Painting Amera's Ruined Tower and Amphitheatre.

Itching to make a start on my Amera plastic I picked out the Amphitheatre and Ruined Tower (as couldn't resist the latter!). This is not so much a tutorial but more a work log, as everything did not go exactly to plan.


One of the fears about Amera pieces can be their lack (or low amount) of texture. A lot of people  have great results with glue and sand, but I discovered I had 2 cans of unused textured spray paints (from a forgotten project years ago), so I thought I experiment with them instead.

The darker capped textured spray has a finer, sand like consistency. I gave the amphitheatre a light dusting of this. I was a bit fearful of obliterating the surface detail.

For the tower I gave the stonework the same dusting, but used the rougher, more foamy stone spray for the ground.

Once the textures had dried it was now for some base colour. I've undercoated stone in black in the past, but didn't want such a dark finish this time, so the stone was undercoated with grey auto primer. The ground was sprayed with a dark brown acrylic

I wasn't too worried about some of the brown getting on the stonework. I adds to the age of the piece.

And the Amphitheatre base coated. Up to this point the whole endeavour had only taken 45 minutes, including grey priming 10 figures and 3 statues (which you will notice littering the work table). In Scotland best take advantage of the lack of rain!

Now I mixed a thin black\brown wash (water and cheap acrylic artist paint). I seem to have made it a bit too watery though. I had intended to add some flow medium ( Johnson's Klear), but couldn't find it, so only water was used.

You can see the effect of the watery mix in the centre of the amphitheatre.

Another effect of this (probably) was the lack of adhesion to the vertical surfaces (even slightly textured). The above photo is after TWO wash applications! I did say this wasn't a tutorial, didn't I??

So I got out a paintbrush and quickly went over the lines in the ruin wall. I didn't bother for the Amphitheatre, being mostly flat it was a bit better.

Once all dry, I stopped gnashing my teeth and drybrushed a few (3 or 4) progressively lighter shades of grey onto the stone work. I did a couple shades of brown onto the ground\mud areas.

Here is the Amphitheatre after it's grey dry-brushes.

And just so you can see the effect of the textured sprays, here is a close up of the wall and ground after the drybrush process.

Next I broke out the flock boxes. I haven't a set of progress shots of this, as it was a flurry of application, correction and tweaking. It's actually quite difficult to stop adding more. I've also added a couple of bushes to sheltered corners.

After a bit of a hum I decided to add a few small areas of growth between the cracks of the amphitheatre slabs. Glad I did.

Both pieces have been given a coat of spray matt varnish.

Pretty happy at the way these have turned out. More to come (after I finish my couple of jobs I interrupted)