Painting Challenge Renaissance Artillery

Next up for me is a pair of light artillery pieces with crews for my Italian Wars project.  These are two different Perry Miniatures packs, both representing wrought iron breach loaders.  I have seen pieces like these referred to as culverins, and falconets among others, but will stick with falconets as it has a nice ring and avoids confusion with later culverins.

The technology on these is outdated by the Italian Wars but old tech stayed in use for quite a while.  For instance similar pieces were carried on the topsides of the ships of the Armada in 1588, referred to as versos at that time.  While somewhat crude, the breech loading design allowed for rapid fire in an antipersonnel role since multiple breech chambers could be loaded in advance.  To wit each pack comes with half the crew loading or carrying breech chambers which pretty much scuppered my plan to repurpose the crew for other weapons.

The single arc piece went together nicely and was very nice to work with.  The gun is loaded and the captain is about to touch it off.  The crews are nice figures and actually look to be working the pieces not just standing around watching.  The clothes are perhaps a little too early and a little too Northern European for the Italian Wars, but they will work for my purposes.  They ended up being more muted and dull than some of my other figures but this was smoky work!

The double arc piece looks beautiful in the online catalogue but it is fussy to put together and was a royal pain in the tush.  The bits are fine and easily bent and it pushed my modelling skills envelope.  The double arc is still not right but it'll have to do.  On this piece the crew are just about to place a new breech block in place, and one crewman has a ready charge set to go.  The breech block was set in place then wedged in using wedge and a heavy mallet (lovely brute force tech).

 I like the pose of the captain who seems to be trying to explain orders to a rather dense set of crewmen.

Ok pay attention lads, here's the plan.  Ray, I need you to focus over here.  Ray....

I waffle back and forth on texturing my bases, as I am normally too impatient and want to get on with the next unit.  This time I added texture in the form of glued on railway ballast before painting the base and adding foliage.  Not sure if it was worth the extra time or not.

Two guns plus a total of 8 crewmen gives me 60 points methinks.