So you can fork out a large amount of money to get Papo or Schleich dinosaurs for your prehistoric gaming, but since the popularity of the Jurassic Park films… or maybe before… I’m not old enough to remember, you can readily find cheap dinosaur toys to game with. All it takes is a little paint, and you can have something good looking enough to game with at a portion of the price. To put things into perspective, the price of a single small Schleich dinosaur in England is around £10, for that price from amazon I managed to pull in 20 dinosaurs all of an equal size. The sculpting quality obviously isn’t great but with a lick of paint you can cover a multitude of sins. Here’s where things start:
I use bases from Games-Workshop, they are a little pricey but fit well and I think boost the look of the finished product. To texture the bases you can use sand. However here I’ve used bicarbonate of soda and super glue. You simply spread super glue over the surface of the base and then sprinkle on bicarb. It adds a more realistic texture than sand, which to scale has particles that are too large, also it dries almost instantly, and since I have a decent amount of expendable income I prefer the slightly more expensive route to texture bases if it saves me lots of time, besides the dinosaurs are affixed to the bases with super glue anyway. I give everything a coat of black spray-paint and then get to work with my drybrush. The point of this initial drybrush is to put down the colours of the skin, I mix colours, use reference photos from google images, but generally just try to have fun. Here’s what you’re left with:
Then I paint all the details, claws, teeth, tongues and eyes. I quickly drybush the base brown and I then give all the skin and the base a drybrush of a light bone colour, this brings all the various colours on the skin together and highlights everything.
I flock the bases to match (ish) the green on my table. I’ve been informed that grass didn’t evolve until a long time after dinosaurs, so this is obviously some kind of moss, or just fallen leaves.
Once the flock is dry I add a quick drybrush of yellow to it to bring it out and add contrast.
Blood is the final step, usually around carnivores’ claws and mouths. This takes three steps, a blood red paint, followed by a red wash that extends beyond the edges of the previous layer of red paint, and finally I use a blood effect paint such as ‘blood for the blood god’ or Tamiya’s clear red to add some gloss. It’s a bit overkill (pun intended) to do three steps when you could get away with simply using a blood effect paint on its own, but I like the look I get.
All in all I can paint a few dinosaurs in a couple of hours. Painting can be so much fun I’d be happy just painting them as a hobby even without the game.
Deathzap 