Painting a Psittacosaurus

I decided to finally repaint the mini Psittacosaurus figure I got quite a while ago in the Safari Ltd. "feathered dinosaurs toob". Here's what we're starting with:

And here's the end result:

I painted the whole figure, except for the eyes and a bit of the skin around them (or at least I intended for the yellow I left there to be skin, but it does kind of look like irises now. Well, Psittacosaurus did apparently have big eyes). The colour scheme is based on Robert Nicholls' restoration of Psittacosaurus (mongoliensis, I think. There are several species in this genus - the most species known for any Mesozoic dinosaur genus, actually).

The quills on the tail are bristles from an old, unusable paintbrush I had lying around, attached with glue. Amusingly the figure was lacking them originally despite being included in a set of feathered dinosaurs.

I also cut off a small bit of extra plastic at the beak, which is kind of visible in the "before" photo, and added spikes on the face by dabbing a thick blob of paint onto each cheek, creating a point on the paint when drawing the brush away. Acrylic just dries like that.

Adult Psittacosaurus were bipedal, and the gait of this figure looks a bit quadrupedal, but I understand the one forelimb touching ground is there for balance of the figure, and the fingers are straight instead of posed like they would be supporting weight. The wrists are pronated, though, which Psittacosaurus' weren't - even large, quadrupedal ceratopsians, which evolved from small, bipedal ancestors, didn't have fully pronated wrists.

I think it turned out quite nice.

With a selection of other Mongolian dinosaurs. Velociraptor and Protoceratops (quite famously) were contemporaries, but lived in the Late Cretaceous, while Psittacosaurus is from the Early Cretaceous. They can hang out together on my shelf, though (the three ceratopsians, at least - the Velo I tend to display next to the other feathered Velos I have).

The Velociraptor, which I've also repainted a little, and the green Protoceratops are from the same set as the Psittacosaurus figure. The brown Protoceratops is by Wild Past, and more photos of it are here.