obviously a lot more fiddly than the larger dinos, but still actually not that bad to do.
Having apparently not had enough difficulty with tiny fiddly things yet I then went down in size even further to paint some Compsognathus. One of the advantages of the Dino Might range is that everything is on the same size base. So you may have one big Dinosaur, or a whole pack of smaller ones. And they don't in all honesty come that much smaller than these guys. Obviously it's a lot harder to get the points of detail in, but at this size there's a lot less detail requiring attention anyway. The main problem in fact is in the basing. You have to pay extra attention to make sure they don't get buried when adding on the texture.
Overall I'm actually rather pleased with these. They're pretty nice miniatures and fun to paint, but they're also relatively inexpensive. Plus it's interesting to do something in a different scale. Of course, I still need to find out what the rules are actually like, and get some appropriate scenery sorted out. The only drawback to 10mm scale is that Heroscape terrain is of rather limited utility.
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