Thanks Owen.
The realism owes much to Johan's excellent artwork!
With this model, I also touched the edges with watercolour pencils and then used watercolours to join up the scales on the joints on the finished item. This was pretty successful. I even managed to patch up a mistake on my part like this as well - see here...
http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/619693-post13.html
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Thanks Tino. Indeed it is paper - as you can see from the build thread below. In this thread, there are also some further pics of it in a realistic vegetation setting...
Microceratops/Microceratus - Johan Scherft