"Toy dinosaur skeletons become Frostgrave terrain" Topic

I went back briefly to Frostgrave to make a few more snowy terrain pieces.

I have seen a number of gamers utilize toy dinosaur skeletons to really good effect on terrain bases, so I thought I'd make a couple of my own.

Obviously there are nearly an infinite number of choices out there for toy skeletons and toy dinosaurs, and many of them are dirt cheap. I got my toy dinos from gift shops at local museums, just cheap Chinese mass-produced kind of stuff… the skeleton was $1.00 USD and the skulls were I think like 50 cents each. This was enough to do several terrain bases.

Most of the toy skeletons out there are made of softer plastic which can be easily cut up with sprue cutters or household clippers. I simply cut up mine into logical pieces; head, torso, tail, arms, legs.

I purposely left out parts of the legs, arms and feet to make it feel more realistic, as if some pieces of the skeleton might be completely buried under the snow.

I'm going to be using my usual recipe for snow paste after everything is painted and dried; baking soda, white craft paint, and white PVA glue. The winter grass tufts are Army Painter brand, they make really good grass effects.

Here's my progress as of this afternoon:

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That's gonna be great.

If you could get hold of a smaller predator, like a raptor, maybe put its skeleton in the skeletonised jaws of a T-Rex?

@Dwindling Gravitas,

Yeah that would be very cool! I'm thinking about trying something like that, where I have two skeletons mixed up with each other as if they were in combat and both expired while still fighting.

Great idea!

I've used those type of toy dino skeletons as "beasts" for HOTT in 15mm & 25/28mm. Your idea looks great as terrain piece please post finished pics!

Thanks for the positive feedback everybody!

Here's some pics of today's progress. I have the bases painted and drybrushed, and grass tufts have been added.

The rocks still need to be drybrushed.

The dinosaur bones at this stage have been primed with Vallejo white brush-on primer. This kind of toy plastic should always be primed if you want to paint it because acrylic craft paints on their own will not stick to it very well. I plan on giving them a basecoat of white craft paint and then use brown and black washes to detail the bones.

After that the only thing left to do will be to add the snow paste effects:

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