Finished! 28mm Gripping Beast Black Hoods Cavalry for Saga

After 23.5 hours painting this unit on my Twitch.tv stream I've completed my Eastern Horsemen 'Black Hoods' mercenary unit for Saga. I've painted this up for the February Saga Thorsday painting contest.

This unit can be fielded in both my Crusader and Eastern Princes armies, the latter being the more likely to use them on a regular basis. I've been using some Lithuanian medium cavalry as a stand in for this unit. When playing the plethora of Mongol opponents from my local club, I find the Black Hoods gives me an affordable mounted warrior option with my Eastern Princes army who otherwise would have to bring hearthguards if they wanted more horse flesh on the battlefield.

I have little to critique about the Gripping beast figures. They are well detailed and nicely cast. I always enjoy painting them. This unit came with only four horse poses, two of each pose, and I got an extra archer in place of the horn blower shown on their website. Both minor concerns. The only other minor complaint is all of the archers have the same body position. Some variance with these would have been nicer.

I took some extra time on this unit to practice some shading with a glazing technique I recently learned by watching other miniature painting streamers. Results are mostly subtle, so I think in the future I need to dial up the contrast in my color selection to '11'.  I'm particularly happy with the two mottled ponies I painted up ant the bone coloring on the skull totem.

I've been using a three-step process on flesh tones lately with a base color, P3 flesh wash, and a highlight of lighter flesh color. This combination was also used on these to good effect. In addition I added some eye detail to really make the faces pop. For shields and horse blankets I kept with the red theme that the Gripping Beast artist used on the web sample images. I also really liked the look of the totem bearer in the samples so I copied that fairly closely as well.

This adds sixteen figures to my annual painting total. Good progress to start the new year.