Tales from the Body Box - I bought some new paints!

Time to talk about paint! 

Over the years I've had a few people ask me what paints I recommend for customs, or touch-ups and restorations to vintage or damaged models. Well, I always use a brand of paint intended for another kind of model entirely : Citadel colours made for Games Workshop (Warhammer) miniatures.
They may be designed for tiny mini soldiers and fantasy creatures, but they're by far the best I've found for our model horses too. They go on very smoothly for brush-painting by hand, whether as base coats or lightly smudged shading layers, they blend well together, and cover neatly in not too many layers without getting lumpy or rough. And best of all, they have this deep, lustrous sheen to them, rather halfway between a matte paint and a gloss, which looks just like the shine on a healthy horse's coat, which does a lot towards making your colours seem vibrant and rich.

They are exasperatingly expensive, in a pounds-per-ml sense, as you pay about £2.75 for a tiny pot whereas £1 will get you ten times as much in the cheaper artist's acrylic, but after early trial and error with all sorts of paint which was a hassle to work with and gave dubious quality results, I've found it worth the cost because the results are so gorgeous and they're so nice to use.

But there's loads of them, and the labels all say different things! Let's make sense of the range...

'Base' colours are thicker and cover a bit more easily, but don't mix smoothly if you're trying to do wet blending or smooth smudgey shaded colours (I've had to scrub paint off and start again because the Base wouldn't play nicely, just clumped and lifted!), so I tend to only buy the Base black & white - black because they don't do it as a Layer paint, and white because it covers better for streak-free markings.

'Layer' colours have a slightly different formula, and these are the ones which blend beautifully together so you can mix and vary your shades, work wet paints together, and add thin layers of lighter or darker tones over a basic coat colour. Go for Layer paints for all your brown/tan/beige/grey coat colours.

There's also various technical paints, and the new 'Contrast' range, which can make the sales stands look confusing at first, but just ignore all those, they're not what we want for model horse painting.

You do have to be careful, as some of the sandy colours tend toward khaki, and some of the browns have a distinctly un-horselike greenish tinge, but remember they're not mixing them with us in mind, and just take care to choose your colours in good light (no, the model/wargames shop people won't mind you picking them up to hold near a window, or taking ten minutes to pick a nice beige - we're in just as nerdy and creative and delightfully obsessive hobby as they are, they'll get it!)

Because they're so pricey, I tend not to buy very many, but each time I do choose a new pot, I can paint some horse colours I haven't done before!
On my most recent trip, as well as my usual favourite chestnut and bay paints, I picked out a pale milk-chocolate shade of brown, and a cream colour which looked nice for cremellos, perlinos, buttermilk duns, or flaxen manes and tails.

My first attempt with the cream paint, a little shading and some black points and we have a sweet little buttermilk buckskin baby! No name yet, but I really do like how she turned out. 

(I bought a mixed lot of very scuffed played-with second hand foals for my body box, so expect a whole flurry of new babies in the Harecroft herd this year!)

And to vary things a bit, meet Peaches and Cream - this one's the same body colour but with a tobiano pinto pattern. The G2 Saddlebred is one of my favourite moulds, she was actually the very first Stablemate I owned (in regular run chestnut) and now my conga line must be over 40 of these showy little mares if we count OF and CM together! I like to carve the moulded braids away, and replace them with plaited thread for the extra touch of realism.

Another foal, this one painted with my new light chocolatey brown, but faded out with softer shading, the way foals' coats are so often paler than their eventual adult colour.

And finally, a trace-clip skewbald on the G3 Warmblood mould, just because the new paler brown paint reminded me of the colour bright bays go when their coats are clipped. This one was painted body colour first, then the clipped areas laid on with a couple of coats of the new brown straight from the pot, then I added the white markings last of all. 

As usual, the pinto pattern didn't turn out as I had in mind (I was planning a lot more white and less colour left showing), but I made it up as I went along and suddenly this just seemed to look like enough, so I left it rather than risking spoiling the paintjob. I've got another G3 WB body, so that one can become the more-white skewbald I intended to make this time round!

Tales from the Body Box - Mini Alborozo customs

This week, something I've been looking forward to painting ever since I found out they existed : the Mini Alborozo mould!
Breyer releasing a tiny version of the much admired Traditional scale Alborozo may be a little bit of a cheat after all the hype about the mould being broken after just one exclusive release, but it really was a treat for the mini-scale fans to be able to collect the little version of this fantastic sculpt. Although I'm the kind of collector who's happy either way - I love Trads and SMs, and was already lucky enough to own the original big Alborozo because a friend in the States went to Breyerfest that year, and sent one over for me.
The only disappointment with the mini version is how frustratingly difficult he's been to actually buy. You can either chance your luck with blind bags - the Series 2 of Mystery Horse Surprise, or the unicorn ones if you don't mind having to snip and file the horns off! Or, you can pay about three times as much for the specific Paint Your Own Unicorn set he's in (again, with a horn to remove, and the fact everywhere sells out of the Alborozo one first!)
He's also in the new set of colourful glittery clearware SMs, but I have a feeling the painted-on glitter finish for the mane & tail would be too gritty and lumpy to paint over, and too hard to remove, so I'm not going to risk that as a cheaper way to get some bodies for the new moulds!

I managed to get two duplicates from the blind bags, one by chance mail order and a second by a little careful squeezing of the bags on a trade stand, and this week felt like my painting was going well enough to give them their new colours...

A paintjob I'd decided on ages ago, more or less as soon as I got my first duplicate to set aside for the body box - a dark dappled rose grey. I'd painted one on the Spanish walk Andalusian SM earlier this year, and thought how nice it'd look on this mould too, so my first Alborozo was always going to turn this colour.

I find paler greys really difficult to shade for some reason (I say my white paint doesn't like me), but darker ones are fun, and I like adding in the redder tones to suggest a dark bay body colour going grey.

How different he looks in the shade! The mould is another very good one to paint, sculpting style and finish is something which makes a great deal of difference to the success of a brush-painted custom - the detailing is crisp which picks up the highlights well, but the style is smooth which means the shading doesn't blotch and catch the way it would on a rougher less polished sculpt. 

I've named him Harecroft Peregrino - the name 'peregrine' has been on my list for ages, and shuffling through a few real Andalusian pedigrees online, the Spanish version jumped out as something to suit him very nicely!

Of course once I'd finished him, I had to choose a colour for my second custom, and after a little musing on typical colours for the Andalusian breed, google photos of real horses for inspiration, along with considering which colours I actually enjoy painting and get decent results with, I decided the best option to make the most of such a hard-to-find mould, would be a nice dark shaded bay.

So that's exactly what I painted - one of those rare times when the finished custom is more or less identical to the idea I had in mind! I couldn't be happier with how he turned out, the dapples were a bit of a risk when he was already looking ok without them, but I managed to keep them looking relatively blended-in by adding a bit more bay colour shading over the top of each layer, so they look like part of his coat pattern rather than spots dotted on last!

His name is Harecroft Altanero, another name which popped out of a real pedigree, though he wasn't based on any particular real horse - I find it way more difficult and stressful to try to copy a photo than to just aim for a colour I know horses can be! 

It's the time of year when taking photos requires all the scenery to be balanced on a board on a box on a chair at the far end of the garden and half into the plants just to find a patch of sunlight; these pictures may look perfectly serene and sensible but the process of getting them is anything but easy!

Altanero and Peregrino together, the beginning of what I hope will be a whole herd of Mini Alborozos - if only I could easily buy a few more!
I might try ordering another batch of blind bags later on, as every model in the second series is a mould I wouldn't mind painting, so I'd not be too disappointed if I ordered say four or five, and entirely missed the Alborozo bags.
But I'm really hoping that they'll put him into the next set of standard single SMs on a card, so we'll be able to buy duplicates to customise, as well as getting another OF release. Very dark almost-black bay would be nice, or a fleabitten grey...

Tales from the Body Box - catching up with my customs!

Quite a few to post today, I've been painting a lot more than usual over the last few weeks (my creativity goes in phases, soon I'll be back to not touching the paints for a year or two, hahah!) and have gathered up a batch to have their photos taken while we got a bit of sunshine, along with three who already had pictures but didn't get posted yet.

A mustang with no name yet, this one happened because I liked the base colour on my dun overo reiner and wanted to do another without the pinto patches!

One from the big bargain body box (last year's blind bags on special offer), my first custom on the G3 warmblood mould - I've ended up with a fair amount of the OF releases on this mould without really meaning to, but this is the first custom body I've got my hands on. I think it's also my first dark chestnut, I've usually painted them brighter purely because that's the shade of my orange pot of paint!

At a slightly different angle to show her face marking better. I've named this one Harecroft Nutmeg.

Another first, this time I picked out my only spare copy of the Mini Valegro mould to have a new coat of paint, meet Harecroft Valiant - one of my favourites of recent years, I love how he ended up!

He's been in the body box ever since the mould first came out and I bought a duplicate to customise, being saved until my painting was going well enough to do him justice! I went for a very shaded dark bay, I enjoy doing these and think they look more striking than a plain even-coloured bay when they're finished.

I tend to do quite small markings on my customs, a set of short socks and a stripe at most, 

so my idea this time was to paint one up with extensive white, and as the American breeders are often proud of what they call 'chrome' on the flashy gaited showring breeds, I chose the TWH mould.

She's also the result of trying to vary my chestnuts much more, with a paler paint mix, light shading, and a flaxen mane and tail. She's named Harecroft American Dream - I'm doing surprisingly well with naming them as I go along, there's not too many in my little book with a space beside their description!

Harecroft Mabel, repainted from a scuffed up foal with a damaged leg which came in a mixed lot of paint-rubbed bodies and good horses. Not the neatest of paintjobs as the body was rough, but broken horses make me sad so I just had to do something with the poor little thing!

This horse wasn't meant to be a bay! He was intended as the base for a tobiano skewbald, but as I went along I just got really attached to how he looked as a solid colour, and decided he wasn't getting partly painted over after all! He can be shown as a Welsh Cob now he isn't a pinto partbred, so I've called him Harecroft Gwydion.

I had to be a bit more firmly resolved to actually add the white for my next attempt at a tobiano skewbald, and although it's always a bit of a faff painting layers and layers on in such a specific pattern without ruining it or overlapping a bit that wasn't meant to be white marking, it's worth it in the end! This one was the WEG 'driving' stablemate I'd got a duplicate of years ago, I'd carved the legs down a bit to refine them, then left her languishing in the dusty bottom of my battered old body box. But now she finally has a fresh new coat of paint, I'm really pleased with how she turned out. I'll show her as an Irish sport horse, Harecroft Ballymena.

And finally, for now, one I've had in mind for months, Harecroft Silversmith, a dark rose grey on the G3 TB mould. I don't think I'll have him as a thoroughbred - a bit too chunky in the legs and wide in the shoulders, though both those seem to be a feature of this sculptor's style, rather than deliberate breed characteristics worked in to each model. He makes a much better hunter type, and I think this colour suits him.