Wow, I go away for the weekend and there are several new pages to the thread.
At least it shows the popularity is still increasing. Warms the cockles of my heart.
Well, I have to start somewhere, so let us begin...
Well let me give you a counter analogy: if one were to have a WW2 diorama - showing the Omaha beach landing perhaps - would it be better to show the troops in an action pose, advancing up the beach, or would it be better to show soldiers laid out on the sand trying to stuff their innards back into their guts? The second representation would be more accurate but not very edifying as a display piece. I would say it's possible to present an action/violent scene without glorying in the visceral.
And taking up your point about the Battle at Kruger Park, one can understand the fascination with such a miserable and prolonged death experience - as humans, we're a very morbid lot. But again, would it be cool to immortalise the scene in a sculpt? I would say not.
That said, I'm not trying to sound morally superior here - I'm as fascinated by life and death struggles as anybody else, and the dios are certainly a valid representation. But just from an aesthetic point of view, will it not come to the point when a collected display of dios drenched in blood won't start to look a bit grim/tedious? As a kid I used to build Aurora monsters and I used to splatter them all with red paint, thinking they looked really cool that way. I figured out much later that it was a pretty cheap way to try and dramatize them, and that they actually looked far better without the excess. Just a thought.
What you've done there is create a straw man. My humanizing the issue and narrowing it further still to war, you are dwelling on a conflict on a grand scale in which often thousands upon thousands of innocents do battle. You frame the issue as irreverential, which is not the case here.
This isn't thousands of young men and women most innocent in the most viscerally literal sense of the phrase pertaining to mortality, with fear and trepidation over entering conflict, and possibly having to take life for the first time. Not all war has to look gritty, bloody, and dirty, but it certainly can. By using war as the example, you relegate the use of gore to a taboo, but while war may be intrinsic to the nature of man, man can survive and subsist in a life devoid of war. Predatory carnivores perpetuate their own lives by ending the lives of other organisms. They cannot survive without making use of those animals whose lives have ended, often gruesomely. Death is needed to sustain life with organisms which predate upon others. Granted scavenging is a possibility for most of these creatures, but it's still the necessity of death to accurately depict the lives of carnivorous fauna.
It's not a glorification of gore and violence, it's depicting the reality of the situation in its most shocking and dynamic. The Deinosuchus diorama is startling, both to the viewer and the Parasaurolophus in the piece. It's the moment of attack which is depicted, that moment which does serve to most alarm. It's not approbation of suffering for suffering's sake. Sideshow could have showed the Deinosuchus underwater, tearing a hind extremity from the Parasaur while it is still alive, the massive crocodilian keeping it pinned in the muddy riverbed and drowning it. That would be a real depiction of suffering. Sideshow is choosing to depict the moment of attack, more often than not, in their dioramas. I doubt we'd see, for example, a group of Dromaeosaurs gutting a small ceratopsid, huddling about and dragging its innards across an arid plain while the ceratopsid kicks and bellows for a herd which has long since abandoned it. Frequently animals in gregarious groupings will come to the aid of their own, but if you come to study them you will find that, unfortunately, it's just as common for them to accept a cause to be lost and amble on their way rather than risk harm to themselves. Perhaps the mother will stay to fight for a time, but most frequently only if the child is an infant, and the majority of the herd will move on to safer dwellings.
No moral superiority asserted, but if Sideshow does a diorama of two gladiators in battle, one expects to see blood and gore. When dinosaurs clashed in battle, it would indeed have been a gladiatorial match which dwarved any theater and pageantry humans have ever enacted in single combat. Among dinosaurs, the proof is quite literally in the fossils themselves that carnivores and herbivores were locked in an evolutionary arms race, each evolving weapons to circumvent the weapons of its opponent. Most herbivores look that way for a reason, the carnivores which predate upon them look that way for a reason. Each began to develop a particular strategy as to how best it can manage to survive. For herbivores that means to evolve a technique to ward off one's opponent whether by alarm, blending in with the herd, or direct combat with brute force. For carnivores that brute force is a necessity to live. To show an interaction between herbivorous species and carnivorous species with impressive arrays of weaponry, it would be disingenuous not to show the forces, actively, which compelled their evolution to that particular end. This is why we have both maquettes and dioramas, to depict the animals as they would be just going about their more placid circadian activities, but to show why they look the way they do, and how they continue to survive, that's why we need the dioramas as well, and frequently for them to be violent and, on a primal level, a bit unsettling though concurrently fascinating.
Theirs something about the whole floating in the air thing that doesnt quit do it for me. The triceratops looks very "animated" to me with that high red color...almost looks purple. The T-rex looks like they took it right out jurassic park.
The pose is actually one of the aspects I like the best in the piece. The two animals are tumbling down a cliffside, both to their likely demise. It takes two of the most dominant, fierce, and imposing creatures ever to stalk across the Earth, and it makes them seem vulnerable. It illustrates well that even those animals best equipped for fighting can themselves be rendered defenseless and assailable both by other animals and by fate itself.
We discussed the coloration of the Triceratops at length quite a bit. I recommend checking out the Review thread for this diorama. That bright red pigment shows that this is a mature bull, an animal with nothing to fear. If battle must be joined, then so be it. Very few creatures would have dared attack a mature bull T.horridus in its prime, as it would have been a true tank of an animal... as the young T.rex is appreciating in the diorama.
I think we even discussed the appearance of the T.rex quite a bit in contradiction to the appearance of the T.rex in the JP diorama. The JP T.rex has a very distinct look; not entirely accurate, but certainly readily recognizable as the JP T.rex. The diorama T.rex is quite a fair bit more accurate (though I do love the JP T.rex as well
).
Another idea I had for a nesting scene before was Pterosaurs..have a pair of Quetzalcoatlus defending their nest from a carnivore. Like in the piece by G. Paul... I think ?
Agreed. I've been preaching that I'd like a Quetzalcoatlus. I gather we'd get one in mid-flight before we had a statue of pair on the ground, though. Perhaps one perched and another in flight would be a fine way to render them.
If anyone's interested, I created this from Delgado's Tribal Warfare. Feel free to use it to insult people at inappropriate times.
Always happy to see the Age of Reptiles love.
Had a chance to read the older books yet, by chance?
Thanks for the thoughts Scar...I read some of your older posts on the piece. Which convinced me to order it using a $50
gift card I have. The pictures Dyscrasia linked are pretty impressive. I hope I enjoy it as much as you guys do when I finally get it in my hands.
Chris
Outstanding. Glad to hear you've swung around into the dio camp.
I agree that the rotted dino base would make a great diorama, and one that I'd love to see. Personally, it's not really 'gruesomeness' that puts me off so much as very graphic depictions of pain and suffering. Taking the Deinosuchus vs Parasaurolophus piece as an example - it's a fine sculpt and has great visual impact, but capturing the moment of an animal being eaten alive doesn't sit well with me as an aesthetically pleasing image to display on my desk. Maybe I'm just being too sensitive, but that's the way I see it. Scavenging or foraging scenes I have no issue with, gruesome though they might be.
I'd say you're far too sensitive with real acts of depredation. Predatory animals are my life, and I can tell you that nature is anything but "pretty" when it comes to the actual kill itself. What people see on television (Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and so forth) is actually
extremely watered down so as to be made palatable for the viewing public. Sure, people love carnage, but they have a threshold for gruesomeness and like the kill to be quick and clean; it preserves this juvenile image of most predators as regal and almost merciful in the way they dispatch other organisms. A real kill can take a staggering amount of time, and is often extremely graphic. Large animals whether aquatic, terrestrial, or volant, most commonly kill by way of impaling, biting, evisceration, massive avulsion and blood-letting, or asphyxiation, and their tools of choice are teeth, claws, beaks, pure muscle, etc. These are the tools of true killers, and we should anticipate for the animal on the receiving end to struggle and/or feel pain.
Hawks, for example, are considered august animals, noble creatures. However, when they kill small mammals they stoop, dropping like a stone and barreling into their quarry at a speed in excess of 100 miles per hour with talons fully extended. They impale with their claws but then the most frequent tactic is to dismember and begin dining on the prey while it is still alive. If the animal wasn't killed by the initial attack, it will go into shock after having its belly ripped open by the hawk's beak. It's important to deconstruct the image we have of animals as almost benevolent executioners. The real world of predator-prey relationships is not as clean and polished as television often portrays.
