The [costume] story so far

Hi, I'm Renee.  I like to dress up in funny costumes that include animals... though I'm not what I'd call a furry.  I've made a pteranodon outfit, which I'm told doubles as a Sauron (X-men) suit, and is very popular with the nerd/under-7 crowd.

 Here I am posing at Wondercon 2011.

Also I has a Gambit costume.  Plz ignore my messy room, my photo editing software is down for the count currently so I can't crop it out.
I'm currently making a deinonychus costume.  The feet are finished, the head is getting there, the tail was done but I broke part of it, the hand claws need attaching to gloves, the feathers and fabric are here, and I am pretty excited in general.

 The tail on me.  You know you're classy when you're taking a picture of yourself in the mirror, AND you're wearing a fat ugly tail.

 The head and neck top.  I have since made a similar jointed piece for the underside of the neck, and painted the head.  The idea is that the white part will be attached to my head somehow in a conehead-like manner, and the point of the cone ends in a hook that goes into the dinosaur head.  There's wire in the head for it to hook onto.  And as you can tell from the state of the head in this picture, it is pure papier mache.  The head and lower jaw took at least two weeks of papier macheing until they were done, and it was all worth it.

 I had to make 60 teeth by hand, and I was feeling cheap so I used air dry clay.  It was boring as crap.

 The lower jaw in front, and the upper jaw in the back, painted and with teeth glued in.  The lower jaw has three little loops for elastic attachment, hanging from the wire in the upper head, and string attachment for me to move the jaw (in order from front to back.)

 The head so far.  It is a little bit shiny because the paint kept getting dings in it, and so I did a thin glue layer.  It also has no eyes yet, I'm working on that.  There is a piece of foam sticking off the back of the top for structure reasons.  Probably going to glue it to the jointed neck parts later.

 Lookit mah teeths.

It has an overbite.  I referenced pictures of deinonychus skulls as much as possible while making this, but the lower jaw ended up being pretty wide.  I also submitted to the "Jurassic Park" raptor head design in a few other places, like nose bridge ridges.

When making this costume, I wanted to be as scientifically accurate as possible.  Unfortunately, there is a decent amount that is not known about deinonychus, and sometimes, well... the stuff they do know just doesn't seem like it would look amazing.  Jurassic Park realized this.  Check this picture of a deinonychus skellie, stolen directly from wikipedia:

I'm going to draw your attention to several key areas that don't really look good.  Starting with the skull, you'll notice that it's domed at the eyes, and the snout is not actually as long or bulbous as the movie raptors.  Scientists even think that the bones in back of their eyes stuck out sideways enough that they had some binocular vision, unlike the movie critters.  That is just plain hard to reconcile with the picture in my head of raptors.  I am sorry, science.  Hollywood got to me.

Next, there's the fingers.  My personal fingers are not that long, and the longer I try to extend them, the less stable they're going to be.  Therefore, the costume's will be shorter than they ought to be.

Lastly, the pubic bone.  It's that thing that comes down from the pelvis and is as long as the femurs.  It's probably there to attach leg and tail muscles to.  But mentally, draw the flesh on that body for a minute.  It's just not going to look good.  As one of my friends so unartfully put it, it looks a bit like "dino dong."  The JP raptors had a smaller version of this bone, probably for that very reason.  Also, with the amount of jumping and bouncing they did in the movies, it would not have paid to have that bone there.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that.  I want to be true to the science, but between it being ugly, and me having to wear it, I just don't know if I want it to be that long.  It'll probably be made out of foam so it's way flexible.  That way I can maybe kind of sit down at some point.  No, not really.  More like sprawl, because of the tail.

Looking to the future, I need to figure out a cool skin pattern for it.  I've been looking at snakes and lizards a bit for inspiration.
Here is a picture of a sexy chameleon.
Here is an adorable ball python.
Any ideas of patterns or animals to emulate?  The body fabric I have is sort of a muddy olive green, somewhat yellower than the color I painted the head. I also have feathers for the arms, tail, and neck, because velociraptors have been found with feather imprints I think, and definitely have quill holes in their arm bones.  Tons of their other relatives have been found with feather evidence too, including T-rex, who isn't even that closely related.  So despite possibly looking like an overgrown turkey, I am going with the feathers.  They are grey and white spotted, and pure black feathers.