Tales from the Body Box - Wait, what, HOW many?

I'm aware I've perhaps been doing too much painting. Eighteen models in the first two months of 2021!

There's such a fine line between making the most of a creative high, and burning through the body box at an unsustainable speed, building up to an abrupt end of this phase for another however many years.

And it's cyclical - you know the burn-out is coming. Sure, at the moment I can pick up a horse and feel enthusiastic about a breed, a colour, I can sit and smudge away with my brushes and tiny paint pots and an hour or so later, have a little full colour horse just how I wanted him. But eventually, I won't be able to do that any more. There's been gaps of five years before I felt like picking up a brush again.

So all the ideas I've got, all the bodies I'm currently excited about getting painted?
Half of me says 'slow down, make them last, take your time', while the other half is screaming 'hurry, hurry, paint them now while you can!'

There's a frantic fragility to it which will resonate with a lot of artists, painters, writers : creating is both a compulsion which takes over, and a spark which can go out in an instant. I do as much as I can while I still can.

Here's a round-up of february's models (let's pretend I got this post up in the same month rather than leaving it into march!)

This is Harecroft Napoleon, who came about because I realised I'd somehow never done the G2 warmblood mould in my favourite/signature colour, bay skewbald. I don't know how this oversight could've happened, considering I've painted just about everything else in bay tobiano at least once!

He's also the recipient of a new tail, the original swishing sculpted one being very short and flimsy-looking as well as out of sight on the non-display side of the mould.

I had the dubious benefit of a brand new pack of Milliput recently, and while it's much, much easier to mix, it's also disturbingly soft compared to my old pack (I'd been buying it from a tiny old fashioned shop in town where they sold maybe one packet every three or four years, the stock was so dusty, fly-spotted, and aged to the point of being very firm when I got it!). The sculpted tail was so bendy I had to support it with a quickly formed tinfoil tail-rest so it didn't just flop down to his hocks like a greenish dead slug. Nice mental image.

Another Milliput victim, this G3 belgian gained a full tail (actually, this was my first attempt at the WB's tail, but I didn't like it for him, snapped it off, and gave it to someone else!) and a loose mane. I was trying to think of which draft breeds would suit both the mould and the full tailed look, and came up with the American Cream Draft. 

They're not actually a genetically cream colour, but rather gold champagne (chestnut plus a champagne gene), so she's got a mottled pink muzzle, and eyes more olive-greenish than blue. I brushed on a tiny tiny amount of gold paint over the top of her coat colour, to give a faint sheen, not all champagne horses have a metallic shine on their coat, but enough do that it was worth adding the little extra detail. I've named her Mississippi Queen, as the origins of the breed are in midwestern states run through by that famous river.

When I painted my other two mustangs, I mentioned roan as a possibility for the third one in my body box, and this is exactly what happened. I've named all three after mountains in Wyoming, so this is Eagle Rock, the spotted one's Dunraven Hill, and the pinto got Wolf Mountain (some peaks on the list were just wildly inappropriate for a horse name... Katie's Nipple or Gobbler's Knob, anyone?!)

I went for bay roan as I find they turn out better than black (blue) roan. The biggest trick is making sure adding white to a reddish colour doesn't result in a pink horse! The best way I've found is never to let the bay and the white meet as wet paint. I start off with a base coat of warm light brown, then richer colour to the head & legs, followed by the white over the top on the palest parts, with some brushstroke hairiness and healed-scar corn spots for this one, to emphasise he's a hardy wild horse, not anyone's pampered pet. 

A little while ago, a hobby friend of mine included some horsey postcards in a parcel, and one of them featured John Whitaker on the gorgeous grey Everest Milton, one of the celebrities of the equine world in the late 1980's and into the early 90's. The first showjumping horse to reach over a million pounds in prize money, he obviously had talent but also a huge personality, and was a great favourite for horse fans at the time, with magazine articles, books and videos, posters adorning hundreds of bedroom walls, and Milton himself making guest appearances at big horse shows and events after his retirement. I was lucky enough to meet him in person at one of these, and after telling the sender of my postcard about the experience, decided I should really paint a custom of him!

I only had one jumping horse in my body box, so I'd been saving it for something special, and although grey isn't my favourite colour to paint, Milton was certainly worth using up the mould on!

As well as slightly resculpting the face to make a better likeness, I tried to give his colour plenty of interest with grey skin, creases and hair patterns, an off-white mane and tail (because although he was always turned out immaculately, this was before the days of artificially glowing-white horse shampoo!), topped off with fleabites copied directly from the real one so the biggest specks are in just the right places.

I tried some pictures with a bit of a jump in, but still don't like this pair any better than the first shots. It's the old problem : jumping model needs a jump, but wouldn't be jumping without tack, so looks wrong anyway. The only way round this would be to make a mini indoor school set-up with a single jump, and have just a bridle, cavesson or headcollar on the horse and say he's loose-schooling. And I can't make tack that tiny without gluing it to the horse, and don't want to risk ruining customs, so it never happens, and I'm left with photos I don't like even when I'm perfectly happy with the model itself!

Looking through my horse breed books to see if there were any major, well-known breeds I'd somehow never painted, I happened to notice the hackney was a glaring gap in my herd, with neither OF nor CM models in my collection. The build and pose in the books' photos seemed closest to the G2 saddlebred mould (not surprising, as hackneys played part of the founding of the breed), tweaked with a new mane and reshaped face. I've named her Harecroft High And Mighty. Her paintwork looks a lot darker in person than in these photos, I tried so many times to get a more true to life shot but my camera insisted on making her brighter.

Another angle, showing the little row of plaits. One of them broke off and bounced away while I was painting, never to be found again, but luckily it was the braid nearest her withers, rather than leaving a gap further up, so you can't really tell there's one missing! I'm kind of regretting not resculpting the tail a bit too, cos her original one just shouts that she's the ASB mould, but UK hackneys are shown with full tails, never docked or bobbed like in the US, held high and gently tapering out, so this existing tail is pretty much exactly right, even if my mind won't stop reading it as saddlebred!