Tales from the Body Box - four more

My painting spree continues without any sign of fizzling out just yet, this time there's four little Stablemates to share.

Last weekend I was just googling horse colours for the usual mixture of inspiration and entertainment, and it struck me that one of the commonest colours for the saddlebred breed is a solid liver chestnut, and I'd never painted one on the little G2 mould I have so many of, so it was off to the body box to get out one of my unpainted blanks and give her a coat of paint.

 I went for a flaxen chestnut cos the contrast of very pale mane would look so good against the dark coat colour, and I'm glad I did cos I really do like the way she turned out. I love the customising part of the model horse hobby for this reason, it's just so satisfying being able to have an idea then go off and create exactly the horse you want to own!

Despite not being as flashy as all her pinto sisters in my herd, a good solid colour makes a nice change and stands out in its own way, I think!

Her original moulded plastic braids I set upon with a scalpel to cut and carve them away, and gave her fine thread braids instead, I don't mind painting in the sculpted ones but I think the 3D effect of plaited thread really adds to the realism in photos, extra detail is always a good thing!

The next custom Stablemate was also a result of random colour googling for amusement one evening, the horse in the photo looked more like a riding pony type and didn't have any white on whatsoever, but I'd been waiting for inspiration for my final Django body and a bay roan pinto just clicked as yes, that'll suit him!

And having completed the paintjob, yes, I think it does - he looks just how I hoped he would! When the usual aim of applying paint with a brush is to get the colour as smooth and blended as possible, roans present a bit of a difficulty, especially the more mottled kind with patchier dark parts - it can be kind of hard to get your head round handling the brush in a way which will deliberatly leave a rougher shading, a suggestion of mixed white and brown hairs. This is why I paint so few of them, but I was determined this time it was the right colour for this horse to be.

I remember a long, long time ago having a discussion with other model horse hobbyists about the rarity of tobiano pintos with a totally solid leg and dark hoof : so many of them automatically come with four socks or stockings, we notice (and maybe try to get a handy reference photo!) when we spot one with a dark leg and black foot. There was even a website at the time, where somebody had collected all the pictures of dark-legged skewbalds and piebalds they could find. So I thought I'd paint one! 

The only thing is, I'm now out of Djangos, and that makes me sad cos I've enjoyed making three patchy little cobs out of them, and would happily do three more!

The next two horses are the really, have I never painted that before? batch! 

I was messing about amusing myself by making one of those horse colour charts you so often see with small drawings or photos of real horses, some pretty basic and intended for riding school and horse-mad-kids' walls, others more in depth and explaining the genetics for particular colour enthusiasts, breeders, artists, and painters. 

I was fitting in pictures of my models for the various basic, variant, and dilute colours, and realised I was actually missing some pretty standard colours in my herd of customs. For a start, I'd never painted a cremello! I thought I had, but when I went to fetch the photo of the one I had in mind to represent the colour on my little chart, he was actually a perlino - oops!

So, another trip to the body box, and I chose a mould that would both be a breed likely to have cremellos, and equally importantly, look good as one!

Another saddlebred! I'd done a dark golden palomino one on this mould, and I've got a much paler palomino my friend painted, but cremello looks easily different enough to warrant picking the mould again, with the cream colour against pink skin, and blue eyes.

Rather than a stripe or blaze which'd reach her nose, I stuck with a forehead star, so there'd be no need to figure out how to handle a face marking on skin which is already pink! 

This one has blue braids, to match her eyes. I know the real ribbon colours are chosen to co-ordinate with the browband and rider's outfit (just like some showing classes here use those ribbon browbands which come with a buttonhole or hair bow so the person matches the pony), but for my mini ones I always go for something different picked out to compliment the horse's colouring.

The next big glaring gap on my colour chart was a red dun. How?! Out of all the duns I've ever painted, not one!
So again, time to pick a relevant breed from the body box - this one was part of a batch of cheap Stablemates which I got on ebay, some perfect enough to fill OF gaps in my collection and others which had clearly been very played with, with a lot of scuffs and breaks, missing ears, and legs sellotaped to backs if they hadn't been lost entirely. A while ago I reattached the leg of this unlucky mare (or perhaps lucky, that she didn't just go in the child's bin!), and she's been waiting for a new colour ever since.

I think the colour suits her, it was a toss-up between a stock horse type and a highland when picking what breed body to go with, but I decided to start with this one and I can always do another for my dun highland conga next time. And look, she got the pink nose I avoided on the cremello!

I can tell which leg's been off, but hopefully the milliput join is strong enough that it won't happen again, and neat enough that it's not immediately obvious she had to be reassembled!

Because there was a danger of red dun looking like a bit of a wishy-washy attempt at a chestnut roan, I made sure to give her full-on dun markings, with a barred dorsal stripe, zebra striping to the legs, and frosting along the mane and at the top of her tail. As with the others, she got photographed before getting named, I haven't managed to think of anything to call any of this batch yet!

I need to have another look at my colour chart in progress to see if there's any more glaring omissions, quite how I painted for over a decade without reaching cremello or red dun is beyond me, so who knows what else got missed!

Breyer Sable Island Horse, or, An exercise in self control and forward planning

Yesterday I managed to have a parcel day despite not having a parcel arrive!

This year we've lost the entire calendar of British Eventing fixtures, understandably cancelled til further notice. Of course this lack of competition is mostly a shame for the competitors themselves, but as a spectator I'm really missing getting out to a nice cross country course on a sunny (or not-so-sunny!) spring day to watch and photograph the horses in action.
At some of the bigger events, there's also the treat of finding my favourite trade stand, which is naturally the one which stocks Breyers. It's usually my first chance to see each batch of new releases in person, getting a good look at new moulds or seeing how paintjobs have worked out in the actual production runs when the stock photo can be a bit misleading, and picking out a model to take home is a highlight of the day. This year, with no eventing, there'll be no trade stand visits either, but a little while ago I'd noticed the same company, Equestrian Bookfair, had started listing models on Ebay, and at the end of March, I came up with a plan.
To recreate the annual habit of buying a Breyer at their trade stand each time, I'd place a big order in advance, take the very quickest of glances just to make sure I'd received the right things in the parcel, then tuck the models away still in their boxes, and on the date which I'd have visited each competition, get one out to open and add to my collection. This way I get to spread them out through the year in a satisfying way - while one huge parcel day would be fun, there's more anticipation in looking forward to several little ones, and it's closer to recreating my usual experience of gaining Breyers gradually through the season.

This weekend would've been the first opportunity to buy from the stall, and so I got out one of my set-aside models, and this is who I picked :

The gorgeous 2020 Sable Island Horse. A breed, and admittedly also a place, I didn't know about until the model was announced, but have read up on since (see, models are educational - I never would've known I didn't know unless Breyer had sparked the interest!). 

She's my first of this Connemara Mare mould, having avoided the pale grey one as overly plain and a little too translucent-plastic-looking, but the dark colouring on this one really highlights all the fine features in the sculpting, there's a level of added detail which we only used to see on artist resins, with creases in the skin, veining, whisker bumps, and even eyelashes! I may be late to this connemara appreciation party but count me as a big fan, now!

Here's a couple more shots showing off her dramatic pose from different angles...

And here's one of her laying flat (or she could be rolling, though exactly where you'd stand to get this view of a real pony having a roll, I don't know - drone photography?!), this captures the depth of her shading. In person you can really see the red tones in her mane and tail, so she's either a very dark chestnut or a bay but with sunbleaching, I'm not sure which Breyer intended - the box info just says they come in 'solid dark colours' - but whether they designed her as a black chestnut or a bleached bay she's a lovely addition to my herd!

Unlike most of the other recent releases, they haven't given her a name, simply listing and labelling her by breed instead. I decided something suiting that Sable Island background would be nice, so spent a while looking for names on it's map, people from it's history, any native flowers or birds, all yielding nothing useful, but then happened across a map of shipwrecks around the island, and from there found a list of all the ships' names to read through. One name jumped out as there'd been two different ships of the same name foundered on the sandbanks, Stella Maris. The words and meaning ('star of the sea') sounded pleasant and fitting, and looking it up a little further, Stella Maris was used by sailors since the medieval era, as a name for 'a female protector or guiding spirit at sea', which seems just perfect for a remote island herd's protective lead mare.