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.

Shane Foulkes 1/18 Parasaurolophus.

One of my major areas of interest is the Campanian paleo-fauna and flora of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada. That´s why I own four castings of Shane Foulkes´s now out-of-production 1/18th sculpt of Parasaurolophus walkeri, - a very impressive 8-piece kit, fitting easily together thanks to Shane´s male-female keyed joins. As with all my other kits from Shane, there were no de-gassing bubble holes on mine, just some virtually invisible mould seams to remove with a scalpel and needle file. Believe me, Shane certainly sets the bar high for both quality of product and of service. You can also see that he did a fantastic job capturing the character of this animal moving at some speed bipedally, whilst also keeping the torso low enough to hint at a more habitual quadrapedal gait.

I finished one of my kits years ago, but it still awaits a permanent base. I have plans to mount it being chased by another animal (still a work in progress), nor have I been able to find a base large enough and to my liking. A rushed temporary base was pressed into service for showing at Wonderfest, Louisville, Kentucky, USA in 2009.

The model also featured in my 2011 "Dinosaurs are here"" exhibition at the Natural History Museum, Gram, Denmark.

Some images with natural settings.

Isolated and confused by an approaching storm Parasaurolophus runs into the path of a patrolling Daspletosaurus.....

(The envisaged final diorama for Parasaurolophus will differ substantially from the above.)

...... and just why do I have so many castings of this kit? Here´s why . . . . .

Finished ..... sometime in the future.

Spike.

Kaiyodo 1/20 vinyl Chasmosaurus.

This is the only vinyl model I´ve ever built and I struggled somewhat assembling this 10 (?) piece kit, not being used to the material. I also fell short of my own expectations when attempting to portray this Chasmosaurus in a marshy environment. At least it is finished and I can always go back and improve it later. Perhaps a larger base might help, so that the animal can be presented at a better angle, along with some more patterning on the body and head to add a bit more visual interest.

One thing I did like was the head sculpted for this kit. Chasmosaurus has an impressive "billboard" of a parietal crest and surely there must be little doubt that it was and is an attention-getter. Avoiding commonly portrayed "roundel" colours on the foreside, I went for an overall maroon red which I imagine might become brighter when the animals reacts to a threat stimulus. I also painted black and white "flashes" on the rear of the frill - like those on the ears of tigers, which might function as alarm signals for any other Chasmosaurs should the head and horns be suddenly tipped forwards in aggression or defence.

This last image of the model isn´t all that bad.

Finished sometime in 2005 or 2006, I think.
Spike.

Shane Foulkes 1/18 Ceratosaurus

This 7 piece kit (head, body, 2 arms, 2 lower legs, tail) fit together extremely well, with male7female keyed joins so tight that puttying was almost unecessary. Furthermore, there was hardly any flash and there were no casting blemishes whatsoever.
 The exquisitely fine skin detail on Shane´s 1/18 Ceratosaurus makes it a favourite amongst my finished pieces. Intended to be paired with an accompanying Kentrosaurus kit to represent a potential prey-item, I mounted mine on its own to portray a less predatory behaviour - scratching an itchy flank up against a lakeside tree trunk. The lake has receded leaving a dry bank, some flotsam and a damp, muddy border indicating that water is not far away. Bakker´s 2004 paper on the possibility of piscivorous habits among ceratosaurs was influential here.

Finished in 206/2007, with some updates to the tree in 2009.

Spike.

Rader 1/18 Baryonyx.

With my special interest in Dinosaur remains discovered in England, heightened when I´ve been fossil-hunting myself in the very clay-pit where the type-specimen fossils of this animal were found, Jon Rader´s Baryonyx kit was a "must" for me. He lists it as a 1/20th scale kit, but animals don´t come in fixed standard sizes so I have no qualms about calling it 1/18 to fit in with the rest of my collection. In contrast to some of the heftier reconstructions of  "heavy claw", Jon portrays a very lean and svelte animal with quite a heron-like quality to his "Fisher King". I re-skinned my kit, making the speckled colouring easier to achieve.

Fossilised fish-remains and a juvenile iguanodont bone were found in the gut cavity of the holotype-specimen, suggesting that Baryonyx may have had quite a generalised diet. I´ve attempted to portray an animal that has found an indeterminate meal at the water´s edge and is moving away to a safer spot before gulping it down. Gloss varnish roughly applied to the snout, arms and legs represents wet skin and water droplets, indicating that the beast has recently left the water behind it.

Here´s some images of Baryonyx as a nocturnal animal.

Finished in 2007/2008 ..... I think.

Spike.