Are you not entertained?! – 28mm Gladiator Colosseum (TerrainFest 2024)

Alright, the arena is fully painted! There was a short delay when I realized I had thrown away the empty primer can I’d used for the first quarter of the arena and couldn’t remember what brand it was. Luckily, I was able to locate a couple more cans and finish it off. I just went with a light gray primer, with a black wash over it. Then I went back and painted a couple details.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on the stadium itself. Instead, I thought it would be cool to populate it with spectators and spend more time on that. I painted up about two dozen spectators, using a mix of Iain Lovecraft and March to Hell miniatures. For the viewing box I painted up a Roman Emperor and a couple nobles, and the rest of the stands are filled with plebs, bulked out by a couple minis from Wargames Atlantic’s Gangs of Rome box.

I knew 24 spectators wouldn’t be enough for a project this large, but after gluing them all in place it was a bit funny to see how sparse the crowd looked. Imagine dying in the arena for the sake of crowd this small!

Well, time to spin up the 3D printer and print a couple dozen more!

Got the scatter terrain for the arena finished. I painted up two sets of doors for the arena, two trap doors, two circular grates, and four spiked pillars.

The pillars are legitimately spiky, and painting them was kind of like trying to paint a cactus. I went with a wood look for the pillars because I figured they’d be made to be removable, and finished them with a dusting of dirt and rust pigments.

I’ve also painted one quarter of the arena itself (background) which went surprisingly quickly. Three more sections to go!

Hoo boy this thing took forever to print (evidenced by the multiple colors of filament). The STL is Titan Forge’s pit fighter arena. I had to do some minor editing of the file to fix some bits that were sticking through the bottom of the base, but overall it was a pretty easy but long job printing it all.

Next up is to prime and paint the thing, which seems intimidating but I think I can pretty easily do it using cheap hardware store spray paints plus a few details.