Venitian Galleys (and that one from Malta)

"When ships are locked and grappled together, the soldier has no more space left him than two feet of plank on the beak head."...

~ Miguel Cervantez, Don Quixote. 

The Fleet forms line, inspired by Angus Konstam's Osprey on Lepanto

Galleys Galleass and Galliots - oh my!

I have always admired the line of the renaissance galley. I've even sculpted a few ships after their fashion for my "Pirates, Miniature Adventures on the High Seas" game.  So, when one of my South Bay Game Club collegues mentioned he had some galleys that were in need of paint, I pretty much reverse Tom Sawyered him - and offered to paint them up! 

The front two ships are Galleass, and the die is for scale

Oh, I can put rigging and those cool banners and flags and... wait - what scale are those?!

With stars in my eyes, I pulled out all my research books on the battle of Lepanto and relived the moments, as we do.  I wonder if anyone has ever done an audit to see how much money they spend on "research" books for a particular period in comparison to the actual miniatures. When I got the miniatures in hand, I was firstly taken aback at the scale. 1/1200, aka: small. Quite small.

I am not sure what I was thinking. Actually I guess I was thinking the whole time that these babies were gonna be straight off the assembly lines from Rod Langton miniatures, which to me are the Bentley of ship miniatures. They are of course priced as such. 

The ships delivered into my care were from the Navwar range. Overall dependable specimens and when building large fleets, cost effective.  The one downside to these models would be the masts, which are thin and damn near impossible to straighten up all the way.  This dissuaded me from trying to mount any rigging or larger flags.

My Lepanto research material, including a postcard of a beautiful model in Venice.

I had good fun painting these guys, and jumping back into my Lepanto books; they were a noble distraction between painting Wooden Wars units. The whole lot probably took me about 4 hours, or better translated as the free painting time over a week. As the masts are fragile, I decided to present them (lightly glued) on a single piece of painted matte board. 

Now... if anyone has any Rod Langton galleys laying about in the slips that need paint...

A Langton  turkish galley, in all its brass etched glory!