Tales from the Body Box - catching up with my customs!

Quite a few to post today, I've been painting a lot more than usual over the last few weeks (my creativity goes in phases, soon I'll be back to not touching the paints for a year or two, hahah!) and have gathered up a batch to have their photos taken while we got a bit of sunshine, along with three who already had pictures but didn't get posted yet.

A mustang with no name yet, this one happened because I liked the base colour on my dun overo reiner and wanted to do another without the pinto patches!

One from the big bargain body box (last year's blind bags on special offer), my first custom on the G3 warmblood mould - I've ended up with a fair amount of the OF releases on this mould without really meaning to, but this is the first custom body I've got my hands on. I think it's also my first dark chestnut, I've usually painted them brighter purely because that's the shade of my orange pot of paint!

At a slightly different angle to show her face marking better. I've named this one Harecroft Nutmeg.

Another first, this time I picked out my only spare copy of the Mini Valegro mould to have a new coat of paint, meet Harecroft Valiant - one of my favourites of recent years, I love how he ended up!

He's been in the body box ever since the mould first came out and I bought a duplicate to customise, being saved until my painting was going well enough to do him justice! I went for a very shaded dark bay, I enjoy doing these and think they look more striking than a plain even-coloured bay when they're finished.

I tend to do quite small markings on my customs, a set of short socks and a stripe at most, 

so my idea this time was to paint one up with extensive white, and as the American breeders are often proud of what they call 'chrome' on the flashy gaited showring breeds, I chose the TWH mould.

She's also the result of trying to vary my chestnuts much more, with a paler paint mix, light shading, and a flaxen mane and tail. She's named Harecroft American Dream - I'm doing surprisingly well with naming them as I go along, there's not too many in my little book with a space beside their description!

Harecroft Mabel, repainted from a scuffed up foal with a damaged leg which came in a mixed lot of paint-rubbed bodies and good horses. Not the neatest of paintjobs as the body was rough, but broken horses make me sad so I just had to do something with the poor little thing!

This horse wasn't meant to be a bay! He was intended as the base for a tobiano skewbald, but as I went along I just got really attached to how he looked as a solid colour, and decided he wasn't getting partly painted over after all! He can be shown as a Welsh Cob now he isn't a pinto partbred, so I've called him Harecroft Gwydion.

I had to be a bit more firmly resolved to actually add the white for my next attempt at a tobiano skewbald, and although it's always a bit of a faff painting layers and layers on in such a specific pattern without ruining it or overlapping a bit that wasn't meant to be white marking, it's worth it in the end! This one was the WEG 'driving' stablemate I'd got a duplicate of years ago, I'd carved the legs down a bit to refine them, then left her languishing in the dusty bottom of my battered old body box. But now she finally has a fresh new coat of paint, I'm really pleased with how she turned out. I'll show her as an Irish sport horse, Harecroft Ballymena.

And finally, for now, one I've had in mind for months, Harecroft Silversmith, a dark rose grey on the G3 TB mould. I don't think I'll have him as a thoroughbred - a bit too chunky in the legs and wide in the shoulders, though both those seem to be a feature of this sculptor's style, rather than deliberate breed characteristics worked in to each model. He makes a much better hunter type, and I think this colour suits him.

Tales from the Body Box - five pintos

I'm trying to catch up a little bit on the painted SMs which seem to be scattered in little groups all round my house - I've got no room left in the "custom mini" section of my shelves so they're currently tucked between Trad scale hooves, hanging out with Julip dogs and bunnies, decorating the mantelpiece and the top of the gas fire, and even balancing on piles of books! I'm going to have to do something about this to give the herd a proper home, but for now, I'll just make do with introducing them here and getting them onto the CM SM page of my website, so at least I'll feel like I've done something with the poor things!

First, we have a little group of piebalds and skewbalds - I didn't mean to paint so many in a row and I have done some solid colours since, honest!

The big bargain box of last year's mystery Stablemates brought with it several moulds I hadn't painted before, including this, my first ever custom of the Tennessee Walking Horse breed. A nice mould to paint, a little chunky in the legs but most of the moulds from this batch are - I've always wondered if Breyer asked for them to be made that way as they'd be more robust for children's play than the thinner legs of the G1 and G2 moulds. 

The hardest parts to paint were the braids in mane and forelock, unlike the ASB's smooth braids, these have the plait detail pressed in, so you have to paint the colours exactly onto the marked out sections - very fiddly!

Her markings went a little bit blurry on this side as I had slightly too much paint on the brush when giving them a light dusting to soften the edges, but so many real life pintos have mottled or roany parts to their patches, I think I've got away with it!

I've named this one Stormy Autumn, and really love how she turned out. Bay is probably my favourite colour to paint, and the white markings make her that little bit more flashy and eye-catching.

Next up, my first on the new Cob. I've always had mixed feelings about this mould - on one hand it is very sweet, with that ponyish look and cute friendly face, and it's always nice to have a model representing the masses of random unknown-partbreds, the heinz57s, the riding school horses and the family pets. Model ranges usually focus on the high performance sport and show horses, and the specific breeds, which fill the catalogue pages and the collection shelves, so it's a change when we get a model of the kind of horse we might've grown up with, or learnt to ride on, or see in a field on the way to work. 

And it's even better when that's a cob. 

But... it's just not a very good example of a fully grown cob! 

Take another look, and tell me that's not a youngster - the neck's very slim with not much topline or muscle, the shoulders are narrow and pinched, the quarters also look angular rather than rounded, and most tellingly, the withers are notably lower than the rump - you get a general impression that it's got some growing to do, a gelding colt which hasn't levelled out and matured, or built up muscle in all the right places. As that, it's fine. So I'm just going to imagine mine as being youngsters! 

I painted this one up with less colour than usual; I find this hard because to get the white covering large areas well it has to go on first, then I'm left trying to get the colour bits neat and smooth within the patch shapes, it's always a difficulty and not always a success - there's usually some colour which escapes and then I try to paint over it but it spreads around and tints the entire side of the horse faintly pink/orange. This one just about escaped the worst of that cos I deliberately let his patches be a bit roany and mixed up with mapping and smudgeyness, but to be honest it's not as nice as I'd hoped.

A visit to a quarter horse stud a couple of years ago gave me my first look at western riding in person, and a new appreciation of the models which represent the particular movements found only in the working and showring western disciplines. Cutting or sliding stop poses make sense now, rather than seeming quite so outlandish and odd, and I think I enjoy my few western models a little bit more, now, than I did before. Which is good, cos my body box came with three of these to paint!

I have trouble finding a sandy-colour paint to use for duns, so this time I gave in and mixed my own : part golden yellow, part mushroomy grey-brown, and part beige, with more and more of the beige paint added to the mix to shade the pale areas. The white markings were added afterwards, with several layers of diluted paint so they'd go on smoothly with a small brush, as I hadn't done an overo for ages and this seemed a good breed to suit it.

Another pinto, another technique! This body was from the second series of blind bag mystery horses, and because the OF paintjob left so much bare white plastic exposed, I decided I could do something experimental with that, and use masking on the parts which were already white. 

Instead of masking tape, which doesn't allow for over-fiddly shapes, I put on a layer of PVA glue with the mysterious pointy thing that comes in the packs of brushes I buy (it's a fine metal tip on a paintbrush handle, I've no idea what purpose they have in nail art but that's what my mini brushes are sold for so I'm guessing nail fans have a use for them!), making up the markings as I went along but being careful to keep all the glue on the parts which were white. 

Once it's dry, just paint the horse bay, then peel off the glue and you're left with a neat little tobiano pinto pattern! 

I put a few streaks into his mane, finished off his face and hooves, and left it at that. On some previous glue-masked paintjobs, I've gone along and added some feathering and mapping to the edges of the colour, but those were the basecoated white bodies, on this one I thought it might stand out weirdly against the bare plastic so I've left the patches sharp-edged.

Last one for now, another TWH, in piebald this time. Another one where the white was done first, but at least black is easier to apply inside the patch shapes, because it doesn't have to be shaded all over the horse, so there's no layering of different colours blended and smudged and mixed but trying to keep within the outlines - black is black and a couple of coats did the trick!

She's got one of those face markings with a patch of colour inside it, and striped hooves to match her ermine spots, but no name yet, I'm still thinking!