BCS Winter Challenge

Hey everyone!
Jennifer Buxton of Braymere Custom Saddlery is holding a photo contest! As soon as I saw it, I wanted to get to work.

I love taking photos and the prompts issued for this challenge really got me thinking. So - although they might not be the best - here are my photos!

1. Vintage
When I was writing down my ideas for the prompts, I got snagged on "Vintage." "I don't have any vintage models," I said. My models stared back at me in disgust. I have four vintage models. So, here is my oldest:

 Phar Lap.
Inside this horse's leg is carved (C) 1984 and 20th century fox. He was a gift to me from my mamaw, and so even though he's considered body quality, I doubt I'll ever customize him. I might send him off to be restored, though.

2. Nekkid

There were so many different ways I could've gone about doing this, but once I got thinking, one image plastered itself into my mind. Unfortunately I didn't have a cloth thin enough to pull it off elegantly, but I hope the concept still stands!

3. Scale Issues

Okay, I thought about a lot of ways I could do this, but I decided to touch home with a problem I had in my childhood - riding my Our Generation (American Girl) horses. There was a time where it wasn't too bad - it was just like riding a small donkey, but as I got older, I noticed the horse was getting smaller, and smaller. So, here I present to you - Scale Issues!

The horse in the photo is for sale!

4. I See Spots
I knew exactly what I was going to do for this one. For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on giving a cutting horse appy marks. I've lost sleep over working on him, and I felt no model would be better to execute this than he. He's almost completed, and once he is, he, too, will be for sale!

EDIT: He is completed and for sale! 

5. Unbridled Passion

When you hear the words "Unbridled Passion," you think mustangs. Wild horses. Galloping. You might even think of the scene from Flicka, where she's galloping with her arms spread and head back. 

I say it can be more than that. You don't have to be galloping at full speed bareback and bridleless to have unbridled passion. It can be the gentlest of moments that really tug at your heart. And with that, here's my take on "Unbridled Passion."

6. Rare breed

This is where I had another brain fart. I was looking at my models, thinking "Man, I really don't have a rare breed." I mean, yeah, there's the Przewalski resin I'm sculpting, but he's not even finished let alone painted, so I didn't count him. I stared, and stared, identifying the breeds of all of my models, when one stuck out like a sore thumb - almost literally if you get a good look at it. 

While it's technically not a breed per se, it's definitely rare.

Here's Victim of Science - my experimental zombie custom. (bit of a pic dump here)

7. Portrait

I thought about what I could do with this one, because portraits are pretty generic things in the model horse hobby. Unfortunately, I didn't come up with anything productive, but hopefully it has an impact all the same!

These next ones are from November (thanksgiving morning, actually), but I liked them enough to include!

8. Conga

Okay, I swear I'm mostly sane. 

With that being said, as soon as I realised I DO have a conga (three actually) the first thing I thought was "Satanic ritual"

I'm not a satanist, so I have no idea where that came from. But, that didn't stop me from doing it!

It looks more like some friends telling stories by a camp fire, no? <I'M TRYING TO MAKE IT FRIENDLY OKAY>

G1 Swaps and G1 Seabuiscut stablemates - all but one are bodies that I'll be customizing soon.

9. The Great Outdoors

It's too cold where I live to go out and take some new photos, so I hope you don't mind if I recycle! One thing I love doing with my models is taking them outside and getting pictures. It's a challenge for me to get the scales of the background and foreground correct to the model, and at the same time make it seem realistic. So, here are some photos that I liked from my Thanksgiving shoot, repurposed for this contest!

 It's horsehair on her vest shhhh

10. Best in Show 

I don't live show. There's only one place in my current area that holds live shows and the next one they're hosting is after I've already moved to Kentucky. Maybe someday! Because of that, I can't show you my "most prized winner" because, well, I don't have one.

So, have this instead! I know what I could've changed to make it better, but overall, I like it!

That concludes my entry!

If you haven't already, I highly suggest you go check out the contest. Even if you don't win, it's a great way to exercise your creativity!

See you next time (hopefully with a tutorial!)

Over and out!

WIP - Cutting Horse

Hello everyone. I hope you're doing great!

I'm going to keep this post short and sweet - I just had to get my less-than-favourite aunt after she had a fight with her daughter and had to drive her back to my mum's house while she's screaming in my ear, so I have a pretty massive headache and need to go lay down.

Before I do that though, I wanted to show my most recent custom WIP, which is on the Scamper model! I'm painting him to be an Appaloosa. Here's the current progress!

I have yet to do the other side.

He will be for sale once finished, and I definitely plan to post more WIPs as I go!

Tutorial - Fixing a Warped Leg

One of these days I'll have a clever title for these things.

Today is not that day.

I'm sure you can find tutorials all over the internet on the topic, but I had a foal that needed her leg fixed and I figured it was time to post a tutorial - so here we go!

I have a Proud Arabian Foal that I got with a warped leg. She could still stand, but she looked funny.

Most warps are very slight, but this was an extreme case to where the pose was almost altered completely.

To fix this, I grabbed my handy lighter

and started heating the area of the leg that needed to be reshaped.

It's best to wave the flame much like you'd do a hairdryer to your hair, to keep the plastic from burning. Make sure you get all angles to ensure the plastic is heated all the way through.

It is OKAY for the flame to touch the plastic, but remember that too much heat too quickly can cause the plastic to burn, and the flames may leave soot and yellow the plastic. So if you're simply trying to fix an original finish, new model, give a little distance between the flame and the plastic to keep from yellowing or burning the plastic or paint. The more distance you give it, the longer it takes, but the safer you'll be to save that leg.

I plan to customize this horse, so I wasn't afraid to let the flame lick her leg.

Once the plastic is heated, gently push it in the direction you need to, to get it straight. Only push it as far as it's comfortable. If it threatens to buckle the plastic on the side opposite your finger, leave it alone and heat another area to get it straight.

This was as far as I could push it, but there's still a slight warp going on. The lower half of the leg was straight, so I re-heated the warped area

And repeated the process.

And now we have a perfectly-straight leg!

Here's the video of the process, so you can see all of the steps in action!

I hope this helped! If you have any suggestions for a tutorial, let me know and I'll see what I can do!

New Year, New Victims - I mean projects

Hello everyone! I hope your new-year's was awesome!

With the sale of Casual Affaire

I was able to buy a body lot of 17 horses.
These horses will not be going toward Project Redemption. Instead, most of them will be sales pieces!

I bought the lot off of ebay, and it arrived literally the day after it was shipped. I was amazed!

The lot included:

Big Ben



Blue Box Thoroughbred - I plan to work on him on and off to make him a better-quality model (and possibly a reining horse!)



Traditional Scratching Foal



Classic Fighting Stallion



Scamper




Classic Quarter Horse Stallion by Maureen Love (not OF) - I'll be keeping him for a while




Classic Quarter Horse Foal



Two Peter Stone Pebbles - I'll be keeping the appy one; the other will be repaired, customized, and then for sale!




Seven stablemates: 2 cantering thoroughbreds, 4 standing thoroughbreds, and a drafter. The buckskin on the far right is the one I'm keeping - the rest will be either commissioned out, or used to practice and test colours out for larger-scale customs.




As stated previously - and unles otherwise stated - these will all be customized and then up for sale, so keep a look-out as I'l be announcing their sales and posting WIP pictures! If there's a certain thing you'd like to see a tutorial on, please let me know and I'll try to cover it during one of my customs! Seriously, I love providing tutorials so don't be afraid to ask!

Christmas and Second Christmas

I hope y'all had a wonderful Christmas! 

I didn't get much outside of giftcards. I did, however, get a children's-style book about zombies that I wouldn't give to most children. It was rather humorous, though, and I love it! It's called "Zombies Have Issues" and it basically tells all the things that stand in a zombies way - like chopsticks, terriers, and jet-skiing.

I also got a thing to make a plush voodoo-esque zombie and a shirt about minecraft that says "The world is mine" and it has a diamond pick in front of "mine." I absolutely love Minecraft, so this was awesome to get!

 Also! I got a pair of awesome pleather combat-style boots! The boots are awesome because they're casual enough to walk around in, comfortable enough to do anything in, break in CRAZY fast (I wore them all day and they're already broken in - hopefully they hold up for a while) and they're the right style that would look good with plaid and leather jackets, or dressed to outfits with corsets and gears. Did I mention they're awesome?

The thing I cherish most out of all of them, though, is "Baby 4.0" 

It's an airbrush!

I asked mum a while ago for an airbrush because I've been encouraged by JenPenJen to give it a go since it's similar to digital painting. I figured "why not?" since I want to convert to mixed mediums to make my models anyway. (Acrylic base coat and pastel shading to get a cleaner, richer look.) Especially since I tend to screw up a pastel job 5 layers in every time Which is partly why I decided to pause creating the zombie horse.

SO! I have two airbrushes - one a siphon feed, the other a gravity feed, as well as an air compressor with a pressure valve which is amazing since my last one didn't have that. I did have an airbrush before this, but all it was good for was maybe giving fleabites to a coat, since the previous compressor was only like 12psi fixed, so it didn't have enough pressure to actually spray.

BUT THIS
UGH THIS SET IS GLORIOUS!



They're Master Airbrushes and compressor, and with the gravity-feed I got a little pamphlet of colour splotches and a colour mixing wheel to show me what colours to mix you don't say? and their outcomes. So this will be handy!

I'm really excited about this, though. It would be nice to be able to paint on canvases with some form of resemblance to my digital paintings. You look at my digital paintings compared to my brushed acrylic paintings and it's like I'm two different people.

See?


You can see why I don't paint traditionally much.
I expect it to look something like this at first - maybe a bit worse:


So today Deana and I went shopping using the money and giftcards we got for Christmas. We started at Goodwill since I wanted to see if I could find any breyers or plastic horses I could practice on. I didn't, but I found a lot of naked barbies and this thing....



I just--


So after that, we stopped at walmart so I could use up my giftcard there. I got more paints for my airbrush, and then headed back to the electronics and got a spare xbox controller since Watson broke his and has to use mine (and I wanted a spare anyway.) While I was back there, I grabbed the AV cable and only found TWO of the three splitters I need. BLAGH. So I might have to order the third online. Regardless, I bought what was there, and then headed out. We went to the mall then, where we used our hot topic cards and I GEEKED OUT.

I'm definitely not in the closet about my love for Supernatural. I'm one of the people who walks around literally sporting my love for it. I mean I have it inked into my skin so. And with my incessant use of the gifs and references and such, I'm surprised I haven't been put through intervention yet 

With that being said, it should come as no surprise that I spent $53 on supernatural stuff. Sherlock helped, too.

I got a Supernatural headset that has an anti-possession symbol on the muffs with "saving people, Hunting things" around it, and across the band it says "The Family Business."
I also got a Castiel watch with wings in the center that says "I'm the one who gripped you tight and raised you from Perdition" around the inside. It doesn't have numbers so I only have a general idea of what time it is, but hey - at least it's pretty! Deana also got the "Bitch/Jerk" friendship necklaces and gave me the "Bitch" one since I'm her Sam. And then I got a devil's trap pin!



I also got a "221b Baker Street" rubber bracelet, and 221b pin to add to my collection on my bookbag. (On the other strap is my Breyerfest 2012 pin)


So then! we headed over to Bass Pro, and headed straight for the aquarium. I sat down next to it and this one fish swam straight up to me and chilled by me the whole time


So we went upstairs and I couldn't find the survival knife I was looking for. I did, however, find something else I've been wanting!
I call it "Zell" - it's an airsoft gun!


I saw it and was like "I'm not even going to resist, you're coming home with me"

It even has a little clip for the pellets!


It's adorable - I love it! I'm going to see if we have the pellets, since JC has several pellet guns. They'll be in the garage if they are. If we don't, Ill just have to save up for them!

Did you get or give anything awesome for Christmas?

A New Brand of Model Horses

Some of you may have heard of the current kickstarter campaign for a new brand of models. Based in Britain, Copperfox Model Horses plan to fill the hole that is the lack of British horses and ponies in every other well-known casting company (Breyer, Stone, etc). 

They plan to price them similar to Breyers and other models on the market. The campaign has 15 days to go and less than 5k of their 25k goal! If you back their project, you will receive a reward, which depends on the amount of money you back.

They need 25,000 pounds (though you can also back in whatever your currency is, too) by January 5th 2015. If they do not reach their goal, the models will not be produced and that would really be a shame. I plan to see if I can drop a few bucks, and you definitely should, too! If not, spread the word! 

Here's the kickstarter that I definitely recommend you check out!

Exmoor Pony

Welsh Cob

Connemara