Painted in 2020

For the second time since starting this blog, it's time to take a look back at all the customs I painted in a year. Here is 2019's post, if you'd like to check them out, or compare to 2020's selection.

Thankfully I managed to get the last of these named this morning, so I've been able to get them all captioned - it makes the little gallery look a bit more professional, I think! You can see them all full size if you browse back through the pages of the my customs tag.

The first thing which hits you in the face is how MANY of them there are - 68 in total! That's more than double what I painted last year. I'm going to blame 2020, and the fact that a creative hobby is an ideal distraction from worries, and something to occupy the time through various lockdowns and restrictions.

So let's break it down a bit, what have I painted?

Firstly, the colour ratio is notably different; fighting the old habit of wanting to make everything skewbald, this year I completed 42 solid colours, 19 pinto patterns, and 7 spotted. 
There's new variations on old favourite colours in here, with my first rabicano roans rubbing shoulders with metallic dilute akhal-tekes; skewbalds in grey and a couple of different roans alongside my usual bay and chestnut patches; chubari and leopard spotting instead of only blanket appaloosas; and a whole rainbow of different duns thanks to my highland pony project.

Eight are portraits : two horses from paintings, one from a book, one event horse, and four famous racehorses.

There's ten Breyer Stablemate moulds I hadn't painted before, while in the mix this year are some different scales, too - first I tried going smaller, with my first Mini Whinny, then jumped up to some mid-scale plastics by CollectA and WIA.

In all, I'm very happy with the year's work - all laid out this I'm astonished how many there are, plenty of colours I'm pleased to have tackled for the first time, and some which've joined the top ranks of favourite customs I've painted.
I'd love to know which you like best, if you happen to read this post - do let me know in the comments!

Goodness knows where I'm going to keep them all, but that's a problem for another day; after all there's no such thing as too many models, only not enough shelves!

Tales from the Body Box - December roundup!

I find it rather satisfying organising my models properly, whether that's the horses on the shelves, their photos in computer folders split by brand and finish, or posts here on the blog where each one's tagged with maker, scale, finish, and a selection of other labels to make it easy to sort them.
So I'm trying to make sure everything I painted in 2020 is posted neatly inside 2020, with no overlapping into the new year - for that reason this post is a gathered together collection of three customs with no breed, colour, or career in common; just the last few models I painted this year!

First we have Harecroft Bluebell, painted as a suffolk mare. This is my first ever custom on the G1 draft mould; they used to be quite hard to get hold of on the second hand market, with no regular run since 1997, but with the Best of British SM set including one a couple of years ago, there's now a few recent bodies kicking around, and I was lucky enough to get mine in a mixed lot on Ebay.

 

I find the G1 moulds quite nice to paint, just because they're something different - I came into model collecting properly in the early 2000s, when G2 had taken over, so these were never familiar to me in the same way as to people who started their Stablemate collection with the first generation of moulds.

The sculpting style might not be so sharp as the later models in the range, but they're good and smooth with solid conformation and typey breeds, so it's a shame we don't see more releases, really!

I decided to do a suffolk just because I have so few of them in my collection, and their big broad barrelly shape suits this chunky mould so nicely. I have considered 'dressing' Bluebell like I did for my first couple of Britains shires, but Suffolks are braided with raffia not coloured wool, and I've yet to figure out what would make a good 36th-scale stand-in for raffia!

While I was painting my mini tributes to Quevega and Annie Power, it struck me that I'd never done a single G2 TB custom which wasn't a racehorse portrait! Really, in all the years I've been painting, I've saved all those bodies to become famous horses, but now we have the Walking TB mould as well, I've got two different racehorsey moulds to choose from, and that means I can use up some of those G2s for non-portrait ideas!

My first idea was one which'd been simmering away in my mind for ages, a young dark grey who was just starting to go paler round the face; often there's quite a contrast between the head and the rest of the horse, especially in flat racing where they start young.

She ended up a little lighter in the body colour than I'd intended, but because she was looking so pretty anyway, I didn't try to correct it with more layers of dark shading - often a paintjob goes a little off target and I just let it for fear of ruining what looked ok even if it wasn't exactly how I pictured it!

I've named her Isle of Avalon.

And now, my final custom of 2020.

A few days ago I'd been mulling over ideas and colours I thought would look good on certain moulds, and the thought which settled as one of those 'I must paint that one day' ideas, was a liver chestnut skewbald using the Friesian mould as a cob. I had the specific shade of dark liver chestnut in mind, faded blonde highlights to the mane and near-black tipped tail, and a big flash of white over the shoulders, tapering out with pointed ends to four socks and a blaze.

But I didn't have a G3 Friesian in the body box, so the idea was doomed to be put aside for months or more. Or so I thought! One of my model horsey friends always sends me a little christmas parcel, and the morning after my colour plotting I unwrapped it to discover one of the things inside was a Friesian!

Highly amused at this co-incidence, I set to work getting him painted up straight away, and here he is.

I love how he turned out, he's almost identical to my mental-image 'design' (aside from gaining an unintended extra white patch on his neck thanks to a slip of the brush which had to be improvised over to look deliberate because it wouldn't wipe off!), and it's just so funny that I randomly got sent the exact mould I'd wished I had just a few hours beforehand!

My first custom this year, way back in the spring (and doesn't that feel like a very, very long time ago!), was a skewbald cob which I named Artful Dodger, so when my final custom of the year turned out to be another skewbald cob, I thought it fitting to call this one Oliver Twist, so they match.

Tales from the Body Box - Two resins

It's a little known fact that my infamous body box isn't just a simple cardboard box, but has an extension out the back. Hidden in the space behind the tv stand are all the resin bodies I've accumulated over time - some rescues, which I got cheaply broken or battered; some raw castings picked up at live shows over a decade ago; some over-ambitiously BIG horses I've put to one side because brush-painting larger scales is scary. They'd become very much an out-of-sight-out-of-mind aspect of my collection of bodies, Stablemates were smaller and easier and that's where I felt comfortable so that's where I tended to stay. This year I've been determinedly broadening my painting horizons little by little, with Mini Whinnies and CollectAs sprinkled between the SMs, and the other day I decided to go one further and have a careful rummage through the dusty resin graveyard and pick out something different.

What I found was a horse I didn't know I'd got. I don't have a clue where I bought her, other than it might've been the sales table at a live show because she'd got her price and someone's initials scribbled in pen under her belly!
She also had a moulding flaw, the poured liquid resin not having reached one of her feet, so she had a hollow hoof tip but no heel or sold, and a big chunk of her feathering lost. I suspect that's why she was cheap enough for me to have come home with her in the first place, though I do wish I could remember this happening!
It took me some investigation after painting to even find out what she was, the resin not being instantly familiar, and I had to look through every shire, clydesdale, non-specified draft, and finally the 'other' section on Equineresinsdirectory before finally finding out her details : Horsing Around's Lissy, by James Richmond, an edition of 50 back in 2010. 

Here she is, all finished up!

I've named her Harecroft Grace, and done her as a bay with plenty of white, but not too-white white - I imagine her as a relaxed broodmare taking it easy in her field, fidgeting to shift position mid nap on a sunny day, rather than all scrubbed and polished and chalked for the show ring, perhaps she's even retired, her tail's been allowed to grow long as a fly whisk, not trimmed for correct turnout.

 

The weather and low sun trouble this time of year made it tricky to get any photos of her at all, so these were all taken indoors with fake light or raking awkward daylight from the window above the front door - I had several goes on different days, which gave a huge amount of variety in the lighting and how it makes her look, but none of it was helpful for especially good photography! The third picture is perhaps the best of the three, though I do like the blue sky in the first shot, and still haven't decided which I'll use for my website or to show her.

The raised hind leg is where I replaced her missing hoof and heel, I did that before tracking down any pictures of the resin which I could have copied from, but now I've seen them, I find my guess isn't far different from how she was originally sculpted.

 

I really like how she turned out, one of my favourite customs of this year, but I love her profile most of all - that big roman nose which looks all the more noticeable under the highlighting wide white blaze!

The second resin is going to be much more familiar to a lot of collectors - he's Breyer's christmas ornament version of the Traditional vanner mould. He came to me in a box of normal plastic SM bodies on Ebay - whoever had them before had taken off his unicorn horn with a saw or possibly a dremel, but also cut a chunk out of his stifle in the process, then given up and sold him with the rest.
With a bit more filing, some carefully milliputting to patch up his accidental wound, and a lot of scraping to get rid of the coating of glittery glue all over his mane, tail, and legs (part of Breyer's persistent insistence that all unicorns must be sparkly), he was ready to paint.
And let's be honest, there was only one colour this lad was ever going to end up...

He really suits this colouring, I think, I might've aimed for more bay and less white but this is just the point where he started to look good so I stopped before I spoilt the paintjob. On this one I did the white first, because I had a nearly-dry pot of white paint to use up, and it goes on fine as a base coat if it's getting sticky and solid, but doesn't co-operate if trying to add markings over the colour. I just went along at the end and used a little bit of my fresh new pot of white for feathering the edges gently into each other so he looks fluffy.

Like with Grace, I gave him faintly dirty feathering, and also a hint of blonde in his mane, just cos he doesn't need to look show-ring-shampoo-white. I've named him Harecroft Rapscallion, though with a mouthful of a name like that, I bet it'd soon get shortened to 'Scally' round the yard!

I'm not sure if there's any difference between this resin edition of the mould, and the plastic Stablemate version, one day I'll have to compare them in hand but I think they're identical and you'd only know this one was resin by the weight, they did a good job of translating the mould into plastic without losing the crispness of detail for the hairy bits!

Tales from the Body Box - Two race mares

This month I've finally ticked two more racehorse portraits off my to-paint list, both on Breyer's G2 Thoroughbred mould, and both mares who claimed their place in the history of National Hunt racing over the last decade.

This is Quevega, who made history by winning the Mare's Hurdle at the Cheltenham festival an incredible six years in a row, giving her the dual honour of being the first ever horse to win at six consecutive festivals, and the first to clock up six wins of the same race at any course. Any fans who remember cheering her on will never forget her name, and nor will any who visit Cheltenham racecourse itself - the bar is named after her!

I've had her in mind for a portrait for years, and I'm really glad to have got her done at last! 

Here is a photo of the real thing just in case you don't know her, you can see that as well as the white sock, she's got a little smudge of white further up her shin, probably from a scar where the hair grew back without colour (I have, in the past, mistaken a bit of stray spit foam from a horse's mouth for a white marking, but this is present in photos taken on different race days, and with her foals after retirement, so it's definitely real and permanent!)

She has such a lovely face, the main part of getting her colour to look right was the sandy shading to her nose, chest, and in a few other spots; often when a bay horse is clipped they lose a lot of the variety in the coat colour but she has more depth of tone, which made her enjoyable to paint. 

I never quite know whether it's best to do the clipped or unclipped sections of a paintjob first, I reckon it might depend on the ratio : if it's a trace clip, with more of the coat left on than taken off, then I paint the clip section on last. But if, like these racehorses, there's much more of the body clipped than not, I paint them the clipped colour, then carefully add on the full coat parts afterwards.

The second portrait is the chestnut mare, Annie Power. Like Quevega, she was a fantastic hurdler, winning some of the very top UK and Irish races in flying style, including being the first mare to win Cheltenham's Champion Hurdle in twenty two years. 

Sometimes Annie Power ran with her mane plaited up, other times it was loose, I decided to go for loose for the simple reason that I don't like resculpting manes!

She's another to have this high blanket clip; because so much jumps racing is done over winter and spring, the horses are more familiar in their clipped state than in the natural darker colour of their full coats. Here is the real horse to compare - the dark mark on her shoulder is just a rug rub, so I didn't paint it on the model!

Showing the white stripe on her face, the only marking she's got - I always think it's almost a shame when the horses who become the stars of the sport, or my own favourites to follow, have minimal amounts of white, because it'd be more fun to paint eye-catching unusual face markings, or a lot of flashy long socks! 

Tales from the Body Box - Britains shires

Another conga line of matching customs to introduce today, meet my little line-up of Britains shires!

Not all of these are freshly painted, the two on the right, all dressed up with their ribbons and braids, were completed quite some time ago, but this week I've finished four more friends for them. 

This mould has to be one of the nicest shire sculpts out there, a lot of model horse hobby people seem not to bother with Britains for showing or customising as they're seen as a cheap, low quality toy brand these days, with only the vintage ones really having much appeal even to toy collectors. And a lot of the moulds aren't all that special, with awkward poses and unrealistic proportions, but the shire is a real gem amongst them, you really couldn't change anything about this little horse to make it more accurate! 

First, let's take a look at the original pair.

This is Excalibur. At the time I only had two of this mould, so I went with one of my favourite colours to paint, a dark bay with just enough bright shading to make the colour pop, and of course the typical white markings so common in the shire breed. She's dressed for the show ring, with the correct white rope halter for a mare - turnout rules are strict and firmly enforced in the heavy horse world; I've seen shire mares sent out to change if they were led into the ring wearing a bridle or white leather halter instead.

The second mare is Hallmark, an experimental paint technique of dabbed-on dapples with a weird brush which had gone all scraggly and wouldn't pull together to a point for normal shading. I think it just about works in a convincing and neat way, but only because they're so small (slightly less than Stablemate scale, the Britains shire is the same height at the withers as the G2 TB : if they were to the same scale a heavy breed would stand bigger than a thoroughbred)

The rest of the herd haven't been given braids, yet, but it's an incredibly fiddly process which takes even longer than the paintwork, the tiny 'ribbons' for the flights being cut from coloured paper with a small craft knife, glue to wires pushed through the thread plaits before being attached to the mane and tail. So I decided I'd get them photographed as finished now, and work on getting them dressed up for a second lot of photos at some point in the future when I feel up to tackling such a long-winded, frustrating, and difficult sort of job!

Shires only come in three colours - bay, black, and grey. Having done one bay and one grey, black was next on the list, but I didn't want to make her a plain solid black as that would look rather lacking detail and interest, so I went with a sabino, with high white stockings and a lot of ticking on the flanks and rump. Her name is Willow.

I've always been fond of grey shires, though the breeder I knew didn't have grey in his herd I admired them at shows, especially the older horses where their colour has almost entirely gone leaving just the hint of grey round the knees and hocks, and maybe a few fleabites on the neck and shoulders. This is my attempt at capturing that colour, with the socks and stripe very nearly blending in to the body colour. I've called her Lady In White, a name picked from a pedigree when looking up shire stallions a while ago, and saved til I had one for it to fit.

Every now and then a shire will turn out a really light gingery bay, with a sandy underside, and they stand out bright among all the dark and mahogany bays. So my herd needed one of those as well, and here she is, I named her Sophia. She's got one blue eye, from where her big white blaze reaches one corner of it.

And finally, this is Diana. After painting big white markings on the previous shires, I decided to go with the much more minimal white a few of the real ones get, with two totally dark legs, and two shorter socks which don't reach all the way around, leaving two-tone feathering.

I do have one more shire body in the box, but having run out of colour ideas right now, and wanting all this year's customs to be blogged before the new year begins, I thought it better to post the current herd now, and think about that last one later!

Breyer Adiah HP

This week I treated myself to one last Traditional scale parcel day for 2020, the top of my wishlist for this year's models ticked off before the end of the year.

Adiah HP was the stand out must-have from the mid-years for me, a welcome return for a mould we haven't seen in regular runs since Totilas himself in 2013 (unless you count the Holiday Horse release, which I kind of don't because they're usually both more expensive and more limited in supply than the usual horses).
It's always kind of puzzling how Breyer just seem to ignore certain new moulds after one regular run, and we just don't see them again outside of the selection of exclusives and specials for years and years, while others crop up in the regular run range continuously, or even have several different colours on offer at the same time. Think of Big Chex To Cash, Topsails Rienmaker, Slick By Design and Latigo Dun It, all overlapping in the catalogue, versus something like the one Marwari back in 2013, or Bluegrass Bandit who hasn't been seen since 2008!
So, like many collectors of regular run OFs, I was delighted to see the mould was coming back, although there's been a slight modification - this one's a mare.

I thought you'd like to see both sides - click any image to view it full size - as real collectors' photos often help me make decisions on what to buy, and because they show an actual production line model in hand from different angles, I find they're often more useful than Breyer's much better quality publicity photo.
The lighting isn't ideal here as I'm in the middle of winter with a latitude and climate which makes actual sunshine a very rare and fleeting thing in my garden, it's hard to find a patch of light big enough for such a large scale model from November til March, so I had to cheat and do this indoors under false light.

Adiah comes with the clear plastic disc stand for one fore foot, like the Huck Bey and Salinero moulds (yes, that one which wobbles creakily forever, or breaks off at the peg!), but I photographed her before attaching it, just because I try to avoid bases in pictures if possible, and that style's too fragile to risk pulling in and out of the foot through the grass sheet like the good strong slotted bases with a metal peg in the foot. 

Once the base is on, she's reasonably steady, but if you've had any Breyers on these bases before, you'll know you can never quite relax and trust them, and they need a secure shelf in a part of the room which will never be accidentally bumped, preferably with their tails touching the wall or back of the bookcase, and after your first unprovoked domino event in the middle of the night, with the addition of some tape or bluetack just in case. I'm saying they will stand up but you'll forever be scared they won't stay up!

I really do think this colour looks stunning on the mould, pinto was such a good choice. The real Adiah is 3/4 friesian and 1/4 Dutch warmblood, an eye-catching dressage horse who's won up to Grand Prix level, and they've done a nice job of matching her markings, with crisp, neatly masked jagged edge details, even on the fiddly bits - here's a look underneath!

The mane seems to be a sort of deliberate mistake, though - Adiah is a chestnut pinto in real life, so her mane is brown in colour : spot the coloured braids along her neck here, or see this photo for her loose mane which shows the blondey-brown even better. But the model has black shading on those two braids, meaning your eye reads her entire colour as a bay pinto instead.

But when a horse is this beautiful, surely we can forgive a little thing like black plaits?! Just look at her!

My favourite part of the whole paintjob is that little black spot on the end of her nose.

A Harecroft Hare

Something small and very different today, rather than a model horse custom, this time I've been painting a hare!

This little chap came into my collection a long time ago, but only joined it properly today - he was a duplicate OF and at the time I'd chosen the one with the best paintwork to keep, and popped this spare safely into a box of fabric scraps and crafty materials, to repaint at some point. As things in any creative-hobby household always go, the box of useful bits got moved multiple times over the years, and I lost track of the fact I even had a spare hare. 

I happened to find him at the weekend, so decided to give him his long overdue paintjob.

And here he is! He's a Brown Hare, the kind we have where I live, but because they're so pretty, with details and shading in their coat, they're anything but plain. I've had some wonderful encounters with wild hares, and really enjoyed bringing this one to life in full colour, especially those vivid eyes like amber glass.

The mould is made by Safari, some model hares look a bit gawky or scary but this one's a nice little sculpt, and I like his action pose - so many views of hares are when they've already spotted you and gone long-legged-loping away across the field.

Here's his OF counterpart, a much brighter colour but they've got the pale rings around the eyes spot-on!

And the pair of hares together. Really I ought to get a third at some point to see if I could set up a 3D version of the ancient 'three hares' symbol with interconnecting ears, which I adopted as my Harecroft Farm logo long ago. I've got the sitting Schleich one as well, but being in a different pose he can't really be a part of that trio arrangement!

Tales from the Body Box - Highland pony project!

Here's a project which has been a long time in completion, making their way steadily from body box to completed customs shelf...

Highland Ponies!

You might be thinking 'why on earth does one collector need so many dun highlands?', and to be honest, I'm not even sure I can come up with a reason - this was never the plan from the beginning!

It all started with a rummage in the body box one rainy afternoon, pondering on how I hadn't done many duns lately I picked out a Breyer G3 highland pony stablemate, and decided she'd make a nice little dun mare for my herd. I've not done many customs on this mould, and none as proper highland colours - two became fjords, one's now an exmoor, and one's piebald. So it was about time I did one which could actually stay the breed it was sculpted as!

And here she is! I went for a middling sort of dun colour, pale highlights and darker shading in it, plus leg barring, mane and tail frosting, and a clearly defined dorsal stripe. Her name is Maighread, the Scottish Gaelic version of the name Margaret, which in turn comes from the French Marguerite, meaning 'daisy'.

So there was my dun, she turned out nicely, and I was happy with both completing my idea, and filling a gap in my collection. You'd think I'd be satisfied there, but no, while googling 'dun highland pony', I was reminded just how many shades of dun they come in, and suddenly one wasn't ever going to be enough - she needed a companion!

Meet Malmuira, highland mare number two. I thought it'd be nice to name them all in Scottish Gaelic, this one means 'dark' and would be given to human babies with darker hair or complexion, so it suited her darker grulla dun colouring nicely. 

But there were also some lovely rarer pale duns in the search results, and you can guess what happened next...

This one's named Machara, which unfortunately means 'plain' but we can put a positive spin on that by saying it refers to her smooth plain colour, rather than as a negative opinion on her looks! This is the sort of dun you get when a very light bay carries the dun gene, I made sure to add the leg barring and dorsal stripe, and that two-tone tail, to distingush her from a buttermilk buckskin.

It was at this point that I realised I had a couple more highlands in the body box (I'd bought some really played-with bodies at the end of last year, some had lost legs or ears and needed mending but all the highland ponies were sound of limb!), and decided it'd be fun to make up a little herd featuring some of the other colours they come in.

This is a grey dun, which is what highland pony people call a black-based dun which comes with the greying gene and gradually fades out. In this in-between stage they look stunning, as older ponies they end up entirely white-grey and you'd never know which colour they'd started out as. I've named her Marcail, which means 'pearl'.

And finally, I did a cream dun - nothing to do with the cream gene, just the traditional name for any of the bay, brown or red duns which grey out and get gradually paler with each coat moult. They can look very similar to grey duns, my models are quite alike too, and they are both genetically dun plus grey, the only distinction between those terms 'grey' or 'cream' dun depends on which colour they started out, and what tint is left in the coat as they age. I named her Marsaili, another variation of the name meaning 'pearl'.

Here's how the herd looked so far, a nice mixture of ponies and it'd been a fun painting experiemnce, trying to get them varied and interesting with different amounts of leg shading and playing with the level of contrast between body and mane/tail colours. But now I had no more highland pony models in the box, so it was time to move on and paint something else.

For a while. 

Because later in the year, I bought another bulk lot of cheap bodies, and guess what - there were highlands!

So it was back to the dun project, and time to fill in some conspicuous gaps in my herd. When you read horse breed books, they tend to list the old-fashioned colour terms for highland ponies, used within the breed, rather than the more precise genetic terms we've come to understand in general discussion of horse colour. 

Mouse dun - black plus dun - better known as grulla in the model horse world, where we often adopt international terms because the hobby's worldwide.

Yellow dun - bay plus dun - not many of them look at all yellow, more likely ranging from sandy brown to tan to a bright hot chocolate shade, but for some reason that's the word for it!

Fox dun - chestnut plus dun - usually referred to as red dun, I've never heard red duns being called this outside the highland breed.

Cream dun and grey dun, I've already explained, they're two collective terms for duns which are going grey.

First 'missing colour' to tackle, the fox dun, I went for quite a high-contrast look with dark points and pale elbows and flanks, because it can be quite a flat colour and needed some pretty shading. I carried on the Gaelic-M-name theme for the second batch, and called her Maura.

Sometimes, the books will include 'slate dun' on the list of highland pony colours, and after some investigation, this turned out to be a very dark variation of black dun - the pony looks a deep grey slate colour with darker points, rather than the grey-brown we call mouse dun or grulla. 

Here you can see the result, there is a tiny hint of brown in the paint mix in an effort to stop her going too blue, but I tried to keep her very dark, with just the silvery top to her tail to make sure she doesn't come across as a dark iron grey. Her name is Muireall, meaning 'bright sea'.

In the process of trying to figure out what slate dun meant, I happened to find out (here) that highland ponies also have the silver gene! So of course, that meant more colours to play with for my mini herd...

Silver mouse dun - that's black, plus a dun gene, plus a silver gene. It gets kind of hard to follow at times, hahah! This one was a lot of fun to paint, I did her shortly after my silver dapple Icelandic and it was interesting working out exactly what to do to make this one look different so she was a dun as well. The silver fades out the points so any feathering is pale, and the mane and tail too, but she's got a dorsal stripe, dark face, and dark knees and hocks. Her name is Mala Mhin, and she's highland pony number eight!

 And of course if you can have a black dun silver, you can get a bay dun silver, too, and this one was even more fun to paint! I don't know why but I really enjoyed making this pretty mixture of colour genes, named Malvina she's one of my favourites in this whole set.

For a moment I thought I'd exhausted dun possibilites, then realised I'd managed to overlook one of the commonest of all, the basic bay dun!

So here she is, Myrna, the final one in the set of ten dun highland ponies, a project a year in the making, and which I had no idea I was going to do when I picked up that first model from the body box!

A few more pictures and colour rambling...

A little line-up picking out just the traditional highland pony colours as listed in the books : cream dun, grey dun, fox dun, yellow dun, mouse dun, and slate dun.

And here's the bay-based ones in isolation : light bay and medium bay giving totally different shades of dun, followed by one with the addition of the silver gene, and one much darker shade (these used to be known as 'golden duns' when I was young and first learning about horse colours, but I haven't heard that term for such a long time, I think it's gone away!)

On the left, the two duns going grey, and on the right, the two colours affected by silver (the silver gene doesn't show on chestnut based colours, hence not having to paint one of those!)

And that's a whole lot of dorsal stripes, for someone with a shaky hand who's scared of painting them - I have to hold my breath and steady my nerves!

That really is all for now, and though there's an annoying little doubt in the back of my mind which whispers 'you haven't done ALL the colours cos didn't paint a plain black, bay, chestnut and grey yet, only dun ones', there's no more G3 highlands in my body box, so I have an excuse to stop here!