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 - New year, new colours!

A recent discussion with some Julip fans about what colours we'd got, and especially what colours were missing from our collections, made me wonder the same for the colours I'd painted. After last year's shock realisation that I'd never done red dun or cremello customs, were there other obvious gaps I really should have filled by now? So I dug the colours chart back out, and started ticking off the ones I've already painted at least once.
What's left stands out as a Never Painted list of colours I'd somehow never thought of, or avoided because I preferred other variations on the same theme, and this year I'm determined to fill some of those gaps.

The list contains four kinds of appaloosa, because surprisingly in all this time I've only ever painted blanket spotted, leopard or semi-leopard, or a sort of extended blanket varnish roan combination of spots on top of mottled colour. I decided to tackle snowflake first from my missing ones, a pretty colour which I'd deliberately never tried cos I feared it'd look too much like white paint spattered over a perfectly good paintjob!
So instead of risking the paint-spatter technique, I decided to go with a much more controlled application of white, got out one of my tiniest brushes, and applied the spots and roaning carefully by hand. It took ages, but I think the results are worth it!

The rather unexpected mould choice is because last year I found a photo in a 1970s horse book featuring a very incongruous looking snowflake appaloosa in an everyday Irish high-street horse market. He stood out so much I took a picture of the page for my 'horse colour ref' folder, and although I didn't go quite so heavily on the spotting for my model version, I wanted to paint one which could be an eye-catching Irish hunter, rather than an American stock horse type.

I might do another at some point, more heavily spotted or with larger snowflakes, but he just seemed to reach the point where he looked good enough, so I stopped here rather than risking spoiling him - I like this ratio of colour to white! I've named him Orion's Bow, a nod to his huntery inspiration, and his snowflakes could be taken as a lot of twinkling stars.

Of course, as usual when researching a colour, I was then in the middle of an appaloosa mood, and the very next custom ticked off another of the missing patterns - snowcap appaloosa, a blanket without the usual spots inside it. It's not that I don't like this colour on real horses, I just enjoy painting the spots on model ones, so I'd never done the appaloosa types which don't have any spotting!

As I've said before, I'm not the biggest fan of the reiner mould as such, but when it's in a really interesting colour my opinion flips and I love them, so I decided to put this good pattern on the final one in my body box, and it seems to suit him so well! The pink-speckled skin round the eyes and muzzle brings his face to life, and I had fun adding all the rough uneven roaning over the basic bay base colour.

Here's that blanket without spots - the temptation to add some was so strong cos I knew he'd look even more detailed and interesting with them than without, but then I wouldn't be ticking off that long-avoided snowcap after all, and would have to use up another body to get round to it!

 

A couple more angles, just because he's not quite the same on both sides, and the light helps bring out the detailing of his face. I've named him Snow Angel, to suit both the name of his colour, and the time of year (we had snow in December, my horse makes snow angels by rolling in multiple spots all over the field).

Another notable gap in my herd of customs was Pearl. A relatively recently identified dilution gene, which only really came to light many years after I'd already learnt about horse colours and started painting them, so I suppose I didn't see it as 'missing' cos it never was in my mind to start with!
Most famous in Iberian breeds, I dithered between using up one of the G2 Andalusians which've been in my body box for ages, or picking the much newer Spanish Walk Andalusian, in the end the more exciting choice won!

Pearl is one of those colours which looks made up - ten or fifteen years ago, this would've been written off as fictional pretty-horse painting, or at best a badly done dun by someone who didn't understand, or forgot, the dark points. 
The pearl dilution works by altering base colours, but it's more complicated than usual. One pearl gene, and the horse's colour isn't changed, it'll just look bay or chestnut or whatever. Two pearl genes, and you get the pearl colouration. But here's the thing - cream can also work as a 'second' pearl gene, so a horse carrying one cream gene and one pearl, will come out with paler variations of the pearl colour.
I went for one of the more basic options, bay plus two pearl genes, creating a colour known as brown pearl, and have named him Valenciano.

Here he is in different light, his dapples hide but his face looks nicer, I think! Double pearl horses have amber eyes and pale grey-brown skin visible on the muzzle and round the eyes, while pearl plus cream will show paler hazel-green or blue eyes, and their skin is much pinker.

This mould looks nice in hand, but is very frustrating to photograph anything but directly side-on, because the head is always either at an unappealing angle, or out of focus! I also spotted a bit of stray brown moss in the background, behind his raised hoof here, which looks like a little pile of horse poo in the other shots. Accidental realism!

The final one of this little batch of missing colours, and it's another unusual one to tick off.

Champagne, like pearl, is a gene which works over the top of other colours. A black horse with the champagne gene becomes classic champagne, bay becomes amber champagne, and chestnut becomes gold champagne (but it can also overlap other genes like cream or dun or silver, leaving multitudes of possible combinations!). I'd done an amber champagne pinto before, but none of the others, so classic champagne was top of the to-do list.

The classic champagne colour is a lovely lustrous brown, with darker points, and these ginger tips to the mane and tail in all the reference photos I collected before I started to paint. Like all champagnes, they also have distinctive mottled skin, peach with dark speckles rather than the pink-on-black seen in appaloosas, and pale hazel greenish eyes. The colour has the potential to look quite muddy and plain when painted, but the darker points do give it depth, the unusual colour skin and eye detailing add interest, and I gave mine some flashy white markings to stand out nicely, too, so I'm really pleased with how she looks.

The sun came out a little brighter between shots, and this photo makes her look much paler and with a warmer tone - it's interesting how some real life horses look such different shades in bright sun or a dull day, and I found it curious that this model version does the same.

Some different angles - this mould seems to 'pose' so nicely for the camera! Her mane braids are done with my usual technique of carving away the original oddly sausagey plastic ones and attaching plaited thread instead - by gluing the lower ends down as well you can be sure they lay just right to cover any rough marks left by removing the moulded-on braids.

That's it for now, I'm satisfied with four colours ticked off the Never Painted list, four nice new little customs for my shelves, and while there's still a few colours and patterns I definitely want to do in future (varnish/marble appaloosa and medicine hat pinto are now top of the to-do list!), I don't have any urge to complete the whole thing. There's loads of obscure modifier-gene combinations out there, so I'm not even going to consider ticking off every last one of the entire set of possibilities, I'll just be happy to have filled some gaps I didn't realise I had.

Tales from the Body Box - another mixed batch

I suspect a lot of people, all over the world, are finding a hobby to be a great a help in these difficult and worrying times, with safety restrictions and cancellations limiting things we'd usually be out doing, and much more time at home to pass in a constructive way. Whether it's making tack or rugs (or even fully furnished stableyard buildings!), photo showing, or customising, many of us in the model horse hobby are finding it a welcome distraction and creative outlet.

I'm yet to be inspired to dig out the craft materials and make any tack, miniature props, or scenery, and I haven't sewn a rug for a very long time indeed!
I always say my creativity goes in phases, and I'm unable to do more than one thing at a time : if I'm writing, I won't be touching the paints. If I'm drawing, I won't be making any miniatures. If I'm painting, I forget I ever could draw, and all my ideas remain unwritten. But rather than seeing this as a useless disappointment, I just embrace whatever I do feel like I'm in the mood for, and my painting phase is carrying on far longer than they ever usually do, so this week I've got a few more customs to share.

Firstly, the horse I intended to paint last time I picked up this mould! I'm really not very good at painting what I had in mind when I set out (one of the many, many reasons I've never considered taking commissions!), some paintjobs just go off in a different direction part way through and I like the results too much to go and spoil it by insisting my original idea was better.

This one's called Bronzewing, and the markings are inspired by a skewbald I saw out competing cross country last year, I just liked the idea of the entirely white back view, as opposed to the flash down the sides of the quarters I more often see - and paint - on a more minimally marked tobiano.

One of my aims this year is to push a little more out of my coat colour comfort zone, or rather, extend that comfort zone so I feel competant tackling a wider range of colours. 

Overo pintos are one of those colours which feels very 'other' to me, totally outside my little world of UK horsey experience and knowledge. 

This, of course, goes for a lot of breeds - I don't travel the world, so I've never met a Lusitano, or an Icelandic, or a Peruvian paso, either. But their colours, and markings, aren't unfamiliar territory : the same bay I could paint on a TB would look at home on a Marwari. The greying I understand on a welsh pony, that works on an Andalusian, too. Dun for Norwegian fjords, well that's just the same as dun for Highlands but with a cooler haircut. Familar and well-understood white markings and patterns can, with a little research, be applied to lots of different breeds. 

But overo? Nope, that's crazy!

It doesn't do what my mind says markings do, when sabino and tobiano are the only white-marked coats I ever see, the patterns I've been painting for years. 

Tackling an overo meant hours spent googling through pictures, trying to 'learn' the likely shapes and spread of the white patches. My first one was fairly tame, with not a lot of pinto bits, so this time, I decided I had to be brave and go for a lot more white! 

I'm pleased with how he turned out, I think the colour was more or less a success (although it'd take someone who actually understands overo the way I'm at home with tobiano to truly judge whether I'd done a decent job or not!), and I do think it suits the mould quite well, the action pose calls for something eyecatching. I've called him Diamond Creek Dazzler.

I finally found a little pot of blue paint in an old craft kit, so now I can do blue eyes without having to resort to colouring pencil over a white eye!

Here's another colour I'm not used to painting, but this time I've actually known several of them in person, the much more familiar sunburnt black! Some look practically bay in their faded stage, and because I've already got the OF black in this mould I didn't want them to be too alike, so I went quite heavy on the reddish shading - some sunburnt blacks have a much more subtle tint, to the point where you only really notice it if they're near a non-fading jet black horse to compare!

This angle is better to show the mould and pose, but doesn't bring out the colour quite so well. He's now named Romario, I'm doing quite well keeping up with naming this batch promptly!

Having done a couple of new colours, I decided to go for something else I'd never tried before, though pretty popular for model painting - a rabicano roan. Most commonly found in arabians and quarter horses, I picked a G3 stock horse and gave her a simple dark bay base coat, then got to work adding the roaning. First some white flicked on each flank with my thumb over a chunky paintbrush, then I picked out a finer brush and added the rib barring, lines following the hair whorl from belly to hip, few flecks of white on the quarters, throat, and behind each elbow. I finished it off by blending in the hand-painted hairs and adding the white top to the tail with some careful dry-brushing, gentle dusting of a very soft dense brush with not a lot of paint touched on the very tips of the hairs, so it leaves a faint smudge of white which increases with every pass of the brush.

This head-up, mouth-open pose is a bit odd from the side, but does make good characterful pictures from the front, like a horse who poses for the camera!

The bum-emphasising angle so favoured by real-life stock horse people! I've named this mare Plum Velvet, cos her colour reminds me of the sheen and lustre on dark velvety fabric.

Having thoroughly enjoyed one rabicano, I rummaged through the body box to find another suitable breed, and came up with this Magnolia arabian, one of my duplicates from the second series of blind bag mystery horses. This time I picked a brighter shade of bay as the base coat, and added the roaning in the same way as the first mare - it's showing up a little less because there's not the dark and light contrast, but I think the colour really suits the mould and it's far more interesting than she looked in plain bay part way through!

My first Magnolia custom, this was one of the moulds I was a bit unenthused by when first released, but the process of painting one, handling it and seeing it from all different angles, has made me like it more somehow. I did file down a couple of extremely overlong toes, though, and shortened both the ears a little bit! I'd like to get more of the mould eventually - perhaps one day if any full cases of series 2 mystery bags come up for sale cheap like the series 1 boxes did! 

I've named her Lumina, a name which has been kicking about on my list for aaaages but I've painted a lot of geldings and stallions lately and was saving it up for a mare. 

My supply of Stablemate bodies is starting to look seriously depleted, now, with how many I've done over the last few months, though I'm far from running out entirely I know I've used up all I'd got of certain moulds : I really need to lay them all out together and take stock of what's left in there, what I paint next will depend on managing to match remaining breeds to my colour ideas and inspirations. We'll see! 

Tales from the Body Box - seeing spots

Three little appaloosa patterned horses to introduce today, starting with one who was actually painted last year but I somehow forgot to ever get a picture of, so he's been delayed a bit!

He came about as a result of me thinking 'I have loads of this rearing mould, what could I do with it?', and also musing that I've hardly ever painted leopard appaloosas, most of mine have been blanket spotted, or roany semi-leopard. So it was a logical combination to put the appy paintjob on one of the rearing arabian bodies! He's buckskin, under his spotting pattern, so the spots on his body are a different colour to those on his legs.

Another colourful appaloosa, this time a flaxen chestnut with four long socks and a blaze, with my usual roany blanket type pattern. I'm getting much better at blonde manes and tails since I found the right creamy beige colour pre-mixed! 

I also found a really good method for getting the distinct sclera (eyewhites) that come with the appaloosa coat pattern : some very diluted pink paint touched against the eyeball while the horse is held on his side - the fluidity of the paint draws it right down into the crease between eye and lid all the way around, then once it's dried you can paint in the eye as usual.

And the final spotted horse is something of an oddity, being not quite an art portrait recreated with heavy resculpting of an existing mould (as I did for Whistlejacket and Cerbero), but inspired by an oil painting, anyway.

This is Landscape with Two Horses, by Nicolaes Berchem, dated to the second half of the 17th century. It's very often used as a perfect example of historic spotted Iberian horses, whether in the context of them existing in Europe (and oh, what a shame it is that they no longer do!) or as the source for the spotted genes which went to the Americas and carried on into new breeds developed there. Though there's several other good examples of spotted horses in artworks from that era, I've always had a fondness for the main horse in this painting, both for his lovely soft brown colour and detailed spots, and the way he turns just enough to look us in the eye, ears pricked and curious - he just leaps out at you as a real little character.
With no standing Iberian-type SM mould to work from, and being increasingly averse to major resculpting projects, I decided the only way I'd ever make a model version of him was to pick from what I'd got and go with it while I was in an enthusiastically painty mood, and so at last he's happened!

I'm extremely happy with how he turned out, roany smudgey mottled colours I find very stressful as there's so much opportunity to just make a blotchy mess when brush-painting by hand, it can go all wrong in one application of ever so slightly too much paint, or the wrong consistancy cos the air's drying it too much or you've tried to counteract that with a little too much licking of the brush...it's kind of scary, but super satisfying to relax when it's over. Maybe being glad it's over isn't really the same as enjoying painting and I'm in the wrong hobby, hahah.

Another angle, as well as attempting to get the spots in the same places I tried my hardest to get the shading just the same, with some more blended and some more speckled, and the deepest colour on the face, the front of the shoulders, and the legs.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this colour, in technical specifics - my best guess is that his base colour is seal or sooty bay, or possibly a dark bay dun, with the leopard complex lightening and mottling it up, and also causing the pale mane and tail through roaning rather than any kind of additional silver gene on top. 

But the stand-out contradiction to this is that his spots are black, not bay/dun. Usually, an appaloosa's spots are whatever his solid base colour would've been. Sometimes they do look much darker, so you can see spots on the 'bay' front half of a bay blanket appaloosa, for example, but that's cos the appaloosa lightens the body colour with what can be subtle roaning of the coat even outside of the distinct white blanket area, and the true base colour is always what you're seeing in the spots. So really, this horse's spots should be painted in shades of brown, but to be true to the original oil painting, I stuck with black. 

This side is a mirror image of the other! Usually, if using a single photo reference for inspiration, I'd just make something up for the side I couldn't see, but this time it's complicated - I really wanted the clear side of his neck and shoulder to carry an exact copy of the pattern - his mane covers so much of this side I'd have lost the chance to recreate all that roaning and some of the spots, but of course the painting is of the left side, so if I invented some similar-but-different pattern, he wouldn't actually match the portrait when facing the same way. So he gets to be the only appaloosa in my herd who has the same spots on both sides!

Tales from the Body Box - the next batch

I may go several months or even a year without painting a single custom, but once I get started, I tend to do a LOT before finally putting aside the paints and leaving the body box neglected for another dormant period! This year's creative burst of painting has lasted a bit longer than usual, so I have yet another batch of minis to share today.

First of all, here's take two on the bay skewbald G3 warmblood - last time I tried I ended up liking the look with a lot less white on, even though this is the pattern I'd originally had in mind, so I had a second attempt and this one's more or less exactly how I'd pictured my idea in the first place!

I've called this one Harecroft Corncrake, a name I'd had on my list for a long while but seemed to suit her halfway through painting, so by the time she was finished she was already named!

Here's a horse who already comes with a name - he's a portrait of the National Hunt racing star Sprinter Sacre. I'd wanted to do a mini version of this much-loved horse back when he retired, but only got as far as picking out the body and sculpting the plaits on, and now I've finally got round to giving him his coat of paint. 

I like doing a custom from photos now and then, because it does make me paint what I'm seeing, rather than how I imagine a bay usually is - the shading becomes more individual and not just the way I like to do them.

A grey. I mean, look, a white grey! One of the most basic of all horse colours, and yet somehow this is the first time I've painted a plain grey model. I think the tendancy in customising is to go for the interesting, the challenging, the unusual, the decorative - while ignoring the simplest plainest colours like black or white-grey. But I've got four of these little Spanish-walk Andalusians to work with, so one of them gets to be the pure white so common (and so handsome!) in the breed; I've named him Harecroft Palomo, the male variant of 'paloma', meaning dove.

When I came to file his picture in the right place on my laptop, I realised I'd somehow missed out photographing another custom, one I painted way back in the summer!

Romanesque, so named because one of my first ever customs was a mulberry grey andalusian called Picaresque. With a lot more colour to him than the pure white grey, this one was a great deal more fiddly and looks a little messy, but as greys do fade out in a rough and patchy way, I'm ok with that!

The next one had to have a swift change of scenery, because I realised I couldn't have a horse doing a sliding stop up my 'tarmac road' base - I did once have to do very much that kind of manouver to stop a runaway pony heading toward a main road junction, but it's not the kind of scene you'd set up for a photo!

This was the result of me not being overly keen on the reiner mould, and thinking maybe if I paint one a really good colour, I'll like it as much as a less interesting colour on a mould I like more. And yes, it worked! I'm so happy with how this one turned out in a flashy pintaloosa pattern, he's well up there among my favourites. I might go with solid but even spottier appaloosa for the last reiner in my body box.

Harecroft Tullius, inspired by a horse I've seen out eventing this summer - he's got the marking more usually known as a 'bloody shoulder' on one side of his face! This combined with the dark legs, faint dappling, and softer fleabite speckles over the rest of his body made him a really striking horse to look at, and I made sure to get a few good reference pictures so I could paint up something similar. I swapped his face marking to the opposite cheek so it'd be on the display side of the model, and gave him a couple of socks so he wasn't a direct portrait of someobody else's horse.

Another clipped model here, this time a cob. At times I think I really do need to paint less bay skewbalds, but then I tell myself I like my bay skewbalds, and may as well keep doing a colour I know I enjoy and can do a decent job with! I've trailed a tiny line of dark paint along the join between clipped and unclipped colour this time, to pick out the little shadow you get where the thickness of the coat has some depth to it.

A slighty angled photo makes the cob mould look a bit less flimsy through the chest and neck, it's a bit more flattering than directly side-on, and his clip shows up lovely here, too!

This boy had a lucky escape when he fell off the board I was carrying him on, bounced off the doorstep, skittered across the concrete path hitting it at least three times, before stopping in a pile of wet leaves. All this, and he got away with only the tiniest of ear-tip rubs - I just had to name him something good luck related, then remembered riding a bay skewbald cob called Felix years ago, and because that name comes from the Latin meaning 'lucky', he can have it!

Last one for now...

I was able to get my hands on one more Alborozo body, and did him the third colour on my wishlist - here's how he turned out! Really pleased with him, I do always find pale colours harder but as long as the paints co-operate and the brushes are just right for the smudgey shading, I can often end up with something I love just as much as any of my darker colours, it just takes a little bit more care and stress to get there!

I think he stands out better on the green background, although the paler one does look pretty, so I'm not sure which I should use as his showing/website photo?

And here's a bonus shot for you - the lengths I go to for photographing models in winter when most of the garden is in shade! First raise the scenery as high as possible using a selection of boxes on a bin on a chair, then arrange the background and base at peculiar angles so the light is on the right parts of the horse without shadows on the backdrop, with help from the bird table to prop it up, and finally, stand off to the left somewhere in among the bushes just to be lined up right for some shots before the sun moves too far and the whole garden is dark again!