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Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

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kevtk135
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Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#1 Post by kevtk135 »

The next critter on my bench is Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus. From their site:
Approx.1/20 scale, (15.5 inches in length). 6 piece cast, body, lower jaw and pectoral fins separate. Included is a resin coral reef styled base as well as an oval pine base for display. The model comes unpainted easy to assemble with a minimum amount of preparatory cleanup before being ready to paint.
Dunkleosteus is an extinct placoderm fish that lived until the Late Devonian period about 380-360 million years ago. The largest grew to approximately 33ft and was the top predator in the seas at that time.

The kit: This is another one my my stash of kits that was purchased long ago and put in the pile. As the description says it comes in 6 pieces and includes a wooden base.

Like many people do, when the kit arrived, I opened it up and gave it a good once over. Unlike many people I have a tendency to put the model back in the box, put it away, and then to come back and see a bag of parts that I forgot to put back. Being lazy at times I put it in my drawer with the thought "I'll remember where it is when I want to build it." Needless to say that the baggie with all four fins have been missing for years. They were only found a few weeks ago and this is why I'm building it now.

Also in the baggies was the tail, which had snapped off during delivery. Taking a good look at it there seems to have been an enormous bubble which left very little resin to hold the tail on. The first thing I did was to grab the Aves and get to work repairing the tail -
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Image
Next thing to do was to permanently attach the jaw to the fish. It friction fit very well, but to make all the seams and gaps go away it needed to be glued into place and then more Aves was applied.
Finally for this session, I cleaned up the seam that ran laterally down the top of the fish. The armored part of the head had a lot of detail on it. The caster looked like he used a power tool to get rid of the cast marks. Some was still left, but he also smooth over some of the detail. So I had to try my best to bring this detail back. Perfect? No, but I tried...
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Before
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After
Finally to have a real look, I primed all the parts I worked on.
Image
In this image you can see I also glued the fins to the fish. They will need some putty and/or Aves. Thanks for looking.
Kev
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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#2 Post by kevtk135 »

It was time to paint. I had an idea to use green and a sort of tan color for the body -
Image
As soon as I finished the tan I knew this wasn't going to work. Time to think of somethings else. Looking at the back of the fish and especially the belly part, there is no scales scutes or anything else. So I thought of the way some guys paint skin. They do it by painting little squiggles all over the figure with different color paint. Having never done this before I tried it with black, blue and red paint it turned out looking very busy -
Image
Image

You see on the second side, some of the lines are way too thick. I was having troubles with my airbrush, and rather than stop and fix it I tried to muscle on and complete that side. I'll just have to make the over coat a little heavier in sections where the thicker squiggles are.

Taking a break of a day to clean the airbrush which became completely clogged by the time I stopped. I took bits apart but trying to keep major sections together. Didn't work. I got the brush all cleaned out and I was surprised at how much gunk was in there despite me regularly "cleaning" it after each session. So being cleaned I had trouble putting it back together, thank goodness for a large number of videos on You Tube showing me how to put it back together.
I also went and bought a cleaning kit and Iwata cleaner.

Back to the placoderm. Seeing many fish, they are dark on top and light on the bottom. So I was going to replicate that. Looking at my paints I found two colors that ironically were both named Gray Green. One was lighter than the other and their respective loc. numbers were 101 and 106. On top I used the darker color and dotted along the back of the animal. The lighter color was sprayed on the rest of the body keeping it light enough to see the squiggles underneath -
Image
Image
In the pics you can also see that I added a thinned red wash to the gill area and the inside of the mouth. I also added a brown wash to darken the deepest recesses. Since most fish also seems to have a silvery sheen to them. I mimicked this by giving a light spray with Vallejo silver. Except for a gloss coat, I'm calling the Dunk done.
The base is next. Thanks for looking.
Last part coming up.
Kev
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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#3 Post by kevtk135 »

Having thought I was finished with the fish, I moved on to the base. I left off putting sand on the sea floor. From there I decided to add a few more clay coral and sponges, a starfish or two, a few sand dollars and an orthocone shell (red arrows). Whether they were all alive at the time of the Dunkleosteus, I don't know. I decided to just use some artistic license to make the scene a little more busy.
Image
Next I painted up the corals in different colors to brighten the scene. On some of the corals I used a pearlizer additive to the paint.

Image
The scene was still a little bland, so I decided to make some clay seaweed. As in a previous post Sculpey III was a little too brittle. I bought some Premo and it worked great. It had a bit of flexibility to the sculpt without making it rubbery. But once again my newbie kicked in and I realized I made each elongated leaf way too thick. So off to the pet shop I went to buy some plants.

I see a lot of people use aquarium plants right out of the package but to me they look too plastic and scream fake. So I primed and painted them. I even took a few extra leaves off the stem to use as dead leaves that found their way to the sea floor.

From eBay I also bought one of those Devonian fishes that are sold in the Japanese candy machines. I also primed and painted that to hide the plastic -
Image
Image

I was happy now. What I decided to do to tie the whole scene together was to give the whole vignette a mist coat of turquoise to make the scene a little darker and to mimic the subdued colors you see in under water photography -
Image
Image

Thanks for looking. CCs always welcome.
Kev
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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#4 Post by tay666 »

Wow.
That was a great ride reading the tail from start to finish.
And the results are really eye-catching.
Thanks for sharing.
Trevor Ylisaari

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To find your way back home."

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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#5 Post by dgelon »

Fantastic job and great paint up and write up - the fish is impressive but I love the base work. I've been wanted to get one of these for years and this might have been the push to order one while Paleocraft still stocks them.
-Daniel

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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#6 Post by Rocketeer »

That looks really nice!

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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#7 Post by Dr. Brad »

Hey Kev, I'm late to this thread, but great job on this! Really looks great!

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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#8 Post by kevtk135 »

Thanks guys!
Kev
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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#9 Post by Harkon »

I really dig the color selection, good job!

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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#10 Post by kevtk135 »

Harkon wrote:I really dig the color selection, good job!

Andreas
Thanks. It prolly went thru 3 color changes before I settled on this. I'm surprised any details were left. :lol:
Kev
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Re: Paleocraft's Dunkleosteus

#11 Post by Warped Speed »

Swimming with the sharks? Shooot, swim with THAT and you'd be brave! That's one mean looking fish. Great job.

Carl-

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