The fossil lab has been partially overhauled into a makeshift art studio this week, because an Australia-wide palaeontology conference is happening later this year and we're putting a bunch of stuff into the auction that'll be happening there! And so I'm going to be doing a lot of model painting over the next couple months starting with this cassowary foot!
The palaeo department got a dead cassowary from a farm in Queensland years ago to add to our comparative anatomy collection, and before it was fully dissected a mould was taken of the right foot. This is a resin cast from that mould which I painted today with multiple washes and drybrushing passes of acrylic paint to match as closely as I could to a real cassowary foot!
Honestly as someone who's relatively new to painting models I'm really pleased with how this one came out! Things are very often not actually the colour you'd assume them to be in real life, so it was a fun brain exercise as well as interesting painting experience.
