Painting Hybrid - Templars of Hod

Another post in the painting category so soon after the previous one seems like a small miracle. This year I've been sorely behind on my planned Confrontation painting, but I'm slowly turning that around. I started out pretty strong with Cron and his diorama, but then it all somehow stopped in its tracks. In all honesty, the biggest blocker to my painting sessions, aside from real life which does fully intend to keep screwing up with me, was this Templar box. For some reason almost everything about it was a pain and instead of this being a quick and fun project it ended out being dragged out for months, so that was an additional motivator to sit down and sort my thoughts regarding the whole ordeal.

The kind of naiveté never seen before...

To begin with, assembly was a nightmare. The comment above was posted when I completed only the  Seneschal who was the easiest of the four Templars. These guys were like the greatest hits of painful assembly, they had it all: mould lines in all the wrong and hard to reach places, excess surfaces which simply didn't want to fit together, tiny joints which sadistically beg for pinning... just all of it. They all collectively made me question my sanity, sans Ambrosius who is a real chad. Pinning especially was a horrid experience due to the amount of excess metal that needed to be removed in order for the pieces to fit properly. In a couple of places I naturally managed to remove even more than needed, but luckily a proper amount of glue managed to hide my mistakes. Also since the tiny limbs really require a lot of precision and careful execution, which was hell in its own way, I'm starting to think that it might be a good decision to invest in one of those electric pen drill tools.

Work-in-progress photo doesn't begin to portray the horror...

This guy was the absolutely biggest offender since the placement of his arms just doesn't make sense physically. He looks like he is in the throes of challenging the Predator to a duel near the end of the movie of the same name, but he lacks muscle mass and his adversary already broke his limbs at the shoulder. Seriously Rackham, what even is this? The left arm in the photo especially was so bent backwards that it took me quite a few attempts of plain dry-fitting his limbs just to make sure that that was what Rackham wanted me to do. I should have taken a photo while I was trying to assemble him, but I was way too enraged to think about that...

So, when the painting was done this was the final product and it was a rather long road until I got there. They took ages to complete and for some reason I didn't enjoy the process at all. One of the things I find nice when painting a whole unit of dudes is that the unit is usually uniform, so using the same painting recipe for each one is somewhat easy on the brain. However, halfway through painting the Templars I realized that I don't really like my recipe for the blue coats. That particular recipe worked really well on some other non-Confrontation miniatures I painted a few years ago, but here I'm not too pleased with it, so instead of the aforementioned relaxation I was rather stressed, torn between redoing them or just plowing through. I ended up going with the latter. The more I look at them now, the more content I am with them, but I think this could have been better and I definitely want to try to find a better, more striking blue fabric recipe. Not to mention that one of the paints used, Deep Sky Blue from Vallejo probably due to age, ended up being too watery, which I didn't pay attention to, so highlights ended up more like glazes than sharp highlights like I intended to do.

The leather was fun to paint as usual. It is painted the same way as I did my Sessairs, only a tad bit less ivory stippling, while the smaller leather bits like the pouches I painted slightly different using Chocolate Brown, Flat Earth, and Old Wood, all from Vallejo. Unlike the leather, I'm still massively struggling with NMM. I think that my choice of paints is bad to begin with, but also I felt like the design of these blades was a bit too unnecessarily complex which makes it hell for an unskilled painter. Regardless, still figuring out how to do it and with some newly ordered paints and newfound guides I'll see how I fare on the next miniatures.

The Venerable Ambrosius, on the other hand, was an absolute joy to paint, so much so that I've managed to finish him in some record time... if I'm not mistaken two sessions with only a handful of hours. The sculpt itself is interesting to me, especially the flag/cloak part which gives you a nice blank canvas to play with. I believe this is the first time I tried some freehand with the lettering and it was pretty intimidating, not gonna lie. I went back and forth a few times to align the text, it could definitely be done way better, but overall it was fun to try something new. Also the whole process of making the cloth dirty and worn was my favorite part of the whole thing.

Speaking of making things dirty and worn, I immensely enjoyed working on the sandy cobblestone. Working on anything scenery or terrain related is always such a relaxing experience to me, it makes me wonder why I don't work more on terrain pieces... This is actually something I plan to change in the coming months, as I need to start setting up my Confrontation terrain. But anyways, the idea with these bases was for them to represent the sandy halls of the Dirz laboratory being investigated by the Templar. In hindsight I think I made them just a tad bit too light, but I reckon it is an easy fix if I decide to make them darker.

Also on the topic of the bases, I spent quite some time thinking what I want to do for the bases and in the end decided to try out Spellcrow. This is their "Pavement v.2" resin kit, I bought three of these for 3 quid a pop and honestly couldn't be happier. The details are crisp and it is designed in such a way that there are some clear paths for easy cutting, so depending on how you decide to carve them you could easily fit one block on roughly sixteen 25mm bases. For this Griffin box it worked like a charm, especially since there is nice difference in elevation of the stones, so the bases and mini poses end up being quite dynamic. I'll try the pavement on a 40mm base soon, so I'm curious how that will look like. But overall, highly recommended if you want an easy cobblestone basing kit!

For all the whining I did in this post and the amount of time I invested in this wretched box, I'm actually satisfied with how the minis came out. Taking these photos on the Hybrid tiles also kind of fixed my perception of the bases, so I think I'll postpone the thoughts of darkening them and just wait and see how it is when they actually hit the table. Soon enough I plan on tackling the Dirz box and then you can expect some Hybrid session reports around here, which makes me extremely excited. Until then, thank you for reading, see you in the next one!