Tales from the Body Box - CollectA Campolina and Camargue

This weeks custom projects were a bit bigger than the recent Stablemate size - I've been brave and done some big CollectAs!

First, a Campolina body who I got some time ago, but put off painting cos I couldn't decide on a colour for him. This Brazilian breed has some lovely primitive-marked duns, and for a long time I had a sandy bay dun half in mind for him, but it just didn't seem quite right, he was telling me he wanted to be darker, much darker...

And now he is! I think this colour suits the mould really well, more so than the red dun it was originally issued in. I gave him deep brown tones rather than the more mousey grey of a typical grulla I've usually painted,.

The colour looks very different in different lighting, this angle makes his paler highlights stand out more, and the sun across his cheek shows his head off well.
It's a really noble-looking mould, with the typical curved nasal bones giving him an unmistakable profile. Early on in the breed's establishment, there was a lot of inbreeding, which would've exaggerated the head shape, but now it's not fashionable to aim for more and more curve - modern breeders are careful to avoid anything extreme, and favour a head shape which is still distinctive, but not too dramatic.

You can see his primitive markings very clearly here - the dark stripe across his shoulders, the zebra marks on his knees and hocks (called 'zippers' by the campolina breeders, a colour detail they prize), and the frosting of pale colour either side of his tail.

I made up his markings as I went along, he didn't seem to need any white on his head, but his feet looked better with a little bit of white interest, and that lets me have fun with striped hooves, too!

This angle is great, really catches his upright, alert pose.
The CollectA sculpt seems to be the only example of this breed in the entire model horse world - some people out there may've done customs from other breed moulds, but none of the other brands have released one, and there's not even a single campolina sculpt listed on Equine Resins Directory!
This means he's only the second of his breed to join my herd, and the lone OF CollectA example on my website will soon have some company on the campolina page - once I've managed to choose a name for him!

His companion is a breed from the other side of the world, one of the famous 'white horses' of the Camargue in southern France

I've loved this mould for ages; in fact, my original finish Camargue mare was my very first CollectA model ever - I won her as a prize in a Chestnut Ridge photo show!
And I've always wanted to do a repaint to really catch the detail of an interesting colour which is lost in the basic factory paintwork. 

I didn't want her to look too clean, it was important that my model could capture the hardy outdoor lifestyle of the breed, and their natural management, without the human-imposed standard of cleanliness - this is not a grey kept spotless with baths and shampoo and clipping and trimming. She's tame, but not pampered.
Perhaps my bias here comes from the fact my first horse was a fleabitten grey (arab x welsh C, rather than camargue, but still, fierce independent-minded mucky speckled beast which was never washed to white!)

The brands on camargue horses have certain meanings : the letter stands for the year, the number indicates the order they were born in the herd (first foal of the year gets 1, second has 2, and so on), and the larger stylised logo or initials are the breeder's unique identifying mark. I designed one which reads H F for Harecroft Farm.

I based her on the example in Dorling Kinderley's 'Ultimate horse book' - my grandad gave me my copy in the early 1990s and the photos are so familiar and iconic to me, they're often the first I think of as my mental image for any set breed. Here is the Camargue page from one of their more recent books, with the same main photo. 

To help fully capture the camargue personality, I made her a traditional simple halter, as all the books seem to like noting that they're made of twisted horse hair rope. You can see in this close-up the mixture of colours - one strand of blonde hair, three of mixed light and very dark brown, so I copied that with embroidery thread.

I haven't managed to name her yet, either (I only finished her yesterday!), but she's already one of my favourites.