Violinosaurus Rex

I have had this idea for awhile to create dinosaurs from musical instruments.  This idea came to me because there are many times when, as a pun, I will say blah-blah-osaurus.  Like Divaosaurus, or Fountain Penosaurus.

So, today, it is Violinosaurus Rex.

I started with a small cabinet door, two baby legs and of course--a violin.  The hard part was not getting the legs onto the violin.  The hard part was figuring how to get the legs to stand.  The answer was to run a bolt up through each leg that would fasten to the door with a nut.

A bolt through the violin, and then through each leg, allows them to be attached to the instrument. Next I had to drill two holes in the top (now the front) of the violin to attach the two little arms for the Rex.  This proved to be more challenging then I thought.  While the wood easily took the drill on the sides for the legs, the large bit for the arms tore up the wood big time.  I used the Dremel sander to smooth out the edges and then used Apoxie Clay to attach the arms and complete the holes.

The head was a whole lot easier as I picked one that had a neck hole large enough to pop on the fiddle head.

Now I had to use the Apoxie throughout the project to make sure everything was really going to stay attached.   Then I needed to caulk up the whole body to prepare to paint.

A string of beads was added to the violin neck to give some texture to the flatness of the violin.

The painting techniques come straight from my lesson with Michael de Meng, master assemblage artist.

So here is the final product, the first in what I hope is a long line of musical dinosaurs.