Tales from the Body Box - The Rockies

Just two completed horses from the body box this time (I'm trying to take them slowly, as the box is not infinite and I don't want to run out of the inspiring moulds and be left with only those I have no more ideas for!)

First up, a portrait who's been a rather long time coming - it's somehow got to twenty years since I met and worked with the real horse - but in my defence, I do already have Julip and Feltie versions of him, it's just the Stablemate which it's taken me forever to get round to painting.

Rocky was a rescued horse, saved from neglect and abusive handling but still feral and untouchable when I first met him, living in the field behind the place I was doing my college work experience as a teenager. Very afraid, and violently defensive, he just needed understanding and patience - it didn't take long to gain his trust and discover the genuine, friendly, loyal horse he was inside.
Once we'd made friends, and done a lot of careful educational handling to get him friendly and socialised, I started him from scratch, climbing on the fence to sit bareback in the field at first, then we started to go for little hacks down the lanes. All that summer and into the autumn I kept going back, to bring him on; we did some schooling, and a lot of wandering the countryside encountering new things, exploring, learning, relaxing, and we had a couple of brilliant gallops. His adopted family learnt to love him too, and a few years later he found a good home for life, with his owner's best friend.

There'd never been a Stablemate mould which really felt right for Rocky. I've done coloured cobs on the Friesian mould before, but that's too flashy and high-stepping for his placid, kind nature. And I've used the G2 Clydesdale, but that build is too chunky, and the pose isn't fitting, either.
Then the Cob mould was released, and at the time, I wasn't the biggest fan : it seemed too slim, too young - all legs and underdeveloped topline, a friendly cute face but not a typical adult cob. 

Just recently, I realised who it reminded me of. Rocky! Suddenly all the faults didn't matter, cos they made it look even more like him than any other mould ever had. So I got out the old photo prints, and the last cob from my body box, and got to work...

Meet Harecroft Rocky Blue-eyes. He had to have a 'surname' to tell him apart from the other Rockies in my herd, but this was one of the nicknames I used to call the real one, so it's got a nice fond-memories nostalgia to it!

I really like how he turned out, I did his patches colour-over-white this time as there's so much more of the white to paint in, it's easier to get flat and smooth when not having to fiddle round the edges of markings which need to stay the right shape (it matters less on made-up paintjobs than on portraits!)

He's got really unusual patches along his spine, a series of spots which I remember seeing when I used to step over his back from the fence. It's unusual for tobianos to carry colour patches along an otherwise white topline, and I've never seen another marked quite like Rocky's string of round-ish blobs!

The second 'rocky' custom is a spur-of-the-moment idea, inspired when I happened to see a photograph of a Rocky Mountain Horse. Oh, how I'd like to have a go at that chocolate colour with the graduated blonde mane! So it was back to the body box, to see if I had any moulds which would do - the closest was the G2 Morgan, while not a perfect example of breed type, was close enough to satisfy me wanting to paint one!

And I do love the way his colour worked! I always aim to vary my brown-based paintjobs - the brand I use only has three shades of brown paint to buy (one chocolatey, one reddish, one rusty orange), so it would be all too easy to paint the same three coat colours over and over again. I have to make a conscious effort to blend them in a new way each time, and be aware of adjusting shading to capture coat colours differently, so my chestnuts don't just look like bays with the points left off, and my silvers aren't just pale browns, and so on.

 

He was enjoyable to paint, his colour turned out almost exactly as I imagined, even the dapples which usually cause me difficulties went on smoothly, and blended into his colour just how I hoped. But I do have one regret - in the left-hand shot here you can see his profile is almost straight, but in the others it looks dished - I gave him a crooked stripe, and the curve to the right makes it look like a straight stripe following an inward contour. If I'd curved it to the left instead, it wouldn't have given that optical illusion of wrong-for-his-breed conformation!

But he's very pretty anyway, and I'm always far too nervous to change a completed custom incase I spoil what was a perfectly decent paintjob with a clumsily-matched or rough bit of extra paint to correct something which looked ok as it was. So he gets to keep his crooked stripe!