Creating Your Own Tabletop Jurassic Park: A Trick Guide To Making A Prehistoric Landscape

Building your own dinosaur playmat

Creating your own prehistoric habitat for your dinosaur models and toys is quite easy and a lot of fun. With summer vacation fast approaching, here’s a super dinosaur-themed craft idea to help kids make the most of their free time and maybe even learn something about prehistoric life in the Age of Reptiles.

We’ve built a number of dinosaur play mats with toddlers to help us out, we recommend this exercise for ages 5 and up, though mums, dads and guardians may need to help out when it comes to using scissors and stuff. for the style. Building your own dinosaur land is inexpensive and fun, the entire project can be completed in a few hours (allowing time for the paint and glue to dry) and can be built at a fraction of the cost of buying a playmat or similar item from a toy store.

Starting with the basics: choosing a foundation

Get your base first, a solid base is always best as this will help stick objects onto it and create a firm platform for the dinosaur models and toys to stand on. Many toy forts and castles are supplied with a square reinforced cardboard base and are an ideal base for your jungle and dinosaur landscape. A quick visit to a high street charity shop can reward the astute shopper with the purchase of a cheap toy fort or castle base for just pennies. It doesn’t matter if this base is slightly worn or damaged, it will get painted and have things attached to it. Anyway, the dinosaurs were always stirring up the soil and damaging the landscape, scientists even have a special word for it when they find evidence of dinosaur activity in the sediments: “dinoturbation”.

Alternatively, if the base of an old fort or toy castle is not available, simply recycle some cardboard boxes to create the base for your dinosaur land. Take a large cardboard box (one with large sides is preferable), push the base so that it falls flat, and paint the base green or sand, depending on the type of habitat you want to create.

A way to cheat to get the perfect base for your dinosaur land

To prevent the cardboard print from showing through the paint, cover the entire base with papier-mâché strips (glue-soaked strips of paper), let dry, and then paint. To create a trick folding dinosaur land, simply take two boxes of the same size and place them next to each other leaving a small space of about 3 cm between them. Cover the entire lot with papier-mâché, including the seam, but only lightly in the seam area. This allows you to build a “hinge” into your model so that the base can be folded up and stored away when not needed. To avoid having to paint the model with multiple coats of paint to remove all traces of any printing, simply don’t use printed material for the last layer of papier-mâché. For example, old photocopy paper (printed on one side only) is ideal for the last layer of papier-mâché. Many dinosaur landscapes have been created by raiding the office recycled paper box.

creating your landscape

Using other strips of newspaper or recycled paper, you can build a landscape so that there are areas with different gradients in your model. Don’t do this too much or there won’t be even ground to put your models on. You can build higher ground (we suggest you do this in the back area of ​​your model), by layering thick cardboard strips on top of each other. Try to produce raised areas that look a bit square in appearance, at least that way you can be sure the dinosaur toys will stand on them. Once you have designed your base, you can use poster paints to paint the landscape green or sand. It’s a good idea to paint a small pond towards the front of your model, since we know that dinosaurs congregated around waterholes. Once the paint has dried, you can add some detail to the base by drawing in some tufts of ferns and horsetails. Use a thin green marker pen for this, just draw stick-shaped plants for the ponytails or just simple “v” shapes to represent the ferns.

Dinosaur Landscapes: Adding the First Plants

Surprisingly, if you were to travel back in time to the late Cretaceous of North America, you would have recognized much of the vegetation. The dinosaurs you encounter may seem incongruous in such a familiar forest setting, but you will have seen dinosaurs darting in and out of groves of oak, sycamore, maple, and ash trees. The ponds would have been covered in lily pads like lakes today and you can add some lily pads to your dinosaur pond to give it a bit of realism. Take plain paper or cardstock and color a small section with dark green paint or pencil. Then, taking some small coins, draw around them to create a series of small circles. Cut them out and cut a notch in each circle, a simple triangular shape would suffice and there you have your lily pads waiting to be glued to the surface of your pond. Your dinosaur landscape has its first plants, dinosaurs having a drink at a waterhole in which a water lily grows: a scene straight out of the late Cretaceous.