"Hail Ceasar, we who are about to die,,,,"

The bare model

""Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you" was never said in the arena (any arena) to the best of my m limited knowledge but I believe was accredited to slaves fighting a sea battle (for the amusement of the mob) outside of Rome and directed at Nero.
The quote does however make a suitable title for this post as I finally decided what t do with my "Caesar-statue" figure. Our impressions of ancient statues was that they were the marble blocks we see in museums but in all likelihood they were pained in garish colours as was the fashion at the time with the Greeks, Egyptians and probably the Romans too,
I therefore thought I had two choices as to how to finish this figure, until that is I saw a documentary on the Colosseum that reminded me that all the niches around the Colosseum  had statues in them and more importantly from my pov they were gold (probably gold leaf rather than solid gold).
My statue then would be gold"

Primed, undercoated and washed.

I started by spraying the model black, using matt black car primer from Poundlardworldbargainbuys and then gave it an undercoat of burnt sienna, The black on its own is a tad harsh whilst the brown does enhance the gold.
The next layer was a very thinned down antique gold dry-brushed on  to give a bit of depth of colour to the final layers of gold   .
The final gold dry-brushing was repeated three time and built the highlights up rather nicely I though.
To cap it off I did give the model a thinned gloss varnish to protect it a little for the rigours of gaming.

Finished model

Boring side view

Equally boring rear view

 

Final side view - still boring

View showing Statue of Caesar in situ

 On the gaming front, my #1son and I continue to experiment and develop the rules we'll be using for our games. This week we've been playing about with three different versions of the Avalon Hill's "Gladiator" beasts rules. After three different games we did come (eventually) to play a satisfactory game, with player taking control of the beast's limited movement and attack options, rather than the sterile automated movement suggested by the rules (trying to give the animals an AI and failing miserably).

That's it for this week, next week I'm hoping to have some all new figures for my arena painted up ready to have another attempt at animal bouts.