Tales from the Body Box - the London Zoo Quagga

A while ago, this colour-tinted magic lantern slide came up on ebay, in one of my 'vintage horse' searches. Although I don't collect these, and had no intention of buying it, I immediately recognised the subject - a quagga mare who lived in London Zoo, the only one of her kind ever to be photographed alive. She's the iconic example, used in all books and online information about this extinct subspecies of plains zebra. You can read plenty more about them on the unusually comprehensive Wikipedia article.

And an idea was sparked in my mind which just wouldn't go away. I should paint a custom of the quagga. Not just any quagga, but that one. With photographs of both sides and her face, I could copy her stripe pattern exactly, and make a model which was not only an example of the species, but a portrait of the famous London mare. 

As well as the black and white photos, I needed some frame of reference for the colouring, and collected up pictures of taxidermy specimens in museums. They seem a varied sort of creature, with different specimens showing different shades of beige and brown, and different patterns and extent of striping, but I picked a middling example with good photographs available from different angles - the Berlin quagga, for those who know these well! I even saved a few 19th century paintings and illustrations of the species into my reference folder, as a bit of added inspiration.

I chose the CollectA plains zebra as the body for my quagga project, it's my favourite of the mid-scale plastic moulds, with the most recent Mojo Fun release a close second, but the deciding factor was that I wanted my quagga's display side facing left, like the most well-known photo of the real one!

Here's a series of pictures showing the colour going on, layer by layer...

And then a necessary pause for breath before tackling the most difficult part!

Starting on the striping was the only nerve-wracking thing about the entire paintjob.

Something I'd never done before, I haven't even painted a normal zebra, but I really wanted to create this quagga and convinced myself I'd be able to do a decent job - it can't be any harder than intricate horse patterns like appaloosas or the more fiddly kinds of pinto, it's just familiarity and experience which makes those seem less daunting.  

Sure, quaggas are animals I've been aware of for a really long time. I've seen the photos and the paintings, read the history, looked at the modern project to create quagga-looking zebras. They're not horrifyingly unfamiliar in the same way someone saying 'Hey, paint this species you've never heard of, here's a google image!' would be.

But stripe painting is new territory, and no amount of poring over photographs of museum specimens can really teach your hand how to make that happen. Sometimes you just have to try, and hope for the best!

I started by choosing a single stripe to copy onto the model at a point mid-way down her neck, to try to avoid the stripes clustering either too high up the neck and running out by the time I reached the shoulder, or vice versa. From the first stripe, I could count out how many more she had in each direction, and painted in the mane streaks first, to make sure I spaced them out the right amount. I should have started on the non-display side, to make it less scary as any mistakes would be less noticeable, but I think I just wanted to get it over with, and the relief when it turned out looking perfectly ok was immense!

I'm so pleased with her, even though I'm used to painting horses, and know the satisfaction when a portrait model turns out looking just like whoever it's meant to be, this one feels special cos she's so different to push my painting into new territory, and a significant species for my herd - she fills a quagga shaped gap I didn't realise I needed to tick off the list!

Adding the stripes wasn't as hard as I'd anticipated, tense but not technically complex! The paint I thinned a little by licking the fine brush to a point then touching a small amount of paint dabbed into the lid of the pot - this just helps it go on in a translucent way, and avoids overly thick or accidentally clumsy strokes, leaving a result which looks less 'painty' and more natural on the finished animal. Pleeeeease don't do this unless you're SURE your paint is non toxic! 

Two or three layers of paint were enough to get the stripes as pale as I wanted them, applied in tiny brushstrokes which follow the direction of the hair growth, not the direction of the stripe. I used a little pure white just to brighten them in the most distinct places, and darkened the roots of the mane hair where dirt collects.

It's hard to interpret the fading out of the stripes onto the body of the quagga through a black and white picture. At some points our London mare seems to have darker stripes as well as paler ones, especially behind the shoulder blades, so I've added just a hint of darker paint to back up the paler stripes and blend them into the body colour as they fade out.

As with all custom painted models, there's an element of artistic interpretation, and with an extinct animal with a lot of known variation in colour and pattern, there's going to be even more variety in how we make our models. This isn't the definitive quagga, just my idea of how one individual would've looked in colour and in life.

Many modern illustrations of the quagga show them with a strikingly black and white striped head and neck, but I just don't see any evidence of that look - every single museum quagga I could find good pictures of shows cream stripes on a brown coat, so I've made the choice to stick to that colour scheme.

I even managed to find a photo showing one of the museum quagga specimens from above, to copy the join between vertical and dorsal stripes accurately.

I didn't manage to find a photograph of any tail from behind, so for this detail I relied on the artistic integrity of one of the painters who depicted the quagga in the 1880s, taking it on trust that there really was a dorsal stripe which faded out down the length of the tail!

You might've noticed I've photographed her against all-new scenery, rather than any of my backdrops seen before - I decided my usual scenery just wouldn't cut it for this special portrait model of a very specific animal we know from 19th century natural history. She lived in London Zoo, so it was only right to create her little corner of the zoo for her photoshoot!

After five hours of gluing little bits of cardboard to bigger bits of cardboard...

Her brick wall, the door painted green because in contemporary colour-tinted copies of her most famous photo, the door is shown green - either by choice to give the photo a bit more life and they happened to have some green, or because the doors of London Zoo really were painted green at that time! Either way, I had no reason to decide any other colour would look better or be more authentic, so green it is!

And the yard floor, which looks like block paving, or possibly very neat rectangular stone (used a lot in stableyard buildings of that era), but you can't tell the colour, only that it's lighter and more uniform than the bricks of the wall, so I chose grey.

The set put together, but not glued. I like to leave my pieces separate so I can combine them mix-and-match for other models in future - this yard could go with a fence backdrop instead, or I could use the wall with a road in front of it, and so on.

But for now, it's home to the London Zoo Quagga.