Harecroft Horses - Tales from the Body Box - CollectA batch two!

Oh wow, it seems I missed a lot since I last visited this topic, so many beautiful horses!

I missed all the beautiful buckskins, and the pinto mare! And the cobs, I love especially the blue bagdon one! And probably my favorite of them all is the portrait model, amazing!    

And now new spotted ones, they are lovely! To me, the spotted Alborozzo looks like he's just making a little jump in place, like maybe he was scared of something (plastic bag?)?
If you want to repair it, I think I would go with the standard method of making a cut, filling the gap and repainting just that little place.

Ahh, thanks so much, I'm glad you enjoyed seeing them now you've caught up. The portrait probably has to be my favourite, too, but I'm biased cos she's mine

I decided to be brave and attack the leg joint with my little hacksaw, he now has a little patch in his paintwork and stands with his feet on the ground! So this morning, back out for another photoshoot...

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After the saw cut, 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. I can just about see where the mend was, not from the resculpting itself but the paint texture isn't quite the same - the original colour was a base coat of off white, with brown scuffed over that thinly, and some dark red-brown and black mixed then applied thinly to the lower leg, so there was a layering effect of see-through colour. But to hide the filler (which is a greenish colour!), I had to apply solid light brown to cover it, and then faintly smudge the darker colour over that. He gained a couple of extra spots on that joint to disguise the fact it's been messed with

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

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

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I haven't thought of a name for him yet, but I'm going to have him as a historical breed on my site, one of the Iberian spotted horses from the past, possibly a Spanish Jennet (the extinct kind from old Europe, not the current re-creation project of named crossbreeds in the Americas)

I painted another horse yesterday evening, too...

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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!

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I'd had some reference photos bookmarked since a previous sabino custom a while back, and decided to go with this mare'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!

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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 a mare from 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).
So I'll be filing mine on my Spanish Mustang page, while still not owning a model of the original Barb from Africa at all!

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Two fine horses! I like the way the black isn't just in the spots but also spread out over other places. It makes them look very realistic. It's a kind of colour that Breyer doesn't really do, probably because it is too complicated to paint well.

I have to say that so far I have only managed to bend a G1 by putting it into boiling water. I could bend this G1 very easily when it was hot, but when I have tried it with later horses, they hardly bent at all. Today I tried with a foal from 2000 that doesn't stand up, but I can't bend its legs.

I think the link of the Barb doesn't work from hotlink, Let me check if it works in my post.
I really enjoy both horses as usual. Is there a pose name for the spotted horse? Also, is there any difference between fighting and rearing?


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rogerpgvg wrote:

Two fine horses! I like the way the black isn't just in the spots but also spread out over other places. It makes them look very realistic. It's a kind of colour that Breyer doesn't really do, probably because it is too complicated to paint well.

I have to say that so far I have only managed to bend a G1 by putting it into boiling water. I could bend this G1 very easily when it was hot, but when I have tried it with later horses, they hardly bent at all. Today I tried with a foal from 2000 that doesn't stand up, but I can't bend its legs.

Yeah, you do get some appaloosas where the colour is only in spots, but the majority of them have some speckling and roaning as well. I think the nearest we've had to this one on an original finish Traditional is EZ To Spot where they used sprayed fine speckling and shading, stencils on the face and rump, and random spatter-pattern on the neck, shoulder, and belly.

That's very odd, I've always been able to bend G2, G3, and any of the more recent ones. Even this horse now stands upright on my shelf with a straight leg!

Roger wrote:

I think the link of the Barb doesn't work from hotlink, Let me check if it works in my post.
I really enjoy both horses as usual. Is there a pose name for the spotted horse? Also, is there any difference between fighting and rearing?

I've edited to change the link, different photo of the same horse on another website, so you can see her, just not the exact same picture

Which spotted horse?
The one with black spots is officially called the Hanoverian mould, but we often call it the Dressage Horse cos it was first released as a special run for the World Equestrian Games, where each horse sport in the games was represented with a model, and he was the one for Dressage. The pose is an extended trot, which in a less exaggerated way is one of the basic skills most riding horses are taught (it's basically telling them 'go faster, but don't break stride!' and they just stretch more, but in dressage it's a much more precise and forceful thing, taken here to the extreme of a straight flicked-out front leg.
The one with brown spots is called the Mini Alborozo, it's a shrunk version of the 1:9 scale Alborozo, who was sculpted and painted as a portrait of the real Andalusian stallion Alborozo. This big one was only ever sold once, at Breyerfest, then the mould was destroyed - they wanted to make him extra sought-after by this promise that he'd never be released in any other colours afterwards. But then years later they made this mini one, so we do get to have a little bit more of him after all His pose is a pirouette manoeuvre, here's a real example of the same breed in just about exactly the same moment of the move - it's used in modern high level dressage, but came through history in classical riding, originally coming from battlefield training for knights and then cavalry. A horse which could jump and spin in several different ways on command kept you safer in a fight, and was a weapon in itself!

Hmm, rearing and fighting are kind of difficult to differentiate - not all rears are for fighting, but horse fights usually do include rearing, if that makes sense

A horse will rear when playing, or when showing off to other horses, or when stressed/upset/angry about something people are doing to it. I once rode a horse who reared when he'd got in a temper and wanted the ride to be over for the day - he'd learnt that it made people either fall off, or panic and get off, then they'd put him away and go. Once I'd sat out his rear a couple of times and just said 'walk on' and made him keep working once all four feet were back on the ground, he gave it up cos he realised it wasn't going to work any more, and in the next three or four years he never even tried it once.
My own horse reared when she was having a bit of a mental health crisis and didn't want anyone to touch her, so she reared at the farrier (hoof trimmer) and ran away. In her case, it was a stress reaction, the fight-or-flight adrenaline told her to scare off the humans and get away so she could stay safe. (She's fine now, and the farrier is one of her favourite people)
They can also be trained to rear on command, either for trick riding, film stunts, or just as a fun extra thing to do if they're a horse which likes to learn. Going back to the age of knights again, a horse which could rear on command would give you a scary advantage over infantry on foot, cos you could knock them over, or make them scatter. Classical riding carried on several different variations on rearing, like the Lipizzaner's famous levade pose.

So yeah, there's a lot of reasons a horse might be rearing, but usually in models it's sculpted as a positive rear, not a stressy one - a freedom kind of thing with a wild horse, a mustang, or maybe a spirited arabian showing off.

When horses fight, they try to bite and kick each other while keeping away from the opposition's bites or kicks. The best way to attack is facing head-to-head, trying to grab the other horse's neck, while using their front feet to fend it off. They fold their ears back, which is body language for aggression but also practical so the ears themselves are less likely to end up getting bitten! So you can see hints of this in the fighting stallion's pose - the mouth is open, the ears are facing backwards, the nostrils are flared rather than at ease. The horse isn't holding his front feet tucked in close to the body in the steady, slow rear done by lippizzaners, they're thrown forward unevenly like he's striking toward another horse.
Horses do playfight, but it's usually much more half-hearted - one will do a bit of a rear toward the other, who'll swing his bum round and buck, then they'll run about the field. One might make a gentle grab or nip at the other, but they won't strike out with the front feet at the same time. Or you might get a kick accompanied by a squeal, then they'll have a bit of shoving and chasing. It's like kids who playfight and wrestle - looks a bit like fighting, can get pretty rough, but they know their limits and neither of them actually want to injure each other badly.
If you had a pair of these models standing face to face, they'd look like they were attacking each other, not having gentle playfight games, or doing a synchronised move at request of a human trainer.

Wonderful models and repaints and thank you for your explanations!

The repaired leg looks great, I wouldn't have guessed which one was it if I didn't know

Looking at your pretty spotted horses I feel like I really need to paint an appaloosa pattern this year too. The last time I attempted one was a few years ago.

And the new sabino horse, super nice! Interesting to know it was a glossy model before! I think I would have had the same doubts before painting over gloss, how nice to see it's actually working just fine

Thanks George for your very complete and really interesting explanation. You really take it very seriously and I learned a lot. Silly me again, the spotted horse was supposed to be the one doing the pirouette manoeuvre but spotted was not a good way to describe it. I see often Lusitano horses making very elegant and graceful poses or moves. That levade pose you linked is very nice, but unfortunately it is hard to replicate for a sculpt.

They are all really beautiful, interesting patterns. I think the Choctaw Pony is my favorite, those spots are so realistic and intricate. I love especially the subtle gradation in color from the dorsal stripe and variation in the coat color. The feathers also look great, though she looks just as lovely without them!

I really love the interesting leg marking on the rearing sabino, that's a nice detail to include to really make it an individual. And I can't tell at all the Alborozo had his leg chopped and removed, you did an excellent repair work.

Caracal wrote:

Wonderful models and repaints and thank you for your explanations!

Thank you for your kind comments! I like to explain what I'm doing, especially as most collectors on here are far more into wildlife or prehistoric and not coming from a model horse (or real horse!) background, I'd feel like I was just talking in a load of confusing jargon and incomprehensible terms if I didn't explain myself thoroughly

Ana wrote:

The repaired leg looks great, I wouldn't have guessed which one was it if I didn't know

Looking at your pretty spotted horses I feel like I really need to paint an appaloosa pattern this year too. The last time I attempted one was a few years ago.

And the new sabino horse, super nice! Interesting to know it was a glossy model before! I think I would have had the same doubts before painting over gloss, how nice to see it's actually working just fine

Ahh, good, not being able to guess is the sign of a decent enough repair!

I look forward to seeing your interpretation of an appaloosa, knowing the rest of your work it will be near perfection! There's still some versions of the various spotted patterns I haven't tried, mainly the roany/marbled/frosty ones, and fewspot. It always seems like the paintjob's just waiting for spotting over the top of anything I lay down as a roan or spotless colour, and I can't resist painting them in after all, hahah

Gloss might not play nicely with all paints, or pastelling techniques, but for hand-painted Citadel acrylics I can confirm it's fine. Even without primer, cos I'm cheap and won't buy primer

Roger wrote:

Thanks George for your very complete and really interesting explanation. You really take it very seriously and I learned a lot. Silly me again, the spotted horse was supposed to be the one doing the pirouette manoeuvre but spotted was not a good way to describe it. I see often Lusitano horses making very elegant and graceful poses or moves. That levade pose you linked is very nice, but unfortunately it is hard to replicate for a sculpt.

I know I tend to talk horse at length, but I've learnt so much about horse behaviour and breeds over the years, from experience and reading up and discussion, it's good to be able to explain things in hopefully a helpful and clear way!
The pirouette is such a graceful pose, I think the Mini Alborozo is one of my favourite Stablemate moulds - annoyingly he's been hard to buy over the years cos the only regular run releases have been in random blind bags where you can't just order the one you want, in this unicorn painting set where you only get one Alborozo per a pack of five for around £20 so he's not cheap to get hold of, and then last year they did make him as a simple single horse, but as a mid-year release, and the UK supply of Breyers is so patchy that only one company I know of ever got him, and they sold out before I noticed they were in stock, no-one else has had him in stock yet, and I'm not sure they ever will! So I haven't even had chance to buy one to keep yet, let alone duplicates to paint up

Jill wrote:

They are all really beautiful, interesting patterns. I think the Choctaw Pony is my favorite, those spots are so realistic and intricate. I love especially the subtle gradation in color from the dorsal stripe and variation in the coat color. The feathers also look great, though she looks just as lovely without them!

I really love the interesting leg marking on the rearing sabino, that's a nice detail to include to really make it an individual. And I can't tell at all the Alborozo had his leg chopped and removed, you did an excellent repair work.

I'm looking forward to painting more Choctaws, they come in so many colours and a lot are pinto so there's a big variety of combinations I can design! The one feather which didn't escape into the lawn I still have, but I'm reluctant to superglue it to her cos that's very permanent and would spoil the paint underneath if I ever wanted to take it off again

On my computer there's a whole folder called 'Horse Refs' where I've saved painting inspiration - some are famous horses or paintings, for specific carefully copied portraits of individuals, some are random references of certain breeds or interesting/pretty/unusual coat colours I'd like to do one day, and some have quirky markings I'd like to use on customs. This sabino is kind of a mixture, cos it was both a breed reference and a cool coat colour, AND with a distinctive marking I'd wanted to include at some point.

I'm used to doing repair work on beaten-up horses before I paint them, cos of my habit of buying cheap bulk batches of damaged or played-with Stablemates for the body box to save having to repaint too many good ones which would've been fine for someone else's collection, this is just the first time I've had to do it after painting and it was a bit scary, risking ruining one I was happy with!

Three more customs this week! One colour I've been wanting to do for ages, one breed to tick off my wishlist, and one racehorse portrait of a national favourite!

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First up, a dunalino. This is what happens when you get the dun gene working on a palomino coat (which is, itself, cream working on a chestnut base), 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!

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

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

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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 and 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.

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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.

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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

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Looking very happy frolicking in the spring field

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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!

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

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The final custom this week is a portrait of a very famous racehorse, Tiger Roll. He's so well-known in the UK and Ireland that even people who've never watched a horse race have heard of him, and anyone who does love horses 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, but here's a nice short summary telling his life story while visiting him at home.
When he retired in front of a cheering crowd a week ago, I just had to paint his miniature.

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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.

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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.

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His plaits show more on this side, I had to cut away the sculpted loose mane and replace it with milliput filler in these little rolled-up braids. 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 hooved, and a slightly different profile as the original face had too much of a dished nose.

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I think the mould looks better from the other side, the eye is rounder and happier-looking when he's facing left!

So that's three very different breeds, and three very different colours, all completed this week - I'm happy with that!

Stunning new customs, you have really nailed that dunalino colouring, I love it!

Always a joy to read your posts and see your repaints. I am curious what the mane of the dunalino looks like from the other side.

Thank you, Bonnie! And I'm glad you enjoy them, rogerpgvg! The mane is just plain blonde, slightly darker at the tips than the roots to match the tail.

This is a great trio of horses. They really show off your diversity! The dunalino is really beautiful, I think you're right, the shading along the shoulders is the nicest spot but all of it is a very skillful recreation of the color. I love the leg barring as well.

I love the Pottok! I've only ever heard of this breed because Funrise made one (called a Basque but I assume the same thing), and it is also a tobiano paint. Actually one of my favorites of their horses. Yours however is much more of a piece of art, haha. Your paint markings are so natural looking. I see sometimes custom paints where the artist hasn't followed the natural way markings tend to develop on the coat, but you can always tell that you have both seen plenty of them yourself in life and also that you make use of good reference material along the way. Her golden brown flank is a my favorite part. It's a perfect look for this fun mold.

And the effort you put into making your portraits authentically resemble the real horse is something Breyer could occasionally learn from. His face is very sweet looking and that's a beautiful red bay color.

Thanks! I love hearing such accurate feedback on what's working and what's impressive, it's easy to get absorbed in what I'm doing and be satisfied/relieved just to finish something, so it's really helpful having 'reviews' and appreciation of the results!

I think sometimes these more unusual colours force me to really think about how I'm mixing colours and applying shading - I know which pots of paint make a chestnut, or a bay, but something slightly more obscure means I'm right back to the basics of figuring out which colours are in what I'm seeing and wanting to recreate!

Yes, Basque would be an alternative name for the Pottok, their local name is 'Pottoka' so I assume it's just a bit more modern to use something more closely aligned with what they're called in their native language. A bit like how we now hear more about Selle Francais than the translated 'French Saddle Horse', or see a sales ad for a PRE rather than an Andalusian.
Funny that they're both pinto, although perhaps statistically likely given how many pintos were in the references and reading material I was looking through
Impossible weird tobiano efforts have always been one of my pet hates in the customising world - you can see customs with lovely vivid shaded or dappled colours, smoothly applied, so the painter's clearly got the skill - but then let it down with random blobs of white in shapes and places they wouldn't be.

I think once it clicks and you 'get' the way the patterns form, you can make up something which looks perfectly realistic, but it's kind of impossible to just describe it in text - you'd need animated gifs showing the colour flow out from certain points (chest, stifle, tail, ears?) maybe ten times with different results, with every frame from start to finish being a possible outcome too, to illustrate where the patches would be
It also helps to allow for which way the hair goes on different parts of the horse when applying the paint, which is something you just know without thinking if you've ever groomed one, but probably quite hard to learn if you only admire them from afar
And a lot of riding schools these days just supply a groomed tacked horse in front of you for your lesson and take it away again afterwards, so it wouldn't surprise me if there's people who've even learnt to ride but still haven't brushed the mud or shedding hair off one!

And yes, their portrait models do tend to be rather hit-and-miss, some they have to ignore that some aspects aren't perfect but can't be adjusted (like the bigger feet I almost always seem to be adding to this G2 TB, they couldn't do that), but some of the chosen moulds just make you think 'but why?!' cos there's other sculpts which are much more like the individual in question and would've been a closer match. Sometimes I buy them anyway as the mould and colour combination is handsome even if it doesn't look much like the real thing

Time for another recap on a week's 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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, cow-hocked and close behind, and just generally much more narrow so they look angular 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 )

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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

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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.

And finally, a custom inspired by a small adventure yesterday!
On my way home from visiting 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 pony, 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

Now, the funny thing is, 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.

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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)

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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

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I think his name was either Thistles or Bristles or Bribbles, 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

Wow, that grey is amazing! It looks like real fur, the texture is spot-on there! It sounds similar to dogs too with certain colours being 'banned' for different breeds, and then sometimes allowed later on as a recognised colour! Great name choice too, I think that was the first time I'd ever seen snow in April! And such a wonderfully fun story about the pony, glad there was a safe ending and nice that your repaint can remind you of this fun-loving shetland!

Hailstorm and Grandeur are so beautiful! As Lilias already said, their hair looks very real. I didn't know that there are only three colours for fell ponies. It would be great if Breyer made a dapple grey fell pony even though it won't look as good as yours. Also interesting to read that you don't think the Clydesdale looks like a real Clydesdale. Do you think the G2 running Stablemate looks more typical? Funny story about the Shetland pony. I am not so keen on the Shetland sculpt, but you've given it a great colour and it looks really like it is a runaway horse!

So many wonderful transformations and beautiful colours and patterns!
May I suggest a heavy horse for your next project-an Italian Heavy Draught or a Breton either a Postier or Trait.

Surely the grey color works perfectly with Fell ponies. Especially when it is so competently performed with your brushes.

Great repaints again!
And what a pony, oh my Good it all ended up well and without it running onto the road or getting injured!
I love light-colored pintos, I think it's such a subtle combination of white and cream color

Both greys look wonderful too! And all the horses and ponies from last month which I missed. The Pottock pony is possibly my favorite this time, what a brilliant breed choice! And it's rarely seen in the hobby too

Those grays are phenomenal. The pencil technique really nailed it! I love the darker areas on both. The fell pony looks so good, I agree that if Breyer releases a gray Fell it is not likely to match yours.

What a good pony story! Very in character for a pony. I'm so glad he ended up safe back at home, and all the people involved to! That's a great backstory for a semi-portrait model. And a beautiful custom. I love the his muzzle the best, with the gray and pink.

Stunning as always! The first is my favorite!

Wonderful repaints!