Blunderbuss gun

 I chose this gun as its the predecessor of the shotgun we have today, the smaller version of the blunderbuss which is also called a dragon is light and easy to use and was popular with the cavalry soldiers at the time. Example below

Sketch

I sketched out a pretty generic dragon but I made such to add some embellishments as I wanted the one i painted to be ornate that the plain ones, making it seem like a higher level weapon in game.I tried to have some forshortening on the final sketch as I think it will look better when in a samll square and prevent it from looking more rigid and boring which we want to avoid for clear reasosns., this forshortning did make we exagerate the flare of the barrel more than than what would be realistic but I do like how overdramatic it looks and I decided to keep it this way.

Tonal 

The tonal drawing for this piece was a bit of a challenge to me as the shine of the metal as I wasnt sure how I was going to paint it, so I looked at some examples of how the metal reflects and tried my best to recreate it, I do think this is a definate area for improvement on the piece as it isnt as realistic as I wanted it to be but I do like the area where the barrel of the gun is sitting in th wooden frame as I think the shading worked well here. The trigger area I tried to keep more simple as the other metal parts of the wooden handle are more detailed and have engravings, so i stuck to a plain metal with a small florish. Although I was happy with area looking back now I think pushing the contrast further could further realise the dept in the structure. 

Colour

Although I did separate the different materials to make the colouring more flexible, I ended up using pretty much the same gradient map for all of them. The main difference being the darkest colours in the gun barrel have are green rather than a bronze which I used on the metal work on the wooden handle to make it more in sync with the wood. I think the main thing I would maybe try with the colour would to be experiment more and see if having more variation on colour improves the piece at all but otherwise I quite happy with the colouring.

Overall although I am very happy with the outcome as I have never really painted a weapon as its not my normal go to field, I do think that it could have been improved in areas such as rendering the shading more and looking again at the way the metal shines and reflects as they are the weakest points in the piece.

I do think the metal detailing on the wooden handle is my favourite part as I like how I managed to define detail without having it look too busy through the use of faded lines when drawing in all the engraved areas.

revision based on feedback

 here I refined the highlights further to and corrected the ellipse of the gun.