Although, just for the record even I wouldn't call any of paint jobs as bad as Jurassic Park 2.
So, the Spinosaurus then. A mighty beast and one of my personal favourites. Although I do have to say that the shape of the head on this guy isn't shaped QUITE right by my estimate. It's still not a bad piece. I must admit that figuring out how to paint it gave me a lot of difficulty. Originally I was trying to go with a kind of zebra pattern. Although quite what anything this big would hope to blend in with I really can't say. It just seemed like a fun idea, but really didn't work. I think I was probably doing the stripes too thin, so he looked more veiny than anything else. Still, the skin tone I got after covering that up works pretty darn well for a primarily marine predator such as this. And you can still hints of the original patterning I tried underneath, which takes advantage of my original mistake. I wanted the sail to be quite bright as it had to have some sort of display function. The reason I decided to use bright green was a great conspiracy theory I came up with. Basically the sail functions as a giant solar panel, and is populated with symbiotic photosynthetic organisms. The extra energy from this obviously giving the dinosaur SUPER POWERS!!
Okay, maybe not.
Then we have the Therizinosaurus. Because OF COURSE WE DO. It's a giant dinosaur made of knives. How could we not want one? The thing that really surprised me with this guy was just how big it is. Bigger than the T-Rex, and comparable to he Spinosaurus. Grasping scale is clearly not a strong point of mine. Anyway, he certainly makes for an impressive centerpiece for the herbivorous hordes. For the patterning I basically just slapped some blobs of brown ink on the body, the filled in the middles with a dirty yellow once that had dried. After that just the usual mix of inking and highlighting really.
Again showcasing my total inability to really grasp the relative sizes of things until they're actually sat in front of me we have the Styracosaurus. It's actually quite a bit smaller than Triceratops. Who knew? Apart from every book on dinosaurs I've read that listed both species, obviously. Anyway, here I went for a yellow skin tone partly because I wanted to try something different to what I'd done previously, but mainly because I'd been playing the Dinosaur King CCG and that had yellow Ceratopsians in it. And also list the actual sizes of the dinosaurs on the cards. I have no excuses.
Sticking with the Ceratopsian theme for the moment, next up we have the Protoceratops. Having already done some tiny carnivores I figured I should have crack at something diminutive and vegetarian as well. Whilst not exactly complicated pieces I did have some problems in that I'd been using a spray undercoat and managed to obliterate a lot of the face detail. So I had to strip them down and start again, this time doing everything by hand. I'm not sure it honestly made that much difference in the long run, but it's the principle that counts.
These Ceolophysis however benefited massively from being stripped down and re undercoated. Whilst I was just kind of unhappy with the Protoceratops, these guys were a disaster first time round, being a lot more detailed with all the feather patterns and what have you. Still, it did give me time to actually work out what I wanted to do with the colour scheme. Despite the initial problems and the inherent fiddliness of painting anything this small I think they look pretty good. Which just goes to show what you can do when there's actually enough detail left on the piece to drybrush over.
So, having sorted out 2 lots of minis and a wodge of scenery, how are we actually doing?
Hey, not so bad. I grabbed a couple of bags of that lichen stuff from ebay to help fill out the vegetation. And I think with that we have about enough stuff to actually try running a game. Although I do still need to give the rules a proper read through. Still, in principle we're good to go for a practice run.
The real question is where to take things from here. The obvious addition is some puny humans to fight the Dinosaurs. But I have yet to find any 10mm space cowboys. Because if we're going to do anything with this, we're going to do FLESH. Other options include Nazis, which would have the advantage of allowing tanks and retaining a strong pulp feel, or possibly some sort of sci-fi troopers which may allow for mech suits. Although I do confess I do think that it might be fun to add some Roman Legionary types into the mix. When you think about it Romans vs Dinosaurs seems like an obviously cool idea. Not sure why that hasn't been done yet.
Still, we'll just have to wait and see how things turn out.
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