This Circus is No Laughing Matter (Updated)

     Having almost finished the racetrack I decided to get started on the spina; the "island" in the middle of the raceway that carried some odd temples and such. The real spine is much longer and narrower (as is the real raceway) but this had to fit on a 6'x4' table so concessions had to be made. The hardest part of all this is that every picture I found of the Circus Maximus showed a different arrangement of decorative structures arranged along the spina. In the end I gave up and just decided to add such representative decorations as I could manage in an evening.

 

the track with a second coat of paint, 

this was a much lighter version of my favorite color "mistint"

 

a third coat and some carefully applied lines to show the movement boxes 

without being painfully obvious, this might just get another coat to further blend the look

 

every picture of the spina showed an obelisk. 

I happen to like obelisks so I drew one up as a card model

 

OK little Billy, don't be an idiot like your Uncle Anton; geometry matters!

if the height of a triangle is half its width you can't form a pyramid with four of them

 

so I made a new top for the obelisk

 

much better!

 

the rest of it I made up out of bits and bobs from the "interesting shapes" bin

 

it looks oddly like one of my Victorian Science Fiction dreadnoughts

 

this is what you do with those old "true 25mm" lead generals

 that you have been hoarding all those years 

 

after touching up the mat I gave the spina a coat of primer color

 

this track has me thinking that there might

be other applications beyond chariot races

a pair of time-traveling Egyptian Pharaonic  chariots give the track a test-run

 

I had a few minutes of free time so I painted the spina

 

the results are satisfying to my mind

the Housemartin wants an egg, 
Castor and Pollux apparently were hatched from one, 
I will see what I can manage

     An amusing aside (and far quicker than the nine month voyage that was the Castillo). Now I can get back to the serious business of painting toy soldiers.