I really enjoyed this, duel. The topic was Gunnar's idea and I love his humorous entry ! Sadly I do not have such a comic sense, so I reverted to my strength, which is cheating! I have always loved dino saurs, so i looked very hard for a skeleton of an approximate scale. I think this apatosaur would be a very large male. I hunted high and low for figures. I found a Noch woman with camera and a digger, two very rough children from a train modelling shop and a mechanic from preisser.
Gunnar was very patient As I had several exams and by May I had only the ground work made from cork glued to a base. I added some wall filler into which i pressed some cut up sections of the dinosaur. Once dried, brush over wet filler and then with a wet brush - brush filler off the bones to expose them. I added some gravel to show the chips of rock from digging and found a tiny lizard to add on the vertebrae on the left of the model ( i don't know if you can see it)
All the rocks and bones were spayed black and then progressively lighter earth shades with my airbrush, trying to show directional light from the sun. The bones were then inked to show them a little more and they received a little more highlight. I was still not sure whether they would be seen.
Finally I added some grass clumps from GW, but I forgot to add weathering powder to make dust near to each excavated area. I tried using a background from my pc monitor which seems to have worked well, never thought of this before.
I am grateful to Gunnar for the idea and the fun duel, remco for his hard work and thanks to the voters