The raptor kit is almost done with the puttying, still without a base.
I ended up smoothing quite a few seams, because why not, though some were also pretty necessary, like how the two raptor halves just wouldn't stay together on the head and face of either raptor, making the poor things look a bit like they're about to split their raptor masks and reveal they were The Thing all along.
I'm mostly leaving the arms the way they are with just the parts snapped together, as they have a bit of articulation. The left arm on this raptor kept falling off, though, so I fixed it in place to attach it.
Also I haven't quite decided yet which character each raptor is going to be when I paint them (other than that they're two of the three JP:TG raptors), so for now I've been calling them raptor A (the one with a neck seam) and raptor B (no neck seam).
A very dignified shot of the sculpting on raptor B's legs. Each leg is puttied on both the front and back vertical seam.
Each raptor has one hip seam I'm leaving until after they've been attached to their base. And also I made the underbelly a little less concave on both. A small edit that hardly makes them scientifically accurate or anything, but within the confines of them still being clearly JP raptors, I think it looks a bit nicer.
Jurassic Park raptors are pretty shrinkwrapped by modern standards. The Jurassic World designs still are, too, though the Velociraptors at least are a bit chonkier (the Indoraptor of course is pretty skin-and-bones, but he's not exactly an average specimen of raptor even in-universe), but I find kind of interesting and also kind of funny the different ways the designs in the franchise (and raptor designs outside it, too) have dealt with the raptors' underbelly and weird, pointy raptor hips over the years.
The JP trilogy features raptors whose pubic bone kind of just pokes out of their body with just skin around it. It looks odd, and a little comical like something pointy between the legs tends to, but the bones of the pelvis being very visible on the living animals was common in paleoart at the time. In JP you can see this on other theropods, too, though the raptors kind of stand out because of their particularly birdlike pelvis making the pointiness very prominent.
The JW raptors seem to have kind of reduced pubic bones instead, like the people designing the models still didn't know what to do with the weird, pointy thing and just left it out. As a result the raptors' torso is pretty oval-shaped from the side (except for, again, the Indoraptor, the outlier Georg who should not be counted - although speaking of Indo's weird pelvis since I already mentioned this with the JP raptors, I've seen some people apparently genuinely mistake the bump between his legs for genitals since I've seen people make a point to leave it out when drawing female Indoraptors, and so to be clear, nope, it's just the pubic bone, which also seems to be positioned more like a tyrannosaur's than a raptor's. and that wouldn't even be the right location for that considering he's a birb :D).
Another funny thing raptor depictions have gone through, soon after they already started getting feathers and proper wings, was leaving the pubic bone to poke out backwards under the tail even if the underbelly was more filled in, which just feels like a bad idea in practice. Surely evolution would be kinder to these creatures than giving them a "shelf" right under their butthole, lol.
But it's been a journey, figuring out what all kinds of stuff a long-extinct animal would have on its bones, and it's not an easy task to start from scratch. Notably the Jurassic Park raptors, and the Jurassic World raptors based on them, lack gastralia, because (I think?) we didn't know raptors had that back in the 1990's. Rexy should have that, too, but doesn't. The pubic bone doesn't look weird when there's enough tissue around it you can barely see it looking at the living animal.
But what was I talking about, right, the model kit.
Because of the head being made of two halves and there not being a lot of small parts included in a kit made for kids, the raptors don't actually have tongues. Understandable compromise, but I think I'll make them some anyway.
I think I might also make them individual bases instead of using the big base included in the kit. It's nice, and I'll use it on something else, but I like the idea of more choices in how to arrange these guys for display.
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