French Light Couleuvrine & Crew

It's been a while in development but well worth the wait I hope, here we have the light culverin [sic] & crew painted and ready for war.

The figures began life as a Perry Wars of the Roses field gun with crew to which I used head swaps and green stuff to bring the crew into the early Renaissance, you can see more about their development in this earlier post.

As you may be able to see from the unpainted figures above I'm in the process of converting a second crew which should hopefully see some colour soon.

These guns are typical of the 1480's but served for quite some time, I suspect as long as they had a meaningful role and were safe to use. The hoop and iron bar construction fast became inferior to cast bronze and iron though as short to medium range anti-personnel they were still perfectly able.

I have painted the metal parts as dull iron with highlights of metal, over which I then applied a thin wash of dark orange/brown to reflect that these were not the newest pieces in Louis' arsenal.

For reference, guns of this construction were numerous on the Mary Rose, perhaps down to cost but favoured, I suspect for their ease of loading and faster rate of fire within the confines of a closed gun deck.

Incidentally, these pieces are also typical of those used by the English at Flodden though they are described as Serpentines, there are numerous terms for guns of varying sizes, Serpentine and Couleuvrine being descriptive of a breech or muzzle loading gun of 3.5-7ft long.

Bye for now

Stuart