Painting

Ludus Magnus

Arena Rex has been out now since 2014, I first saw it at Adepticon that year, and loved the minis. I got the Ludus Magnus some years ago and have really only now started to paint them.

I have a number of the Ludus Magnus models however I am going to start with the starter box set. This set includes :

Micon
Marcus Furious
Infelix

I love the models and they are great to paint, I wish I had of painted them sooner. for this I used only Scale75 paints

For the Skin Tones:

Pink Flesh SC21
Arabic Shadow SC22
Golden Skin SC19
Light Skin SC17

Brass

Viking Gold SC72
Dwarven Gold SC73
Elven gold SC74
Necro Gold SC71
Peridot Alchemy SC78
Citrine Alchemy SC75

Steel

Cobolt Alchemy SC68
Thrash Metal SC64
Heavy Metal SC65
Speed Metal SC66

Fabrics

Rainy Gray SC60
Thar Brown SC61
Mojave White SC62

Leather

Black Leather SC32
Brown Leather SC31
Orange Leather SC28

Red

Deep Red SC35
Blood Red SC36
Albebaran Red SC38

With all these I have used the cards that come in the Scale75 Paints as guides, I like the colours and the guides though if I stay with them I am unsure. The paints them selves are the best I have used, and I love the metallic’s, the reds are amazing as well. The Leather came up really well. I say the Metallics are amazing however I need to change the way I use the silver and steel metallic’s they just did not do what I wanted them to do, or I should say they came out alot differently to how I wanted them too, part of that is the way I paint part is how blue the cobalt is that I didn’t have a proper plan for.

Some of these metallics remind me of the old GW metallics, especially the blue’s and purple’s I had these GW paints until recently.

The models themselves are fantastic, however they can be a little intimidating to paint, they want to be show case mini’s with paint jobs to match, but painting Nero with riding Septimus is really intimidating. The more I painted these models the better they look, they are nice and clean and clearly defined. That said my painting has multiple layers mostly using two brush techniques, the skin is one area I was really happy with the models before I put the Testors Dull coat on. Once that was applied it flattened out some of the contrast I had in the skin, and the reds, so I worked hard on these as I did each mini. It just was not enough, I need to work on my contrast from shade to highlights much more to get the minis to look like I want them to.. I possibly also need to work on getting them blended better, but that comes with practice, and I don’t paint this way that often, I need to do it more.

I still have to paint the following Ludus Magnus:

Hermes
Septimus both on and off the Bull
Otho Mentulus

There are more miniatures to get of course and I will have to get them.

I tried my hand at doing these photos in a HDR (High-dynamic-range imaging) it doesn’t really work with my camera, I need to work on it some more.

–Edit…

After looking at what I had done with out the image processing of Lightroom, I was not happy, so I have updated the firmware on the Nikon D5100 and activated it’s internal HDR function. This is what I got.