Krentz 1/12 Styracosaurus

I´m a big fan of Dave Krentz´s sculptures and this 1/12 th (?) scale Styracosaurus, produced for the Sideshow Collectibles "Dinosauria" range, encapsulates his strong points. Dave is an expert at conveying dynamics - look at this inanimate piece of resin and doesn´t it convey an immediate sense of the transference of weight in motion? Don´t you get the impression that this is an animal "strutting his (or her) stuff"? Dave has a knack for imbueing his sculpts with a vey strong sense of animal individuality bordering on "personality" (he has, after all, worked for years as a character designer). This sculpt simply oozes haughtiness,

"Pretentious? Moi? Huh!"

I couldn´t resist re-painting my piece with my own colour-scheme, more fitting to my personal vision of how this impressive animal may have appeared in life.

To my shame I haven´t added the intended final detailing (my life had to alter course a few years back), but here´s how it looks in a state of near-completion.

Hoping to put the finishing touches to this one before summer 2014.....

Spike.

Wenzel 1/35 Triceratops.

This is a really nice little one piece kit from The Dinosaur Studio, imbued with the characteristic personality that Greg Wenzel somehow managed to impart to his sculpts.

I´ll let the images do most of the talking about how my little project evolved.

Basic patterning and some pre-shading laid down.

Nice idea for a startled animal.

I added some sloping ground to show the beast puzzling over how to cross a river in spate with deeper, faster water than it was expecting. I liked the stance with the animal looking down and things developed from there.

The picture frame used as a base was sprayed with several coats of granite-effect paint.

Groundwork was built up from bark, stiff packing foam, milliput and a pva glue/plaster mix.

A mixture of drybrushing and thin washes brought things on.

The belly of the animal is difficult to see but I couldn´t resist painting a pattern on it.

My first use of Vallejo clear water resin tinted with Vallejo paints went drastically wrong, cracking and lifting from the base. Several attempts later things began looking the way I had envisioned.

Triceratops has a black central stripe running down its back which has a slight purplish tinge to it.

A little more detailing.

Whitening the tip of the nasal horn makes it more effective for intra- and inter-specific signalling - waved around it might impress potential mates or warn off rivals and predators.

A liberal scattering of droppings over the moss-meadow implies that this Triceratops is not the first of its kind to come to this spot. Perhaps it is an old male, lagging behind the others and intentionally or unintentionally performing some kind of rear-guard action.

His tiny brain is trying to work out whether to cross the flood-waters or wait until they have receded. Fossil bones in the Hell Creek Formation will tell us the rest of his story.

Begun and finished in May 2009.

Spike.