Tales from the Body Box - April additions to the home-painted herd

Time for another recap on a few weeks' worth of Stablemates!

There were four Fell Ponies in my recent whole box, and while their most famous colour is undoubtedly black, which I already painted, they also come in the much more scarce grey, and the very very rare chestnut, which has only recently been allowed in the stud book. (It used to be regarded as rather a disappointment or embarrassment when two black Fells produced a chestnut foal - assumed to be a throwback to some accidental cross-breeding, or dodgy cover-up of a mare's true pedigree, and the chestnuts weren't allowed to be registered, shown, or bred from as pure Fell Ponies!)

But greys have always been acceptable, though not anywhere near as common they're not looked down on in the showing or breeding circles, and I think they're very handsome, here's a real one. So because I already did myself a black Fell, and have one of the chestnut in factory-finish paintwork, that left grey as the last colour to complete the set.

A while ago I did an experimental pencil-scribble dappled grey, and thought it was about time I used the same technique again. But rather than scribble dapples of equal darkness all over the white base coat, I decided to go for this faded-out look of a slightly older horse, where the dark colour is mostly left on the hindquarters and legs, while the front half has almost reached the white-grey stage.

It was quite tricky getting the pencil to go fainter, it seems to catch heavily on the paint surface rather than being able to control the shade of grey precisely like you would on paper, but I used a little bit of white and black paint over the top of the scribbles to help blend them without covering too thickly.

I've named him Harecroft Hailstorm, as we had such a lot of hail it was layering thick like snow on every flat surface and gathering in every hollow, just a couple of days after I painted him and was still trying to think of a name.

I like how he turned out, better than my first try with the pencil (I've got better at applying the marks like little individual lines rather than letting them loop too much), and I think the colour's really pretty and suits the mould well. He's kind of a half-way point between pencil and painting, and that's more effective than pencil alone.

The one down side with the pencil graphite is that it gets a kind of shiny, silvered effect where you lay lots of scribble down in layers, but I found that gently tapping it with my fingertip took the metallic bloom off without smudging or fingerprinting the colour.

With the pencil dappling going so well once, I thought I'd get on with another custom idea I've had for a while, a really pale dappled grey draft horse, the French Boulonnais.

I've wanted to paint one of these for ages, they're always in the horse books with their pretty grey colour pointed out as a feature of the breed (their nickname being 'the white marble horse'), but hadn't had the right type of heavy-set draft mould in my body box til now.

Some before-and-after shots of the mould as it's sold, and my adjusted version with a loose mane and tail made from Milliput.

I just don't like it as the Clydesdale it's supposed to be, the build and conformation is all wrong (true typey Scottish Clydes are rather lanky, deliberately cow-hocked and close behind, and just generally look narrow and upright even when working-fit and strong; this chunk is wide, massively rounded, with a barrel chest and enormous bum, the back feet are far far apart, like the typical Continental-European draft breeds it's more muscle than legs!)

I've given him the name Harecroft Grandeur, though in French naming grammar it'd probably be Grandeur de Harecroft, and the name 'Harecroft' doesn't sound French in the slightest, so I'll just leave it the English way round!

Much like the Fell, I did his base coat of off white first, then the pencilling, with a little bit of black paint on the face and lower legs just to apply some more solid shading.

Next came a custom inspired by a small adventure!

On my way home from a day with my real horses, a very fast loose shetland pony shot across the main road in front of me and darted into a farmer's crop field, pursued by a panicking owner, and two random chaps from the house next door who'd seen him get away and were dashing after him too.

Of course, the pony was having a GREAT time, bombing about this huge field at speed in all directions, and cos there was nothing to stop him leaping out back onto the road in front of oncoming cars, I took on the double role of 'the one who stands in front of traffic' and 'the one who flails wildly at the pony to turn it away from the road every time it comes this way'.

While the people in the field tried to corner the shetland, which kept on evading them, a horsey family from a neighbouring house came out with a bucket of horse feed, some carrots, and a long rope, and joined in the catching game, while I carried on directing traffic, letting them go every time the pony was a safe distance away, and stopping them to a standstill or crawl whenever he was heading back toward the road and could've caused an accident.

The food trap didn't work, and the pony was so skittish and hyped up not even the owner could get near him by gentle sneaking or bribery, let alone the strangers he didn't trust, so in the end they changed tactics and worked as a pack to surround and slowly herd him the way they wanted him to go. There were a few false starts where he realised what was going on and shot between them at top speed bucking, but eventually they'd got him heading toward the corner of the field nearest his home.

I stopped the traffic both ways and stood there as a road block while the people in the field chased him briskly and determinedly across the road, across the bridge he'd escaped over, and back toward his yard. Then it was time for us all to hurry after him, one opened the yard gate while the rest of us blocked every escape route and shooed him in the right direction, and in he went - looking like he'd thoroughly enjoyed his adventure and gone home exactly when he'd had enough of exploring!

I've been passing this pony and his donkey friend in their field for years now - I live in one village, my ponies live in another, and I work in a third village just down the road from there, and they're on my bike route between all three places. 

And I've always thought he was a really nice colour, which would be fun to paint one day. I'd kind of thought I'd just pinch the colour idea and put it on a totally different breed, like an American paint horse or a cob, but after being one small part of his rescue operation, I changed plan and put his colour on a shetland pony after all - so although it's not a true portrait as the placement of his patches is all made up, it's a custom inspired by the real pony.

He's just the G2 Shetland pony mould, unaltered - the real one was shorter-legged, more chunky, and of course still in winter fluff mode at this time of year so his patches blended into his white parts much more, but painting that fuzzy blurry look on smooth plastic wouldn't have looked right, this flat smooth sculpt is obviously intended to show the sleek summer coat (which Shetlands shed soooo slowly they have full shiny coats for about two weeks a year before the winter fuzz starts growing back, hah)

The other side, as I said I've just guessed at a random tobiano pinto pattern for him, cos at the time I was concentrating way more on stopping him from getting hit by cars than on where his markings were.

I think his name was either Thistles or Bristles or Brizzles, it was honestly too hard to hear what they were calling from halfway across a field on a windy day, so I'm calling my little one Thistles cos I think that's the nicest of all those possible overheard names!

Here we have a LOT of spots! I tend to paint very roany blanket appaloosa patterns, so I decided it was time to do another full-on leopard spotted version for a change. He's a bay base, so the spots on his body are brown but the ones on his legs are black.

The spots didn't take too long to put on, each one was painted thickly enough that it took just one coat for full coverage, then a light diluted layer over the top for the halo effect. Normally I don't like applying paint thickly at all, but on an appaloosa it doesn't matter that the spots aren't perfectly smooth - in real life the spots can be felt when you run your hand across the coat, cos they stand up a bit thicker and more solid than the white parts!

The mould was sculpted as a Quarter horse, so it's a bit more chunky in the bum and full-tailed than a foundation type Appaloosa horse, but the majority of show ring Appaloosas are so stock-type these days, and allowed to register as purebred with a lot of QH blood in them. So it's fine for models to echo those real life trends, and I can easily get away with allocating Appaloosa for a sculpt which doesn't look like the old-fashioned true typey examples.

Over the years I've done quite a few racehorse portraits, even since beginning this blog I've introduced four or five new racing stars in miniature, but almost all of them have been jumps horses.

The reason so often given for why UK and Irish fans enjoy jumps racing more is the horses we get to know and love - coming back year after year, for a career of six, seven, eight seasons, in contrast to the flat racing stars, which might only race for one summer, possibly two, before being whisked off to stud.

Where a great chaser or hurders' expertise is in it's experience, and a lasting reputation comes with accumulating a lot of wins over multiple seasons, flat racers aren't usually asked to come back into training again and again. Their prime comes early, and often their careers are so very short, which makes it frankly quite hard to get attached to all these beautiful horses which show up with awesome speed and strength for a few days spread over their immature years, then are never seen again.

So I think it's no co-incidence that the first flat racer I painted was Enable, a hugely talented mare and sympathetically trained for a long career, who raced on successfully for many seasons before finally retiring to her new life as a mum to the next generation.

Now, the same trainer has an eight-year-old stallion, Stradivarius, who's also still racing and winning, long after the average flat horse has disappeared from the public eye. Whether the longevity is all in the kinder training, or the combined attitude of connections to manage the horses with a longer career in mind, I don't know - but it's been lovely to see him continue into adulthood as a magnificent horse at the top of his game.

Here's a photo of the real Stradivarius which shows his bright colour nicely, but what really made me decide I had to paint his portrait was this shot, taken after one of his big wins. His pose is so much like one of Breyer's recent Stablemate sculpts!

And here's the mini version - see what I mean about the pose! It's a very narrow and wiry-muscular mould, which has the look of an old-fashioned hunter or a very fit lean racehorse, I'm really glad Breyer have given us this option as their Thoroughbreds are often fairly stocky and rounded and small-looking somehow.

Stradivarius also has the advantage of being a really eye-catching colour, with his bright shade of chestnut emphasised by so much white, it was fun copying his markings for all four legs and the narrow stripe on his face.

For once I didn't have to resculpt the mane for this portrait, thankfully Stradivarius always races with it loose and unplaited, just trimmed for tidiness, and that's the same way the mould was styled, too. He makes a really nice addition to my racehorse collection.

The final one for this month's batch isn't a portrait as such, but from a reference photo of this anonymous horse which always comes up in my Google image searches for appaloosa pattern ideas and information - she too reminds me of a Stablemates mould, and after I'd seen her so many times, I just couldn't get the idea of that colour and pattern on that mould out of my mind!

So here she is! I made her a mirror image of the real one, since my model photographs better from this side, but other than that I tried to get the colour, shading, roaning, and spotting to be as close as I could to the real horse which inspired her.

As there's no name or details attached to the original photos I picked one at random, Chickadee, as it's such an adorable name for a bird, and from the same country as my little horse would be. She looks very kind and gentle and steady-tempered, the sort of horse which would be very easy to look after and a good influence on the rest of the herd!

I've found several references to appaloosa spotting patterns occurring in the Choctaw Pony breed, which is what I've used for my others on this mould so far, even though there's no modern photo examples, only older black and white ones, so it's possible those genes have died out. It might be better to file her as a foundation-type Appaloosa for her colouring, but as the vast majority of my Appaloosa models - actually Appaloosa models in general - are now spotted paintjobs on modern stock-type horses, she wouldn't really fit in there either, so I'm more inclined to keep her as part of my small herd of true Native American heritage.

Her other side, which isn't quite as nice - I did this side first to figure out the strange new smeary-blotchy-roaned paint techniques by trial and error before going over to her more important display side!

That's it for this month, but I'm really happy with them all. Which do you like best? 

A Classic and some Stablemates

A few new original finish additions this week, I have a little parcel of Breyers to introduce. Taking advantage of a 20% off offer from Chestnut Ridge, one of my favourite online sellers, I decided to go for a model I'd been dithering over for a while, some opened blind bag models, and finally (but not pictured here) a few unicorns to de-horn and paint up, because the moulds aren't available as normal horses yet.

Here's the first one, a Morgan in a simple but very effective bright bay colour.

I don't buy many at Classic scale (1:12), because I don't like all the moulds, and they do a lot of overly pearly or generally poorly designed colours in this range - and more often than not it happens that the good colours are on the moulds I'm not a fan of, and the bad colours spoil the sculpts I'd have happily owned otherwise! So when a mould I was keen to buy came out in a colour I liked, he went on my 'maybe' list...and then the special offer price made up my mind!

I like his flicked-back ear like he's paying attention toward the 'photographer' in pictures, it's a nice touch which gives him a little more life and realism.

He seems a pretty good rendition of his breed, with the typical compact, rounded body, deep neck, and handsome-looking head. Bay is also a very common colour for Morgans, and it's nice that they gave him nice bright highlights rather than flat plain brown, or the metallic reddish bay they use so often.

The rest of the parcel were Stablemates, here's the ones I'm keeping as they are - all three from the 2022 Mystery Horse blind bags, though I bought them already opened so I knew which horse I was getting. I'd have bought one of each to complete the set, but the others had sold out before I made my choices, so I just picked the best-painted example of each remaining horse.

This one's the Peruvian Paso mould, but I admit I'm not quite sure if they intend it to be chestnut or red dun! I assumed chestnut, in all the pictures it looks chestnut (the legs are no darker than the body, with is a bit too orange for a dun), but in person I discovered there's a dorsal stripe painted along the back in a darker shade of paint, so it's quite possible they mean it as a chestnut-based dun

A mould which looks good from either side, but I think I prefer the first picture with the gently windblown mane. I've given him the name El Ambajador.

The Loping Quarter Horse mould in chestnut, again a really typical colour for the breed and nicely done, with nice pale shading on the flanks, and just a hint of gold in the paint mix - this is when the metallic effect can work well, it's subtle enough to enhance the paintwork rather than making it look silly and plasticky, and on a horse breed which can have that subtle sheen on the coat in real life.

I've named her Rock And Roll, to match with my other solid chestnut QH mare, Cinnamon Roll. I do like picking themed or word-linking names for the breeds which do that in real life, it's kind of cheesy but quite fun!

The reiner in frame overo pinto, a neat combination really, as in this mould I've already got a solid coloured grulla and a frame overo chestnut, so if you take the base colour of one with the markings of the other, it's this result.

I wasn't too keen on this mould when it was first released, but I think that was just due to a lacklustre paintjob on the first one, as in good eyecatching colours like this it's just fine!

Hopefully at some point I'll be able to get hold of the other three blind bags from this series - there's a spotted dressage horse, the Valegro warmblood (which looks almost the same as the original Valegro portrait release, but perhaps in person they're a different shade of dark bay), and a gorgeous Icelandic which I really, really want!
If nobody else lists opened bags so I can choose my missing horses, I might just start buying a few unopened bags from wherever they're cheapest, as I wouldn't mind duplicates too much - more moulds for repainting is always a good thing!

Tales from the Body Box - Another Stablemate roundup

Since my last Tales from the Body Box update in early February, I have quite a few more customs to share!

I recently added a few of the mini 1970 'Indian Pony' mould to my body box, which I was quite pleased about as I'd never painted one of those before. So I picked the first one out, and gave her a new colour...

Meet Shikoba, the Choctaw Pony mare. I wanted to do a pinto all along, but wasn't sure what colour I'd use as the base; I dithered between sandy chestnut, red dun, or this warmer bay dun, in the end I decided this would be most different from her original finish chestnut pinto paintwork colour, so that's what she got.

Her name means 'feather', because my existing original-finish pony in this mould I named Hushi ('bird') and I enjoy linking my same-breed models with a theme, like they're part of a family line. I chose the Choctaw pony breed for my first one, and they come in a wide range of colours so this and any future customs will all be allocated the same breed for my site.

It's important to mention again that calling Native American horse & pony breeds what their indigenous owners and breeders call them is the only respectful way to refer to them - singly, by breed name, rather than lumping them together under the old-fashioned casual racism of 'Indian Pony'.

It's not the 1970s any more, the mould name from back then may not have changed, but all hobbyists can help acknowledge and respect people by dropping racist terms from the model horse world.

Some of the releases in the original 1:9 scale mould have sculpted feathers in the mane, so I thought it'd be a nice detail to add those to the tiny version. I made a couple from painted paper - unfortunately the blustery wind took them off mid-photoshoot and I only managed to find one, so even if I reattach it she won't look quite the same as in these photos.

I was going to do her tail plain black, but as I was applying the first coat the smudgy edges blended so nicely I thought I'd leave it with this fade-in effect - a lot of real duns have a mixed mane and tail where the centre is black and the edges are the same as the body colour, so it's something which looks deliberate and not like lazy painting which needed filling in to the edges.

The dorsal stripe down her back, as I always say, the most nerve-wracking bit of any dun paintjob - to minimise hand-shaking, I hold my breath, and brace my elbow against my side.

And here's some photos from after the feathers got away - I'm not entirely sure they looked realistic enough in the first place, as a copy of the model ones (like on this example here) they were ok, but the thickness of the paper made them look rather chunky and stiff, not soft and fine like real feathers. So I took a second set of pictures without them, in case I decide to leave them off after all.

She's got two blue eyes - a lot of frame overo pintos have a white face and if the marking is wide enough to catch the eye sockets, they'll have full or partial blue eyes. I think she looks very happy and friendly.

The very next day, I painted two more, with spots instead of patches.

I've had a couple of these dressage horses in my body box for a while (they were in the blind bags the first year I got a cheap whole boxful to work my way through!), but hadn't had any nice ideas for colours on them lately, then I happened to see a photo of a spotted horse competing in dressage and realised that would be the perfect fresh idea to give one of my horses a very different paintjob!

I decided to go with Knabstrupper as they're the most famous pure spotted warmblood breed, rather than yet another partbred for my collection! With this new nationality in mind, I've named him Harecroft Heroisk - 'Heroic' in Danish.

One of those moulds which has two good sides, as it's posed moving on a perfectly straight line it photographs just as well from either side.

Now, the next one has a bit of a problem. I painted him working on my lap, as usual, and when I'd finished I was really pleased with how he'd turned out, didn't notice anything wrong at all. The following morning, he still looked lovely, and I was happily satisfied with my work - til I got him outside for a photo.

See the issue? 

Handsome enough horse, pretty colour, no massive errors in the paintwork, no missed bits, no stray fingerprints or stuck fluff... whatever could have made me say 'Oh, no!' out loud at him? 

Look at that back foot! His back leg nearest the camera is so warped, his foot is hovering far above the ground when the pose means it should be touching down, and supporting his weight.

It's because I don't have a desk or table or workbench - if I'd stood the mould on any flat surface before painting, or even during the boring basecoating layers, I'd have noticed this and been able to fix it first!

So okay, I think, I'll just take him inside, use boiling hot water to bend the leg, hope hope hope the paint doesn't peel off with the wet or the heat, then retake his picture.

The paint's fine, but the plastic doesn't soften. Not even a little bit. 

I try reboiling the water and putting him in again. 

I try pouring it directly on the leg.

I try leaving him in longer. 

I try more force. 

I try everything, but the leg just will not bend.

This body was made from a different plastic, completely clear, sold in this set designed for making decorator pieces, like stained glass or rainbow or however you wanted to colour them. They paint up just fine with normal model paints, too, and I've had several of them for turning into ordinary horse-coloured customs in the past, without ever realising that the different plastic can't be softened with heat in the normal way!

So I was left with only one alternative to fix him - first, my little hacksaw to cut the leg almost all the way through, trying not to scratch up the paint anywhere else. Then I wedged the gap open the right amount with a piece of compacted metal foil superglued in, and used Milliput filler to smooth over the edges, with a slight overlap. Then once it had dried hard, I repainted that little section carefully, trying to match the previous day's paintwork enough that the patching won't be obvious.

And then he was back out for another photoshoot...

I'm much happier with him now, I liked the way his colour turned out anyway, and now he doesn't have a mistake in him I can feel pleased with the finished custom!

I took more photos the second time round, so you get to see some extra angles now!

I've chosen the name Campéon ('Champion') for him, and I'm going to have him as a historical breed on my site, one of the Iberian spotted horses from the past, probably a Spanish Jennet  - the extinct kind from old Europe, not the current re-creation project of named crossbreeds in the Americas.

The next project was one where I foresaw the potential for problems...

I'd got one of these gloss finish Fighting Stallions in my body box, and wasn't sure how well I'd get on with painting over the top of the gloss. Not just cos it's shiny and paint may not stick, but also the clear gloss layer is quite thick, and might've settled into the fine detail of the mould, making it look blunt and blobby once painted with colour over the top of that.

But it turns out it's just fine to paint over the gloss, I had no issues with the paint failing to cover well, or rubbing off with layering or handling, and the detail's not obscured at all, so all's well!

I'd had some reference photos bookmarked since a previous sabino custom a while back, and decided to go with this horse's colour for him - although I didn't copy exactly, more took the general idea of where the white was than trying to recreate every patch and speckle as a portrait, the one in the pictures had this interesting marking on one foreleg, with white across the knee above a solid black leg, so I just had to include that!

The real horse he was inspired by is used as an example on a couple of pages about the Barb breed from North Africa, but I think they've got their sources muddled and picked an incorrect picture, as I've found photos uploaded to Flickr by someone who photographed this exact same horse, and they're captioned as the Wilbur-Cruce breeding line of Spanish Barb horses (which is an American breed, also called the Spanish Mustang, descendants of the horses taken there by the colonists).

Later in the month, I painted a few more customs, and because I haven't been keeping up with the blog very promptly, they all get to share this one post.

First up, a dunalino - this is what happens when you get the dun gene working on a palomino coat; the golden colour gains a dorsal stripe, darker points including dark ear tips, and sometimes leg barring and a darker shoulder too.

Here is the reference photo I used, he's the classic photo example used when dunalino is listed or explained!

I used one of the new moulds from my box of anniversary Stablemates - the older G2 Appaloosa/QH sculpt is just as nice but I've painted a lot of them and only a couple of the Mini Smart Chic Olena. So he got to be a colour I've never painted before, on a fresh new mould too.

I really do like how he turned out, especially the shading on his shoulder, and the colour was fun to mix - warmer than the buckskins I did recently, but not as coppery-bright as a palomino can be without the dun adjustment!

His dorsal stripe, which annoyingly isn't at all obvious from the side, yet it's one of the most important parts of the paintjob! I'm just glad to have ticked this colour off my list, it's fascinating how horse colours combine and vary depending on the various dilution factors, and dun plus cream was one I'd wanted to tackle for ages!

Next up, the results of hours reading and research - I wanted to know what other breeds the new Mini Connemara mould would be best suited for.

I've already painted one as the Connemara it was sculpted for, one as my own pony (Welsh x New Forest, looking more like this sculpt than anything else on the market!), and the Sable Island Pony Breyer once released it as themselves. 

But there's a lot of pony breeds out there in the world, and I'm especially fond of the native and feral types rather than the cross-bred showring types, so I sat with my books and referenced Wikipedia and various breed websites, and came up with a shortlist of ponies which matched both the breed type & conformation of the sculpt, and the free, feral attitude in the pose.

So which breed stood out as best suited, and one I'd most like to add to my collection?

The Pottok, from the Basque region of France and Spain.

These ponies are rather like the 'mountain and moorland' natives I'm so fond of in the UK - ancient ancestry, hardy, thrive on the roughest of land, can manage just fine as feral herds doing normal horse things in the wild, but can be brought in to a domestic environment and loved just as much as any other pony when tamed and trained.

They also come in lots of good colours to paint, with pinto being notably common, so my first Pottok is a seal brown pinto mare! Well over 50% of the reference photos I've seen have been flashy tobiano patched bays, chestnuts, browns, and blacks.

I hadn't realised how good this mould would look in a patchy coat, I think cos I'd only seen solid colours so far I'd not even considered it before, but it really does suit it - especially this slightly dirty unpolished coat, I gave her grubby heels and a bit of mud on the knees and hocks, like she's a proper outdoors pony and never gets bathed or shampooed!

Looking very happy frolicking in the spring field. I may well set aside another of the Connemara bodies to paint her a companion, it wouldn't be fair to have only one of the breed in my entire herd!

And the other side, because the markings are never symmetrical on a pinto, so each side will have different shapes.

The final custom of this whole March batch is a portrait of a very famous racehorse, Tiger Roll. He's so well-known in the UK and Ireland that many people who've never watched a horse race have heard of him, while anyone who does watch racing has ended up quite fond of his sweet little face, and admiring his big achievements. He's one who's attracted so many supporters and fans that he gets referred to as 'the People's Horse'.

There's a lot of biographical videos, compilations showing all his races, and even a couple of full documentaries about him, over on Youtube if you have the time, but here's a nice short summary telling his life story while visiting him at home.

When he finished his last ever race, and did his final lap of honour in front of a cheering crowd at the Cheltenham Festival, I just had to paint his miniature - I think I always knew I would, I just wanted to see him retire safe and sound first!

His colour is much redder than a lot of bay horses, here's a photo of the real one to compare - it's a very deep, bright bay with a lot of red tones rather than dark browns and blacks, so he looks quite different to the other racehorse portraits I've done.

The big star on his forehead - in later races he wore a black visor to help him concentrate his attention forward and you couldn't see this, but up to and including his Grand National win, it helped make him easy to identify in a crowded race. His only other marking is a little white patch on his shoulder, which I spotted in a video of him being tacked up - under his saddle pad you wouldn't know it was there.

I think the mould looks better from the other side, the eye is rounder and happier-looking when he's facing left, but his plaits show more on this side. I had to cut away the sculpted loose mane and replace it with Milliput in these little rolled-up braid blobs. I wish more of the famous horses I wanted to paint could run with loose manes, but so many of them seem to have needed plaiting! I also gave him bigger hooves, and a slightly different profile as the original face had too much of a dished nose.

All in all, I'm happy with my month's worth of customs, but already plotting what breeds and colours will be next!