Eyeing again

And Triptail is done! I think she turned out quite cute if I do say so myself.

I should have photos of the whole pack ready to post sometime before the end of the month (year. decade! wow, it's really been another one of those already, hasn't it).

All the better to chomp you with

Triptail's mouth and claws are done. She had a bit of white paint on her tongue, not enough of it on some of her teeth, and the gums on the top jaw were green at the front, but that should be fixed now.

I gave her stripes a light purple-red wash, and added some green-ish to her underbelly, especially around the throat, since the JP1 figures have that, too. Hers is more yellow-green while their green is more bluish, though.

The eyes got a base coat of white, to bring out the colours better so they stand out against the dark markings around them. They're painted a little over where the eye is sculpted, and I hope the contrast helps in masking that.

Bonus long Masu:

Green raptor erasure

This is now, what? The third green raptor I've repainted to be brown? Also this figure just can't decide what shade of brown she is because all of these photos were taken in different lightings.

Anyway, Triptail is approaching the finish line. I'll still tint her markings a bit, and then it's just details like claws and eyes. Also touch-ups to the paint in her mouth, since there are some stains and scuffs in that. The claws are mostly painted, too, but the factory paint was already a bit spotty in some places and I didn't pay much mind to painting over them while changing the base colour, since they're pretty easy to just repaint black all nice and neat once everything else is done.

Showing up to the repainting 15 minutes late with raptor beverage

The last one of the figures I'm painting into my raptor OC pack (led by one (1) technically-canon character) has arrived. The Papo raptor figure is kind of ubiquitous, but I didn't have one before, and it does match the JP/W figures well in size and proportions.

I'm not a big fan of the tripod pose, though to be fair the tip of the tail doesn't quite touch the ground and the figure does actually stand just on the two legs. The raptor OC I'm making this one into is Triptail, so perhaps she is in the process of living up to her name and tripping someone up with her tail. That at least is her preferred meaning for her name, but she has also been known to perform feats of clumsiness on par with tripping on one's own tail (which a raptor would probably not be able to do very easily, theropod tails are not that floppy).

The face is nice, but I think she kind of has the opposite problem from her sister Whirlwind, whom I just finished making from that Fujimi kit. The eyes are small compared to the JP/W figures. We'll see if I'll do something about that. I'm already going to paint over her eyes anyway, since the character has green eyes.

(Yes, that is the same figure, just at a window mostly illuminated by the limited natural light Finland gets in December, and under a lamp, respectively.)

Finishing touches, finally

Adding pupils,

 attaching legs,

...and here she is!

Spottier

Purply spots!

 And darker outlines to the purply.

Our raptor is starting to be done (hopefully, anyway)! She's getting her legs back once this latest addition dries, and then it should be just eye details. And possibly touching up any paint I chip by popping the legs in. Acrylic sticks to her plastic okay, but it scratches off more easily than on the other figures I've painted. Those other figures are all made of at least a little softer plastic, while this raptor needs to be made of hard plastic to maintain the shape, since the model is hollow, and needs to have the parts line up when put together. She's survived just fine getting dropped a few times, though.

Spotty

Whirlwind has the beginnings of her patterns, and her new base colour. The insides of those spots are going to be darker than the base colour, but I didn't paint over those areas because the base colour is a bit yellowy, while I want the spots to be a bit purply, and those being complementary colours it may turn out cleaner this way.

I also gave her eyes a gradient from darker and bluer green to lighter and yellower. Since she's got big eyes, might as well make them fancy. I'll still shape and resize them with more dark brown around the edges, though, before adding the pupils. She'll have dark blotches around her eyes, so hopefully the brown on the "eyeballs" blends in a bit.

Her patterns are based on the tribe B raptors from Trespasser, just in shades of brown instead of the pretty goldfish colours seen in the game, because she's female. Apparently during Trespasser's events all the lady raptors were elsewhere, perhaps doing something more productive than chasing humans by walking, and falling off cliffs.

I did get to just the painting

Whirlwind is getting nice and brown, and has left the lantern only to sit in my brush holder instead, as she and her legs are yet to reunite. I put them back on temporarily, though, just to check that the putty on her neck didn't make her too front-heavy to stand (being heavier than the plastic is, though still pretty light), which it turns out it didn't. I think I'll keep them separate until she's at least almost done. The patterns in that area should turn out neater that way.

She's got ~1½-2 coats of the light brown paint I used for the base colour of the JP1 raptor babies, but the base colour I want her to have is a little darker and brighter. This paint is just more opaque and easier to cover up the green with than jumping straight to that colour would have been.

The tail does still move, but I prefer it in this position, so if the next coat makes the paint thick enough it won't anymore, that's not a big loss.

Ok NOW can I get to just the painting?

Well, not quite right now because she'll need her neck seam to cure for the day, but hopefully that's the last of the sculpting she'll need. I don't know if the head support I slapped together for her is necessary, but just in case her head starts falling over before the putty is hardened enough. All her parts are really light though, being hollow plastic, so it probably wouldn't.

Her legs are off since they're easier to paint separately for at least the first coat, and she's sitting on that tealight lantern thingy instead of lying on her side, which might make steadying her head easier, because I also sealed the seam on her back. It wasn't a huge gap, but, since I could. I also just now noticed her tail is poseable at the base, too, and can move up quite a bit. This shouldn't ruin that, but we'll see once the putty's cured.

I made the head turned to one side a bit, which I think looks livelier than having her look straight forward. Little raptor who's joining her on the drying shelf agrees - and is finished now except for the drying.

Here's a before and after of what I did about the little raptor's mouth. I didn't repaint that part completely, but the paint on the teeth was pretty uneven, most obvious when seen directly from the front. Also the tongue was the only part with pink on it.

Almost assembled

Puttying is done, for now.

Assembling the raptor, part 2

The raptor model kit's journey into becoming one of my Jurassic Park OCs in figurine form continues. Number of separate pieces has gone from... 68 (+spares)? to 8.

Little Velo guarding the small parts by being brighter and easier to notice, so I don't accidentally sweep the feet and one (1) loose claw onto the floor, from which the claw at least will never be found.

Assembling the raptor

So, about time I get around to putting that Fujimi raptor model kit together.

Same hat scientific inaccuracies! Same scientific inaccuracies!

More on the small JP raptor figures

The little mini one is almost finished, and just needs pupils, and paint on their feet. The feet are convenient to hold the figure by when painting other details, so I left them for last. The figure has a light underbelly and some faint stripes, but I want to keep the babies' colours more muted than the adults'. Hopefully my paint supply lets me do that.

The bigger kid has a base coat of light brown, and their sickle claws painted. I'm so proud of managing not to stain the base, can you tell?

I haven't named them yet, but they would probably be my other JP OCs' children or grandchildren. I gave the little one markings that look like they're maybe related to Finder and Dare (a ring around the eye that "drips" into a stripe over the mouth, and a dark chin, respectively), so... Squeak&Finder's kid and Dash&Dare's kid had a kid, then. The other one has orange eyes that I'm not going to change, so they're probably Survivor&Grappleclaws' child, or grandchild that one of their children and another one of Dash&Dare's children had.

Scaly tabbies

The tiger bros are finally done!

Their stripes took a while partially because each stripe needed like three coats, due to the smooth plastic surface, but I really wanted to keep the orange the way it is and not paint over it with a primer. Echo, whom I painted last year, had a full repaint with the base colour functioning as a primer for her stripes, and most of the stripes I painted on Grappleclaws, too, had paint under them. The way I painted these two boys may not have been the most efficient, but it was fun to try it this way, too.

I don't know if it shows in these photos, but their claws are a slightly different colour, to further differentiate them. Finder (on the left in all three photos) has purply-grey claws while Elusive has dark brown claws, which also contrast their eye colours a little.

I think next I'll try to puzzle out the Fujimi raptor and if it could be made into one of their sisters, and then I'll still need to find a figure to make into the other one. I don't really want to use this same sculpt again, even though I really like it, since I already have four raptors with it and two of them in this pack.

Painted Velociraptors and alleged such

Gave my Safari mini Velo a bit more colour on the face in addition to painting the claws. It hopefully looks now like the white is all feathers, and the raptor actually has a yellow-brown snout. I painted the inside of the mouth, with a bit of darker pink at the back.

Trying out sculpting

I don't do sculpting much. For some reason it's a pretty intimidating artform for me, and my experiences with it don't extend much past having a lump of clay put in front of me at school and being told to make something out of it without knowing anything about how to do so - that may very well be the reason, actually. But I'm working with a 3D canvas in painting dinosaur figurines already, so I guess this is a logical next step. And I'm quite happy with the results so far!

For starters I decided to do something about the cuptopper Blue not having sickle claws, and for starters of that, I just chopped the non-sickled middle toes off with a box cutter. I thought about detaching the figure from the base for this, but it's glued on quite firmly and I wanted to get on with the sculpting, so I just slid a piece of thin cardboard under the toes to avoid scratching the base's surface much.

The operation was a success!

...And then I did my best to make tiny raptor toes with tiny raptor claws out of epoxy putty (Apoxie specifically, for anyone curious). I don't really have any sculpting tools, but I had tooth picks, an old brush, and water, and after having the putty cure for a day, we have this:

Miscellaneous crafty progress

The raptor skeleton decoration is a souvenir from my birthday field trip. It's a skeleton, so.

Wondering what will be a good way to attach the reflective fabric bone shapes onto the gloves, considering the fabric isn't stretchy, but the gloves are. Maybe I'll get different gloves for this after all.

I'm not going to finish the skeleton gloves today, but that's okay, I'm not making them for halloween (which I don't actually celebrate, as I'm not christian and the trick-or-treat version is not a widespread thing in Finland anyway, I just like the aesthetic). If I get to wear them sometime before spring, I'll be happy.

One more tigerraptor

Well, maybe they're not all that identical, or it could just be that they're my babies so of course I can see a bunch of differences in their designs.

Incidentally, this picture features six dinosaurs

Anyway, I started painting Finder, and good thing I can indeed tell him and his brother apart, since they are at about the same workstage.

Making eyes

At the boys, or for the boys. Either way, they both have pupils again.

The orange raptor is the character Elusive, since he has green eyes, and I was going to paint over the figure's chipped and badly placed eyes anyway. Might be that the figure I'll repaint to be Finder, who has yellow eyes but otherwise the same colouring, will need to have its eyes fixed, too, but then I'll just paint more eyes, nbd.

I gave Elusive's eyes a couple of coats of green to cover the old eyes, a bit lighter and warmer at the center, and touched up with orange where the old eye paint had bled to the lower eyelid.

 Grappleclaws' eyes are a bit more complicated, and I did end up painting over them completely instead of preserving the old pupils, since that seemed it would come out neater. He's got a coat of red, another of bright pink at the center, touch-ups to mix the two more gradually, and a stripe of very light yellow at the center. I used cool reds and yellows for the eyes to contrast his colouring otherwise being very warm, and deliberately went a bit over the eyelids to enlargen the eyes a little, since the jumping raptors have kind of small eyes. It's probably because the sculpt seems to be designed for the JP3 raptors, which do have smaller eyes compared to other JP/W raptors. To help the eyes stand out even more, there's also a ring around them of the same black I use for their stripes (mixed with brown, like the white I used on Elusive's underbelly is, too, to have them not be too stark).

Hopefully I'll get to working on some of the girls, too, soon. The Fujimi raptor might become one of them, but speaking of eyes, it actually has really big eyes compared to these figures, so I'll see if I can do something about changing that, or maybe I'll just learn to live with them.

Also, I think I may have fixed the Sinornithosaurus figure's leg? After having it sit on the mold for a week continuously I took it off it, and it's been a day and it hasn't warped back. So that's nice!

Orange leaves and orange boys

 The boys are getting stripes, the leaves are perfect as they are.