1/35 Parasaurolophus Bust
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As you may have realised by now, I enjoy the odd Dinosaur model or two. I recently got a hold of the Tamiya Parasaurolophus kit for a reasonable price and decided to build it. While building it, I noticed that it came with two seperate heads - one for male and one for female supposedly - and I thought to myself 'It seems a waste to not use the second head - what can I do with it?'. After a little while, I had the idea to build it like a bust and mount it on a little stand.
Being a plastic kit and all, the head was in two halves with the additional lower jaw piece. I glued these together and then filled them up with Milliput putty. While the putty was curing, I used some Repliscale to make a pattern stamp and then used it to press skin pattern into the Milliput. On the back of the neck, the open gap was filled by glueing on some styrene sheeting and then cutting to to size once the glue had cured. Milliput was used again to fill in those gaps.
At this point, I drilled a small hole in the base of the neck and then mounted a small length of brass rod into it. This was to mount the bust on to the stand later on.
Painting was done with Clear Orange and Clear Blue over the Primer Grey basecoat. NATO Black was used to shade and put a pattern onto the skin. The eyes were hand painted and finally the bust was given a wash of Artist Oils (burnt Umber) and sealed with Clear.
For the base, I used an old measuring cup that I had left over from an old medicine bottle. A hole was made in the top for the rod to be inserted into, then it was primed and painted with NATO black. Once dried, the rod was inserted and glued into place from inside the stand.
Overall, a quick and easy build and something that you rarely find, a Dinosaur bust!