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!
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