TYRANNOSAURUS REX

Manufacturer: Revell-Monogram, Jurassic Park Series

Scale: 1/20

This dino was a lot of fun to build. I like the "looks" of him and the details, pose and over-all accuracy is very good. Add to all that an attractive price and we’re all set! The original base was OK but I’m more of a realist and didn’t care to include the base with the crushed land rover. I decided to use a custom base and forgo the original.

The Rex was large and great fun to put together. The teeth were well detailed so I decided to keep them rather than replace them. After all, since the Rex is well known for his chompers I feel that unless they’re sculpted well, plan on replacing them. Because I liked his pose I decided not to alter it and built it straight out of the box with one important exception, the mouth interior. The mouth interior was open with no detailing in the roof or under the tongue, which was quite noticeable. I used Sculpy to add both the upper and lower parts of the mouth, like gums, roof interior. It was pretty dark inside the mouth so I didn’t have to be critically detailed when sculpting but I did expend some effort to make it look like a mouth interior. After the Sculpy forms were baked it took quite a bit of trimming to make them fit inside the mouth so the 2 head pieces could be glued together. Of course, I painted the mouth interior and the inside of the teeth before gluing the sculpted pieces into the head halves then finally gluing the halves together. Not a lot of work but it really improved the final look tremendously. Beyond sculpting the cloaca [the opening in a reptile's body for the discharge of wastes - Mark] and normal seam filling I was ready to paint.

For me, I like to pattern dino painting schemes after modern-day lizards and other animals. While no-one really knows what colors any dino may have been I can’t believe they were all brown or gray beasts as pictured in many older books and movies. You only have to look at a male Panther Chameleon, or Tokay Gecko today to see nearly every color of the spectrum in today’s lizards and amphibians. I like to think many dinos were vivid as well. For this Rex I decided on two basic colors—rust for the upper half and sand for the underside. I started by airbrushing the sand color on his lower half and rust for his upper half. Then a wash was applied to both areas. The sand color was mixed with rust for the lower parts while rust and black were mixed as a wash for the upper parts. This served to tone down the colors but more importantly darken the recesses. Drybrushing was then used to highlight the details and to give him "life". For the lower areas I used sand again to catch the raised details then ended with a very small amount of rust to color certain areas, like where the upper color meets the lower, lighter areas of color. This really helped "blend" the two halves together. The upper areas were drybrushed with a rust and red mixture, then finished off with drybrushing pure red over certain areas of interest. This helped develop the veins and added "muscle" to his body, legs. I also used red to highlight around his head, jaws and eyes. His claws were painted black then drybrushed with gray for highlights. For his eyes I used yellow with round black pupils. Finally, I added a red wash that filled in around the iris giving it a real nice "living" touch that looked great with a little gloss coat added. Boy those eyes came "alive"!

The base consisted of a piece of weathered tree branch I picked out of the woods by my house. Simple, you say—you betcha! While normally I would paint the wood anyway I felt the weathered look was just right for the subject. Don’t get me wrong I like the shellacked wooden bases for that "museum quality" look and feel but with dinos I feel you can use rock, wood, slate to add that "prehistoric" look and feel. For me, it works well. I positioned him where I felt he looked the best, drilled a hole into one of his legs and made a rod out of some old sprue to help "pin" him to the log. 

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