Iguanodon, the scientist

This is a print by my daughter and just shows that strange things do run in my family. I saw it it, loved it and was given it as a present -lovely girl. I decided to return the favour and make a 3-D model of it for her.

After making a strong wire armature, it was filled with a bulking material -in this, and many other cases, aluminium foil. You can use pretty well anything to do this bulking job, but the stuff needs to be light, workable and dense when complete. I have used newspaper with a class of students as foil has some expense associated with large purchases  and really all you are doing is filling a space which will never be seen. The advantage foil has, is that it can be compressed and I use a small hammer to bash it into position ,where it is usually hot glued to itself.

The material I used for this build was Super Sculpey, a polymer clay, used for jewellery, doll making and general small scale sculpting. It is a very controllable medium and will take fine surface detail, but it requires a heating stage to make it hard. I have found that it can be too old and the white Sculpey I tried to use here was definitely past its used by date. It was crumbly and although the liquid softener recommended was used, I had to buy some new stuff  - not cheap, Sculpey.

New pink stuff to the rescue and the modelling continued.

Now this Iguanodon is no dummy - in fact, he is a CSIRO scientist, along with the duck on the piano - (another and much older story altogether). He therefore needs a lab coat, but with those Hadrosaurian thighs, I was really pushing to cover him with constant splitting of the material, which as you see is the rubbish white  stuff. 

Every good scientist needs a work station and this is probably my favourite part of modelling. I really like creating machines from plastic or things I have been given or have collected.

When I asked my daughter about colours, she said to keep it very flat and green, in keeping with the cartoony theme, so that saved me a lot of work by not having to shade and layer it.

A closeup of his noble head -who could possibly say that dinosaurs were dumb?          

 

Every good model deserves a decent base and this one got a mesh screen panelled, double layered and fully wired doozy, and there it sits awaiting the inevitable "What the hell is that?"