ACW Commission: Gun Carriages

I usually enjoy my painting sessions, but for some reason, painting guns has always been more a chore than a pleasure. I always like to base the guns before painting for extra durability, but this makes the nooks and crannies difficult to reach.

I have always primed my guns black, applied a silver drybrush, then picked out the wood work with my detail brush. With 15mm guns, where I'm only applying one color to the wood, this works well enough. With 28mm guns, where I try to highlight the wood grain, it makes for a pretty tedious process.

Today I decided to reverse my usual plan of attack and prime the guns in the wood color. Here are the 8 Confederate guns primed brown and the 10 Union guns primed green.

To make sure this technique would work, I went ahead and finished one gun carriage tonight. I'm pleased with the look of the piece, and priming in the wood color made the job much faster. I think I'll be using this technique from now on.

The barrels will be painted separately, then glued on during basing. If I glue the gun before painting the carriage, my paint jobs always look sloppy around the elevating screw.