Breyer 70th Anniversary Andalusian

 A much-awaited brand new model arrived here with me yesterday...

Yes, at long long last, Breyer's 70th Anniversary Traditionals have reached UK stockists!

This may seem crazy if you're a US collector and have had this set around since the spring, but over here we're often subjected to long waits for some regular run items. The current estimation for one of the 2020 'mid year' models is spring next year!

But this is the first time I've ever ordered one in January and had it arrive in October. Actually, I'm just relieved he's here at all. On top of unavoidable production delays from covid and the international distribution being a bit rubbish, the company I pre-ordered him with never even acknowledged or confirmed my order in the first place, then in ten months I never had a single email update on delays to likely delivery dates (meanwhile the website said 'due March' and this was never changed), and they ignored not one, not two, but three increasingly worried emails through the autumn, as I tried to contact them and got no response whatsoever. So I wasn't sure I'd ever be getting this model, and he definitely takes the record for longest I've had to wait!

Way back when the Anniversary collection of five Traditionals was first announced, this was the one who stood out, for me, and the only one which I knew I was going to want to buy. 

I realise collectors have been raving over the Saddlebred most of all, they sell out in minutes, but I reckon I'm the odd one out there : he hasn't even made it to my wishlist yet! At first it was the oddly twirly sculpting of the tail which put me off, but when we saw 'real' photos which clearly showed his paint finish, I didn't like the highly metallic body and pearly mane & tail. I think a little metallic sheen can be a good thing, golden colours can reflect the light that way in real life, but too much and it's more like a decorator finish than a realistic coat. Some saddlebreds seem worse than others, I've seen a few which are perfectly done with just a hint of gold, so there's a lingering 'maybe' if I ever get chance to hand-pick one, or buy second hand with clear photos, so I could be sure of getting one which was less shiny. But now, back to the Andalusian!

He's just as nice in person as I'd hoped. The amount of black shading on them does seem to vary a little bit from the promo photo; some have starker contrast with a lighter near-white base coat, or entirely dark hindquarters and a more solid streak down the shoulder, mine's faded out more gradually into a dove grey body colour. That combined with well-rounded, distinctly non-fishscaley dapples makes him look quite soft and subtle. There's been none I've seen that looked absolutely terrible, though, some previous Trad runs have had 'good ones' and 'bad ones' but the painters have done a great job with copying this design - they do vary but even the ones which stray most from the prototype paintjob still look nice, if you get what I mean!

Here he is in different light, it's extremely tricky to find any big-enough patch of sunshine in my garden for many minutes each day between October til March, so these photos aren't the best - I had to make his shadow fall either left or right, to avoid hitting the backdrop behind. You can click any picture I post here on the blog to see it full size.

I think the photos with his shadow in front of him look the nicest, but these with it away behind him probably show him a bit more clearly, so it'll be difficult deciding which to use in photo shows!

The other side, it's one of those moulds which looks handsome either way round, and they'd display equally well on the shelf cantering left or right, I just love the big wild-flying mane so I tend to favour the near side. As the back of the box details, in explaining why they chose this mould to represent the 1990s-2000s, there's a lot more detail and complexity in the moulding, with cut-outs in the mane and tail. I've liked this dramatic and handsome mould ever since it first appeared, in 2004 as the unnamed black first edition (incidentally, still one of the best black OFs ever made, with shading and dapples worked in to his colour rather than just spraying it all over with a semi-gloss pure black paint and calling that good enough!)

You can just about see if you look closely at these two photos, that he's missing the tips of his ears, more drastically on the near side but the off is curiously blunted, too - it looks like over-zealous buffing of the mould to remove seam lines and going too far, not broken ear tips which escaped notice and got painted over. Luckily you can't really tell in the side-on photos, nor at a distance, so he looks just fine for display or photo showing - you probably hadn't noticed til I hadn't pointed it out, either!

I've tentatively gone with calling him Aniversario, as he's likely the only one of the 70th Anniversary Trads I'll end up with it, and in Spanish it doesn't sound too unappealing as a horse name - it's just rather unoriginal and if I think of anything better later, I'll change it!

Tales from the Body Box - four skewbalds and a grey

Today's batch contains a bit of a catch-up from all October so far, as the weather's not been co-operative in getting the pictures taken.

First up, a chestnut overo on my favourite of all the Stablemate foal moulds. Not only is it a fun playful pose, with a sweet face, but it's the most steady on those little feet, less likely to topple over and damage paintwork or set off a domino trail along the shelf!

I've named her Harecroft Red Horizon, here's a couple more shots of this very photogenic little one!

Next to be completed, the final G2 paso fino in my body box - this mould I never really clicked with, knowing very little about the breed (not to be confused with the peruvian paso), til I read up more about their history and watched some Youtube videos of their unusual running-walk gait. Do look them up if you've only ever seen still photos, it's quite something to see in action!
Despite not being one of my favourite moulds, in certain colours I do really like it, and luckily I struck on a colour I'm very happy with, here. She looks a very soft and gentle mare, so I've named her Pachamama, after the mother earth goddess of the Inca.

Something much much more familiar, next, my own local 'native breed' in the form of a coloured traditional cob. Ever since I got this body (as a free gift with an order from the much-missed Utterly Horses online model shop), I've had a skewbald cob in mind, and at long last I fished him from the body box and got painting! He turned out pretty much exactly as I'd planned, with a typical tobiano pattern and fluffily feathered edges to contrast with the sharper style I usually use.

I didn't have to wait long to think of a fitting name for him, while I was still finishing off his paintwork I happened to hear mention of the pirate Calico Jack on tv, and it seemed perfect - a calico cat is one with a tri-coloured patchy coat, and another of my recent cob customs was named Pirate, so this suits him very nicely indeed.

Here's another colour idea which has been hovering in the back of my mind for years rather than days before actually happening on a model! She's inspired by a couple of grey skewbalds I've seen out on the cross country course, horses which would have started out dark with white markings, but the greying process has taken away their colour little by little, til they're left as a pale or fleabitten grey with markings almost lost as white on white at first glance. When they're clipped, the grey stands out a little more, as the contrast of black skin or pink can be seen clearly - especially after they've been through the water jump! I've named this one Bluebird, and with those chunky legs and dinnerplate feet, I imagine her as a partbred heavy horse with the feather clipped off!

And here's the last of this batch, Valparaiso, one more mini Alborozo for my herd. He was from the unicorn suncatchers paint set, but once the horn's carved away and the clear plastic is painted over, you'd never know - it's quite a handy and good-value way to get hold of four nice newish moulds to customise!

I'd been trying to pin down colours for my last two Alborozos for a while - being a harder-to-get mould, it does take careful consideration to make the most of the bodies which come my way. Having done a bay, a dark rose grey, and a mulberry grey, a pure pale white-grey seemed tempting next, or perhaps fleabites or some faint dappling for a little more interest than a plain one? Then I turned the page of my calendar to see a fleabitten, faintly dappley grey with a blonde-and-grey mixed mane, and ah, there was my colour.

It was only after finishing him that I realised how much he reminded me of this grey version of Napoleon Crossing the Alps - mine has shorter socks but the likeness is there, especially in this sidelong lighting!

Fifteen years apart

When I was re-arranging my Stablemate customs along their shelves to try to squeeze in a few more of the newer ones, I noticed I'd painted two which are more or less the same colour, and on the same mould. The first was one of my very earliest customs ever, and the second from last year - I had a little count up and reckon they were painted fifteen years apart! 
So I thought it'd make a nice blog post, to see how my painting has progressed, so here's the little pair of pinto mares together :

While the first paintjob isn't terrible, and I'm not planning to tuck her away in a back row out of sight, or sand her down and start again, I'm definitely pleased to see how much better the second one looks - a sign I have got better over the years, rather than just painting more of the same without progressing at all!

I really would credit most of my improvement over the years to finding the right paints and brushes.

The horse on the left was painted with normal artist acrylics from an art & craft shop. The one on the right was Citadel colour from Games Workshop, where you get about a quarter of the quantity for twice the price, but the texture means they blend and layer smoothly, and the finish has that soft sheen of a healthy horse coat. The art acrylics are far too matte, looking dry and dusty, and the thickness needed to cover (especially with the white) means there's lumps and brush marks, and no room for finesse in shading or blending. 

Expensive paint doesn't make good painters. But paint you get along with makes painting to the best of your ability a whole lot easier, while the wrong paint makes it impossible to do good things. Find the paint that suits the way you want to paint, and you're halfway there.

Compare these two tobiano mares again, and you can also see how I've got far more confident with intricate markings, with more complex shapes, feathery edges and detailing, and shading within the patches. This is a combination of co-operative paint, and helpful brushes - much like I stick to the same paint brand I know and love, I also buy the same kind of brushes over and over again. 

Despite having tried (and struggled with) the various, often pricey, specialist brands aimed at the model painting market, I eventually found the best kind for how I paint are the packs of brushes sold for nail art. Yes, they're designed for applying nail varnish, but the springy, silky synthetic hair texture and compact, tight construction is perfect.  I get them from ebay, in two batches - in the chunky brush packs you get a range of bigger brushes for thin smooth layers of paint and smudgey shading, while the thin-handled sets contain a mixture of smaller ones for detailing and markings, and the finest sharpest points for detailing eyes, edges of pinto patches, and hair-by-hair roaning. And they only add up to about £4 in total for six fat brushes plus eight or ten small ones, when you could easily pay more than that for one brush from the model shop.

I really don't know exactly how many customs I've painted in the fifteen years between these two, but it's been interesting looking back on one of the very first, and figuring out what's helped most in making my paintwork get better over the years. 

Tales from the Body Box - Shantih

I think reading horsey fiction is pretty universal for anyone who grows up loving horses. Whether you've got your own, ride at a riding school, or just adore horses without ever getting much contact with the real thing, pony stories have always been a part of that obsessive phase which so many of us have as children or young teens, and not all of us grow out of. 

There's horsey books to suit just about every kind of horsey child, and my favourites were the Jinny at Finmory series by Patricia Leitch - they didn't have the tweedy, jolly poshness of the typical pony story, the 'horsey set' I'd never come into any contact with, and couldn't identify with. Jinny's world was easier to relate to - things went wrong, real life got in the way, and ponies weren't perfect : they were difficult things, stubborn and dirty and sometimes badly behaved, and you couldn't just snap your fingers and have all the tack and equipment you wanted, it was realistic mucky down-to-earth horse-owning on a budget. And central to every story in the series was the bond between Jinny and her horse, Shantih - a strained, stressful thing of love and worry, joy and panic, which everyone who's ever owned a much-loved but difficult horse must've been through, too.

Recently I've been having a chat about the books with a couple of model horse friends who'd loved them as well, fished my copies out, and ended up re-reading them - I think some others in the series must've been library borrowings, because I've definitely read more than I've got here.
And, of course, I loved them all over again : the beautiful, lyrical quality of the writing makes them an absolute pleasure to read, the horse characters as strongly drawn as the humans, and the setting so atmospherically brought to life you can almost feel the wind from the moors. The nostalgia is strong, too, written in the 1970s they're utterly evocative of an era which isn't quite 'historical' yet, but has definitely gone from most places any modern teen would ride.

One thing which came up, as to be expected in any discussion between model horsey people, was the markings on the horses posing as Shantih for the cover photos (you can see a good informative post about them here). In the text, Shantih is described as having a white face and four socks, making the first model the most accurate, but the second one caught my eye more, the stallion Prince of Orange - not only does he have a nice quirky face marking, but he's got a chestnut patch inside his white sock, which is pretty rare to see.

By the time I'd finished the first two or three books, the idea of painting a mini Shantih had settled in my mind, and this weekend I dug through my body box to find an SM-scale arabian I knew was in there. A while ago, I'd filed down the ears to a better length, carved the legs thinner and hooves smaller, refined the throat and jawline, and filed a bit off each overly chunky shoulder, but never picked a colour and so it went unpainted. Now, I had an idea, some reference photos on the book covers, and plenty of orange paint (I've run out of a couple of colours, but not my 'chestnut' pot), so it was time to get to work...and here she is!

I'm very pleased with her, after knowing this fictional horse for about 25 years it's kind of satisfying having a little version, but I'm already thinking she needs a little black highland Bramble to keep her company! I don't tend to paint all that many chestnuts, finding it can be a bit of a plain colour unless they have a lot of shading and contrast, but the markings on this one make her that little bit more interesting to look at, even if you don't know the character.

I did google 'Breyer Shantih', 'model horse Shantih' and 'Shantih custom', just to make sure I wasn't making a direct copy of anyone else's model version, but oddly couldn't find any others - there were models named Shantih, but none of them chestnut arabian customs which could've been done as portraits. You'd think such a popular fictional horse would've been painted many times over, but if so, they're hiding from google!

A couple more angles to show the markings, and I even found a bit of suitable background scenery (though admittedly it came out of a connemara's box, not a highland, so it's the wrong nationality of stone wall and moorland!)

So there we have it, my own little Shantih, in painted plastic form. I wonder if any other fans of books might happen to find this post. Did you ever read them? Or did you have different favourites? Do let me know in the comments!