Each rosette winner was sent a bonus prize of one Mini Whinnies blind bag, and inside mine was the pearly pink rearing unicorn. As I wrote here a few weeks ago, decorator unicorns aren't my cup of tea, so this was the perfect opportunity to try something new - painting my first ever Mini Whinnies custom.
What colour? Well, you can probably guess!
I quite like all the shrinky and new-sculpt moulds in the unicorn bags, but I was glad it was this one - it's the sort of horse which perfectly suits being a hairy patchy cob custom, and for a first attempt at Breyer's smallest scale, I thought I ought to go with a colour I'm very familiar and confident with. So this signature bay tobiano was inevitable as soon as I'd opened the bag!
Incase you're not familiar with the size of Mini Whinnies, here she is with a penny for scale (British pennies are the same size as US and Canadian ones, and Euro cents).
It was interesting, and not as difficult as I'd expected, to convert my stablemate painting style to a much smaller scale, I just needed finer brushes for the shading as well as the markings, and used a pointed detailing brush for the highlights which I'd normally be smudging in with a small but chunky brush.
Although it gives you two toe-tips on the hind feet, you could just about get away with a running pose as well, or you could do a bit more custom work to reposition that near hind to be a flat weight-bearing foot, if you really wanted to pose one horizontal rather than vertical.
Here's a couple more angles, showing off just how nice the sculpting is on these new moulds - really good proportions and pose, and so much neat sharp detailing compared to the old original Mini Whinnies, which were cute but not nearly so realistic.
She also had hardly any seam lines, just a couple of extemely light ones which easily buffed away for customising, and weren't even ugly or prominent if leaving OF.
I'd definitely like to paint some more of these, it was nowhere near as scary going down a scale as I'd anticipated, and I'm so pleased with the way this little mare turned out, my lovely tiny big hairy patchy cob!
I bought one of the MW Ballyduff mould ones from Catriona a month or so ago and so nearly bought this mould too but someone beat me to it!
ReplyDeleteLook forward to seeing what you do with it, we're quite similar in our painting style and choice of models to paint in the first place, so it'll be good to see how someone else handles the swap to smaller scale.
Delete