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