Irish Handgunners

Another Ireland update! 

This time I wanted to do a bit of experimenting, with both multi-basing figures, and with some different ways of painting the léine, so I decided to use a possibly slightly anachronistic unit of handgunners as test subjects!

Historically speaking, handguns were adopted fairly quickly and enthusiastically in Ireland, with many earls wasting no time in adopting gunpowder warfare towards the start of the 16th century. Although, despite this, we don't have any record for gunpowder weapons being used by the Irish contingent at Stoke, and not much to go on for Warbeck's insurrection with the earl of Desmond (although Cork was reported as using gunpowder weapons against Warbeck's forces!). For this project, the handgunners represent more of a 'late' (insofar as the first half of the 16th century can be called late!) period force, or a dip into alternate history, where France, Burgundy or the Empire decide to back up their investment in a Yorkist pretender by providing weaponry to the Irish forces as a pretty substantial force multiplier against the more conservatively equipped English. Plus the idea of an early Irish pike-and-shotte formation is a fun project, if nothing else!

Given how much yellow I've been painting with the Irish, I wanted to give the new yellow GW Contrast paints a spin, to see how those worked! They were very easy to apply, but I would say in this particular case I did need to use a few washes to bring down the yellow a bit, where it was approaching a very bright banana yellow rather than the warm saffron I was going for!

I also wanted to try and experiment a bit with conversions of the kern figures themselves. Seeing as the unit is fairly small I wanted to avoid obvious doubles, so I've included a few kern from other sets with weapon and hand swaps to diversify the bunch

This base is entirely unmodified Perry Irish handgunners

This base on the other hand is entirely weapon-swaps and conversions from the other Perry and Antediluvian kern sets

And the other two bases are a mix of the two

And here's a couple of pictures of the full band of skirmishers together

I'm quite happy with how they've turned out! Although, I'll probably be a little more sparing with the Contrast paints in future, just where there's so much pigment that some of the kern here ended up almost too yellow!