It's New Year.. but he's still Spartacus..!

With the dawn of 2024 still fresh, it's time to wheel out an army that I picked up way back in 2019 (pre pandemic!), and only got around to painting at the start of last year - and which first took to the tabletop at the very end of 2023, at the 3rd Devonian Classic competition in always-sunny Brixham.

Yes, this is Spartacus! is now appearing on your small (ish) screen in full polychrom cinematic glory (OK, they are almost all painted in Contrasts..) in 5 battle reports where the Slave Revolt struggles for freedom against the oppressive hegemonoies of the Greek City States (twice), the overweening imperialist ambitions of Alexander The Great, the Eastern Empire of the Comfy Kushans, and the Francophonic stylings of the Gauls. 

There is oodles of  additional irrelevant content shoehorned into these 5 reports, including some dubious "facts" about Spartacus' links to Torbay,and some very strange AI-generated images of poorly armed kitchen workers and gardeners leading the charge against oppression

There is also loads of commentary and analysis from all of the usual suspects, including of course the final word in critique from Hannibal, and an array of non-sequitur captions which occasionally veer into philosophical musings on whether rodent-scat-based segregation criteria are good for military discipline and morale. 

Go on, let this happy chap brighten up your hangover this New Year's Day with his tales of derring-do and liberation from oppression and servitide achieved through the aggressive deployment of kitchen equipment in a hitherto unforseen combat context in these 5 Madaxeman battle reports! 

    

I'm Spartacus!

 I've finally given into the inevitable and started painting a Spartacus Slave Revolt army that I won (in a raffle) at a competition in Rome way back in the summer of 2019 

They are 15mm, mostly Strategia et Tactica figures from Italy supplemented by some Forged in Battle chaps and no doubt all sorts of odds and ends from the bits box too by the time the army is done.

My intention was to do mostof them with a black undercoat and then try a zenithal (ie from above) white spray to try and pick up highlights before actually painting. 

The zenithal spray didn't really work as planned, I suspect because a can of spray paint doesnt eject the paint fast enough to "miss" the undercuts. This meant that they ended up part highlighted and partly undercoated in grey - probably an airbrush would have been better.

To compensate I added a white drybrush to them to really pick up the highlights so I could then aim for a mostly Contrast Paints approach

This is the first test batch taken to completion - I think I have (at last!) managed to make a half-decent job of putting faces on the little blighters as well, with a Darkoath Flesh undercoat and picking out the noses, chins, cheekbones and brows of these well-cast figures with a normal Vallejo skin tone flesh paint.

There are however many more to do... so watch out for them over the next few weeks and months!