With sixteen pieces in all, I decided to tackle the English Civil War artillery for the Royalist, Parliamentarian and Scottish Covenanter armies in one large batch. I generally do not enjoy painting the artillery pieces themselves; the crew are fine, but I find gun carriages and wheels a bit fiddly and uninteresting. However, the Eureka models are quite nice which took away much of the boredom:
I gave the Royalists and Parliamentarians six pieces each, comprised of two cannons, two culverins and two sakers:
And allocated two culverins and two sakers to the Scots
I did half the pieces in plain wood, but gave the Parliamentarians and Royalists two red carriages and the Royalists two in blue, just to brighten things up a little. I put in a bit of extra effort to paint streaks on the carriages and wheels to give the effect of wood grain. The models themselves had a wood effect, but not enough that it rendered itself easily to dry-brushing.
Speaking of bright, the blue looks very bright here but thankfully is a little duller to the naked eye:
I also completed a few petard stands, one for each army. I'm not quite sure when these will be used, and received one from Eureka as a free gift anyway, but they might come in handy as an objective or for a siege game at some point:
That is it for the artillery and I now just have sixteen regiments of cavalry and three of dragoons across the three armies to go. I have decided to paint the bulk of the horses first but, once that is done, hope to be able to roll them off the production line reasonably quickly.
