I forgot to share this with you guys. But I thought you might get a kick out of it.
I've been fascinated with Cameroceras, a prehistoric mollusk of the Late Ordovician / Early Silurian 470-440 million years ago, ever since I saw the creature on Nigel Marven's "Chased by Sea Monsters!" So I had to sculpt one for myself. Three or four years ago I started to build one in 35th scale. But I lost track of that one when we moved out of state. A few months ago I decided to try again. But this time I chose 24th scale because of Pegasus Hobbies prehistoric kits and the fact that there are so many common vehicles and figures in that scale.
To make the orthocone's shell I rolled up a sheet of plane 8.5 x 11 printer paper into cones a little smaller than I needed. Then covered the outside with blue painter's masking tape. I mixed a thick batch of Plaster of Paris and poured it into the cone until it was about 80% full and propped it somewhere safe to dry. Once that had cured I spray painted it with Krylon primer. Then I mixed enough Apoxie Sculpt epoxy putty to put a thin skin inside and outside of the plaster and paper cone. The next day I sanded the cone smooth and touched up any rough spots. Once I had it perfectly shaped and smoothed I took the roughest grade of sandpaper and carved growth ridges into the outside of the shell. Now I had the shell.
That was the easy part. Sculpting the fleshy part of the beast was trickier. I wish I had taken pictures. Oh well.
The shell is 9 inches long. In 24th scale that would be a shell 18 feet in length. Modern thinking has the Cameroceras with ten arms not eight like the octopus, or eight arms and two tentacles like squid and cuttlefish nor ninety tentacles like the nautilus. They don't think it had hooks or suckers on its arms either. But none of the soft parts of this animal have so far been found fossilized. So like the ammonites, what the fleshy body of this animal was like is only speculation and inference. So I went with a squid-like head. In one of my pictures you can almost see the beak surrounded by its crown of tentacles. The model is painted with acrylic paint from the craft store or Walmart. The paint scheme is taken from the modern nautilus because I couldn't think of anything else.
I included a swimmer in the same scale to show how big this animal was. I think it helps give prehistoric animals a sense of reality.