Re: Betta's repaints.....Dinosauria series added 7/18/24

[bettashark]

Starting a thread for this instead of making one for each figure.
So, to inaugurate it, here's a bootleg Dinosaur Iguanodon (labelled Scelidosaurus, oddly enough) from the dollar store. Took 2 days and a lot of anxiety due to being snowed in with a sick pet (pet is fine, snow is dealt with, I am now calm). This was the first time I tried painting on a textured model, which was interesting, although this one doesn't have any scales, only wrinkles. Also experimented with using colored pencils for shading and some details, which worked quite well! The Mod Podge brand sealer though...that did NOT work terribly well. It's supposed to be matte and is glossy, and it's lightly tacky once set, just enough to stick down slightly to whatever the figure is standing on. Not cool. I'll have to get something better and coat it again.
The colors were vaguely inspired by a capercaille, since the model originally had bright red eyebrows. I decided to keep those, just for fun. This model has very prominent ears, so I decided to emphasize them instead of struggling to hide them, and made them blue like a silkie chicken's. I started to make the eyes a bright golden yellow, as they had been, but then decided I didn't like it and made them dark brown. I also experimented with adding color to the spines, but it looked really bad, so I stuck with near-black. So ultimately, it's not the most excitingly colored dinosaur, but that's ok. I'm quite happy with how it came out, and I'd happily use this paint scheme again on a better figure.

[BlueKrono]

Your repaint looks awesome! Do you think the dollar store has any more of those Scelidosauruses?

[Libraraptor]

That repaint looks super cool!

[Duna]

wow, that is wonderful! 

[bettashark]

Your repaint looks awesome! Do you think the dollar store has any more of those Scelidosauruses?

Unfortunately probably not, since i got this when I was about maybe 6-8. It's definitely not a Scelidosaurus anyway, but it made a good practice model.

[Gothmog the Baryonyx]

It looks like an Iguanodon from the film Dinosaur.
Your repaint is very nice, are you sure you can replicate it ona nicer figure?

[Loon]

Always love a glamorous ornithopod, and wow, this is so nice. Definitely transforms a less than desirable figure into a piece of art.

[Halichoeres]

The paint job is much lovelier than the sculpt! Very charitable of you to grace it with these pajamas

Your repaint looks awesome! Do you think the dollar store has any more of those Scelidosauruses?

This mold has been in use for many years; I've even seen them in CVS. The colors might vary, but this is a readily available sculpt.

[PrimevalRaptor]

Ohh, great work! I love seeing those cheaper sculpts being enhanced by a good repaint, big fan of the eyebrows!

[Shonisaurus]

Superb repainting.

[bettashark]

Got another one for you!
Long ago, as a kid, I picked up the Safari Toob of carnivorous dinosaurs. (I believe it's still in production?) Say what you will about the accuracy of the sculpts (and oh, there's a lot to say...), but several of these minis have an amazing amount of detail! Wrinkles, scales, spikes, osteoderms, even tiny teeth! But of course they then went ahead and gave them very lackluster paint, because painting several thousand tiny dinosaurs with care and attention would really slow things up. Anyway, I figured at least one of them could do with some new paint. I chose the Carnotaurus, just because it stood easily and was one of the more detailed figures of the bunch. It was originally sort of a graphite gray, with some light gray underneath and a wavy black line down the side, and that was it. What a waste!
That said, I also wanted to try an experiment. The rules of the game are as follows:
1. Choose 1 cool tone, 1 warm tone, and 1 neutral at random from your paint collection.
2. Add black, white, and the colors you use to mix up a decent mouth-interior color.
3. Use ONLY these colors.
4. Everything but the mouth color can be mixed in any way you like. That gives you 5 colors.

The colors I grabbed out of the piles were light tan, orange, and aqua green, plus black and white. Seems pretty bad, but it worked out in the end. Orange and black make dark brown, orange and tan make muted yellow-orange, orange and aqua green make olive green. Aqua green and black make deep muted teal, aqua green and tan make kind of an ugly strange olive. Tan and black and white make taupe.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of trying to remove the old paint from this little guy. DO NOT. I promise it's not worth it. This plastic is very susceptible to acetone. The teeth and lower jaw had a bit of an accident, but oh well, guess this Carnotaurus has been in a few fights.
The underlying plastic on these minis is white, and I knew I was going to be doing a lot of drybrushing, so I skipped priming it and just painted the whole thing very dark brown. Then I started drybrushing with a very dark teal, and gradually worked up through 3 layers of drybrushing with progressively lighter shades. Then I drybrushed the underside taupe. The inside of the mouth was painted a funny dirty pink color, and the teeth were painted off-white. The claws were also done in taupe. And then it was time for all those osteoderms, one at a time, with a toothpick full of plain aqua green. Took quite a while, but worth it! Then I broke out the orange and used that muted yellow-orange for the horns, the osteoderms on the back of the neck and scattering down the back, and a drybrush of the throat and the top of the head. The eyes were painted bright orange using a toothpick, and pupils were added using the sharp point of a sewing needle. At this point, I realized I wasn't happy with the horns, so I just kinda went a bit wild with them and redid them in bright orange with black and white slightly-wonky bands. I sealed it with that Modpodge stuff I still need to replace.
Sitting on its own, it looks a bit too bright, maybe. But as I found when I went to photograph it, when placed in front of a forest background, it disappears!
I also had some fun photographing it inside of a rolled-up gray towel for the classic cave scene feel. (This works better on some screens than others.)







Plus, a sneak peek of things to (eventually) come...

[Bokisaurus]

Very nice repaint and I love the colors.
Can't wait to see what that sauropod looks like😃

[Dusty Wren]

This little Carnotaurus turned out so well! It's cool that you challenged yourself with the color scheme. I find myself going back to the same familiar colors over and over, so this would be a good way to mix it up. And I think the bright spots of orange work nicely against the olive green.

Also, that is a good thing to know about the acetone.

[JohannesB]

About your nice Carnotaurus repaint (and concerning many living animals), isn't it interesting how seemingly obtrusive colors and color combinations actually often make animals blend in perfectly with their environment? Evolution is just marvelous :-)

[Halichoeres]

What a great exercise in color usage. It turned out really well. Are those the old Safari Brachiosauruses?

[bettashark]

They are indeed old '96 Safari Brachiosauruses! I had both the yellow and the green version, and after some research, I've decided to differentiate them in other ways. They still need a lot of work, especially the green one. That's all I'll say for now!
Meanwhile, Blue sits idle, waiting for the day I go back to the craft store for better tools.
And now I'm starting on my defective Safari ichthyosaur instead of finishing anything! All I've managed so far is removing the existing paint and slapping on some black.
The good news is that my Bullyland ichthyosaur is finally sealed and finished, and it looks really good, so I'm hoping to get some photos of it soon, maybe alongside the Safari one, just for fun.

[bettashark]

Good news folks! I'm not dead! I've just been having a more-eventful-than-expected summer.
Progress reports! Safari icthyosaurs: still in progress. Brachiosaurs: still not even done altering the sculpts. Blue: same. Carnegie Corythosaurus: uncertain? need to see in full sun to decide.
Meanwhile, have a coelacanth! Safari's sculpt, of course. Always bugged me that it was so pale and plain. This one is done up as Latimeria chalumnae, the more endangered of the two living species.
This project was pretty simple. But I made a mistake. I tried to use Krylon primer. It was awful! Weird powdery stuff that unevenly sloughed off. And the only way to remove it was with acetone. I ran out and couldn't get more and wound up using nail polish thinner, which, for the record, does work, but also makes plastic smell really bad. So then I had to soak it in vinegar to get the smell out. It was A Time folks.
Anyway, the actual painting was just some drybrushing and some subtle gradients in the fins and gill membranes, plus all those white markings. I used teal colorshift paint for the eyes. I think it came out pretty good!
I just bought another coelacanth so I can do the other species, which is more brownish. Safari apparently will no longer be making this, so grab em while you can folks!

[Shonisaurus]

I didn't know that Safari will no longer make the coelacanth, bad news! Luckily I have it, thank you for reporting.

On the other hand, that repainting of the coelacanth based on the species of coelacanth most threatened by extinction, has come out embroidered. My congratulations.

[bettashark]

I'm back again, this time with Safari's Deinonychus! I was super excited to get this, but I knew I wanted to repaint it. The sparrow-like terracotta and brown and white didn't make sense to me on an 11 foot animal. I was aiming for wolf, but some bobcat and harpy eagle got in there as well. The gray actually has some subtle taupes and creams, though I think they came out more subtle than I intended. Oh well!
I had a heck of a time painting this. My first attempt was going to be Blue-like, but oof, even using mostly black and some navy in the stripe, that color scheme just wasn't working out for an ambush predator, especially not after I tried to get fancy with the iridescent paints... So all that had to come off! And it didn't want to come off with water, so it had to come off with acetone. Which is how I found out that this figure is made of a type of plastic that is particularly sensitive to acetone, and wound up resculpting all of the feather detailing on the tail with a hot pin, and setting my hair on fire. Twice. (I'm fine.)
Anyway, turns out a lot of gray birds have yellow display markings, and that looks a lot better than blue anyway.
My particular figure stands ok-ish on its own two feet without the tail, but is prone to falling over whether it's on its tail or not, so I built it a custom base. Most of it is polymer clay, and it has little plastic plants (some kind of fern from Ikea), bits of stick from driftwood that used to be in a betta tank (the wood cannot be reused for a fish for sanitary reasons), dropped asparagus fern needles, tiny wood crumbles from the bottom of the orchid bark bag, paper leaves, tiny bits of furniture foam painted green, rocks from outside, and a very badly eroded crinoid fossil I happened to spot in the flower bed. It's supposed to look like it rained recently, so it has gloss varnish in the low points, and green staining to look like moss or algae. It took me I think about 5 days to finish the base.

[Patrx]

Beautiful work! You've really elevated an already-wonderful figure.