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Roman amphitheatre

Time for a change of pace! If I’m honest, I was getting quite fed up with painting Rohan warriors. They’re very laborious to paint and there’s so many of them (12 down, 38 left to go...). I’ll get back to them at some point, but for now I need to do something completely different. 

And what better project to get your mojo back than to build this epic amphitheatre by Sarissa Precision! I had been ogling it online for years, but last week it arrived on my doorstep as a birthday present from my wife. I’m not quite sure where I’ll put it once it’s done (it’s huge!), but it is insanely cool.

Roman ampitheatre

I didn’t count the number of parts, but there’s a lot. For reference, each (semi)column consists of 12 parts and there’s 34 of them!

Roman ampitheatre

I’ve made a few tiny changes to the design. Most significantly, I permanently attached the removable arena by gluing the entire thing onto a large sheet of polystyrene. This gave the whole piece some additional strength and also meant that I could hide the large seam that ran across the arena. I also filled in some holes to make it look a little bit less like an MDF kit.

Roman ampitheatre

That’s assembly and priming done. I’ve glued everything together apart from the dignitaries lodge, which will be easier to paint separately.

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