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 approaching, here’s a super dinosaur craft idea to help kids make the most of their free time and maybe even learn a little 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, although mums, dads and guardians may need to help out when it comes to using scissors and stuff for the style Building your own dino land is inexpensive and fun, the entire project can be completed in a few hours (allowing time for 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 on 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 make an ideal base for your jungle and dinosaur landscape. A quick visit to a high street charity shop can reward the savvy shopper with the purchase of a cheap toy fort or castle base for just pennies. It doesn’t matter if this base is worn or slightly damaged, it will be painted and have things attached to it. Anyway, 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 for an old toy fort or castle isn’t available, simply recycle some cardboard boxes to create the base for your dino land. Take a large cardboard box (one with large sides is preferable), push the base down so 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 strips of papier-mâché (paper strips soaked in glue), allow to dry, 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 3cm between them. Cover the entire batch 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 several coats of paint to remove all traces of any print, simply do not 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. Lots of 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 on your model. Don’t overdo this 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 strips of thick cardboard 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’ve 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, as we know that dinosaurs congregated around water holes. Once the paint has dried, you can add some detail to the base by drawing some fern strands and ponytails. Use a fine green marker for this, just draw stick-shaped plants for the horsetails or just “v” shapes to represent the ferns.

Dinosaur landscapes: adding the first plants

Amazingly, 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 come across may seem incongruous in such a familiar woodland setting, but you would have seen dinosaurs weaving in and out of groves of oak, sycamore, maple, and ash trees. The ponds would have been covered in water lilies just like today’s lakes and you can add some water lilies 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 a few 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 water lilies waiting to be glued to the surface of your pond. Your dinosaur landscape has its first plants, dinosaurs having a drink at a watering hole where a water lily grows: a scene straight out of the late Cretaceous.