French Artillery

It's nice to be back painting again and here is what I finished last week, some French Napoleonic artillery.

Esci cannons with Airfix crew

These are 20mm plastics and the guns come from the Esci foot artillery set, which actually has guard artillery crew.  Being a bit more down to earth I prefer to have fewer rather than more guard units and therefore I paired the guns up with some Airfix (line) artillery crew.

12pdrs

The Esci set is quite generous and comes with two normal cannon (12pdrs I think) plus two howitzers.

The howitzer

I had managed to misplace one of the howitzer barrels over the years (it turned up just after I'd completed all these, of course) and so I used a cannon from the Airfix set.  The Airfix gun carriages are far too small and have the wrong number of spokes on the wheels, amongst other problems, but the gun itself when put onto the Esci carriage doesn't look too bad.

Airfix cannon on an Esci carriage

As the cannon I used was from the Airfix set I nostagically crewed this piece with the few figures I had remaining from the the very first Airfix artillery figures I got, from sometime back in the 1970s.  Not many of them left but they still paint up OK (I had refurbished the remaining marching figures as an infantry unit previously).

The guns and crew are on 40mm x 60mm bases and my usual basing technique of coarse shelly sand painted in Revell Dark Earth, with a bit of dry brushing and then selective flocking, completed them nicely.