Last week, I bought a nice little parcel of bodies from a hobby friend, and included were a couple of moulds I'd been hoping to get hold of. I always have a little mental list of ideas to paint, but til now I hadn't got the breeds I wanted for the colours I had in mind.
First up, Alskær Fra Harecroft, an Icelandic in a gorgeous shade of dun inspired by this reference photo. The horse is described as a bay dun on Pinterest and other image-collecting pages, and annoyingly I can't find an original source, but I'm wondering if perhaps he isn't just an unusually light bay dun, but rather a dunskin - buckskin plus dun.
This photo was taken in the shade with the camera's cloudy day white balance setting, in reality he's somewhere between the two pictures. His name translates as 'most bright' cos he's just about as bright as a dun colour can be, and my prefix becomes a suffix in the Icelandic naming tradition.
A high angle to show his dorsal stripe, the most nerve-wracking bit of any dun paintjob!
Making use of my free bit of Icelandic scenery from the Breyer Elska box - it's such a shame they've abandoned these attractive and useful photo backdrops in the boxes' bland new redesign.
I do love this Icelandic mould, and still have plenty more colour ideas I'd really like to paint, whenever more of them come my way.
This one was the result of a bit of recent reminiscing with another Breyer collector online - she loves her Llanarth True Briton model just like I love my Danaway Tango on the same mould, and remembering his wild patchy roany sabino paintjob inspired me to finally get round to the sabino SM welshie I'd had in mind for years.
I didn't base him on Danaway Tango himself, just used made up markings over a similar bright chestnut shade. I find messy smudgey roaning on bays tends to get worryingly pinkish, so the more gingery tones in this colour prevented that from happening.
He isn't quite how I intended, the white softer than my original plan to flick it on as speckles with a toothbrush - in the end I chickened out of such a haphazard method in case I lost control and got more paint where I didn't want roaning than where I did. I've named him Harecroft Baledwr, the welsh for balladeer, as in writer and singer of folk songs.
Finally, not just another clipped bay thoroughbred, which I know I've painted several times already, but one more for my line-up of famous racehorses in miniature - Faugheen!
One of those horses who made a big initial impression and went on to live up to the hype, Faugheen always stood out as full of character and enjoyment of the game, and in return I enjoyed following his career over hurdles and then over fences.
He retired safe and sound at the beginning of the month, and the very same day I picked out one of the G2 TB models I've been saving specially for portraits. Something about it just didn't seem quite right for him, and when I was looking for reference photos to properly copy his distinctively shaped stripe, I realised what it was - he seems to have his ears pricked so often, I just had to resculpt his mini self to match!
The new ears really change the expression of the mould, while it didn't look unhappy before, just concentrating and running hard, with them pricked up it's got that look of a horse who thoroughly enjoys his job!
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