Today's task has been to create a footprint - not just any footprint, I might add, but a T. rex footprint. There are a couple of footprints that experts around the world concede may well have been made by T. rex, but as the NHM's Angela Milner pointed out, animals don't tend to die at the end of their tracks (there was a great horseshoe crab fossil in Solnhofen where it actually DID die at the end of its trackway, but that's another phylum), so it's very difficult to give them a 100% positive identification.
However, the tracks that have been found suggest a foot-size of around 1m long - a suitable size for T. rex, so those are the footprints I've based my model on. I started out with two sides of a cardboard box, flattened so they made one big expanse of cardboard. Next, looking at several images of the footprints, I sketched a rough outline. There's no point in being particularly careful at the stage, as the point of the thing is to look a bit rough and a bit... squidgy. Aim for a footprint in mud sort of look.
Once I'd done that, I immediately set to work with my 2:1 mixture of PVA glue (white school glue): tap water (cold). I painted some glue onto the outline of the footprint, then I lay a strip of newspaper down over the glue mix and painted more glue mix on top of that. I used my fingers then to pinch the flat bit of newspaper up into a ridge, and then proceeded to apply layer upon layer of glue-mix soaked newspaper over the top of it so I had a narrow ridge made of newspaper marking the perimeter of the footprint.
Once that was done, and while it was still wet, I got some budget toilet paper (cheap stuff from Sainsbury's value range), bunched a foot-long strip of it up lengthways, so it was still a foot long, but narrower, and lay it along part of the outside of the perimeter. The aim was to thicken the outside of the ridge and then slope down from it to the surface of the cardboard, to give the effect that it had been displaced by this heavy footprint, and pushed up from underneath, if that makes any sense!
I did that around the footprint, then lay a couple of layers of flat toilet paper/glue-mix inside the perimeter so it wasn't completely smooth. Now it's drying. Tomorrow, I shall go in search of a handful of sand to mix into paint to make it feel a bit more authentic. Pictures to follow soon!
If you've a lazy afternoon and fancy a bit of alternative artwork on the cheap, why not make your own footprint? You don't need to do a T. rex, check out other dinosaur footprints. Sauropods are funny because their prints for foreleg and backleg are close together, but the manus is really tiny and the pes is really big; kind of looks like they've been walking front leg and back leg swinging at the same time, so it has a weird, swinging side-to-side gait. What was actually happening was since they could only move one leg at a time, the back leg needed to catch up close to the front leg so that it could advance any distance at all!
Anyway, that will do for now. More updates to follow no doubt. Happy making!
xx Alex
p.s. there's an owl hooting outside. Favourite noise ever.
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