Painted in 2021

In 2019 I first posted a blog recap of every custom I'd painted during the year, and enjoyed looking back on them so much that I did the same in 2020. Now it's time for 2021's round-up - here's all my model horse customs from the last twelve months.

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Astonishingly, without even realising til I came to write this sentence and counted them, I've completed even more than last year - 72!

Among them, there's 48 solid colours, 15 pinto, 9 spotted.
Bay is my single commonest colour to paint. I've done some dilutes for the first time here - classic champagne and gold champagne, plus a pearl Andalusian. There's more variation through appaloosa patterns, as I tried my first snowflake and snowcap this year. Pintos are, as usual, mostly tobiano, but with an overo and a couple of manchado criollos to vary it.

13 of the customs are portraits; one pony I own, two cobs I knew personally, five famous sporting horses (an eventer, a showjumper, a western reining horse, three racehorses), one character from a fictional book, and one quagga from London Zoo.

Five of these are Breyer Stablemate moulds I'd never painted before, it was exciting to get my hands on them and decide which colours to go for. I also tackled my first Mojo Fun custom, as well as four Magpie Models, plenty of CollectAs at standard and mini scale, one more WIA Gustav, one Peter Stone Pebbles, three artist resins, and two Breyer commercial resins.

Here's a little postscript picture, just for this forum : I made a little version of the chart above, for all the non-equine repaints I did this year - there aren't many

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All in all, another year I'm pleased to look back on - I kept on painting, covered a nice variety of moulds, a wide spread of breeds and colours, some very much-loved customs which are as good as anything I've ever done.

Which do you like best?

I really enjoyed looking through your repaints this year, there are so many!!

They are all breathtaking but I especially loved your quagga, cormorant, and red fox

I can't wait to see what you paint this upcoming year!

Amazing

I can't stop scrolling up and down to see them

Joliezac wrote:

They are all breathtaking but I especially loved your quagga, cormorant, and red fox

The quagga is one of my favourites for the year, too - something I'd wanted to do, in theory, for a really long while, but the Model Painting Month spurred me on to actually make it happen instead of just thinking it'd be cool to have one

The cormorant and fox can be blamed on (or dedicated to!) this forum, too - I'd never have got started on other species if I hadn't given in and joined here after being aware of it for years but never registering....because I thought it would make me buy more animals

I enjoy the fact you make a kind of photographic archive of your works.
It is great to have a overview of all of them sorted by year. It averages a new painted figure each 5 days.
Since favorite is a personal thing, I will be obvious and lazy, still predictable and my favorite is... ... ... the fox. Well, I will remember to revisit this topic and try to choose a horse. If I start now, I will finish it next year.
Though, my George's favorite act of the year was on April 5th when you decided to join our community contributing decisively to animate our board. I really hope to see overviews like these on future years and please with more wildlife once you are clearly a versatile artist, your ideas for your cormorant are genial.

A wonderful year in review! I love seeing them altogether, a style really begins to take shape, though not in a confining kind of way. There is a lot of variety and experiment and different directions, but all with the same precision and attention to realism. I can't get over the photo of Danny Whizzbang, either, it LOOKS like a photo of a real horse. I'm not sure what about it is tricking my eyes so throughly, but I thought, well he's snuck a real horse in here, hasn't he?

A favorite is extremely hard to pick, and is always influenced a little by which molds I prefer. Brown Jack is still one of my favorites, at least, I think, because of the sculpting and painting work and also the story of creating it from another work of art. I also have to agree that the quagga portrait is an excellent addition to this lineup. But Alskar (sp? That looks like a special letter in there) might be the one that impresses me the most from just a painting perspective.

Roger wrote:

I enjoy the fact you make a kind of photographic archive of your works.
It is great to have a overview of all of them sorted by year. It averages a new painted figure each 5 days.
Since favorite is a personal thing, I will be obvious and lazy, still predictable and my favorite is... ... ... the fox. Well, I will remember to revisit this topic and try to choose a horse. If I start now, I will finish it next year.
Though, my George's favorite act of the year was on April 5th when you decided to join our community contributing decisively to animate our board. I really hope to see overviews like these on future years and please with more wildlife once you are clearly a versatile artist, your ideas for your cormorant are genial.

Archiving them appeals to my hidden tidy side, I like curating their photos neatly on my computer and website and blog, even if I can't keep the actual displays of models well sorted (because there's just so many they're sharing masses of haphazard mismatched shelf space with little ones between the feet of bigger ones)

One every five days

There'll definitely be more wildlife, I already have a whale in progress and there's a couple of prehistoric projects on the way.

Jill wrote:

A wonderful year in review! I love seeing them altogether, a style really begins to take shape, though not in a confining kind of way. There is a lot of variety and experiment and different directions, but all with the same precision and attention to realism. I can't get over the photo of Danny Whizzbang, either, it LOOKS like a photo of a real horse. I'm not sure what about it is tricking my eyes so throughly, but I thought, well he's snuck a real horse in here, hasn't he?

A favorite is extremely hard to pick, and is always influenced a little by which molds I prefer. Brown Jack is still one of my favorites, at least, I think, because of the sculpting and painting work and also the story of creating it from another work of art. I also have to agree that the quagga portrait is an excellent addition to this lineup. But Alskar (sp? That looks like a special letter in there) might be the one that impresses me the most from just a painting perspective.

I think the style might be cos the way I apply the paint is pretty consistent, my smudgey shading of layered acrylics, so even when the colours or details are different, I'm getting there in the same way. A lot of artists vary their media or application a lot more from one paintjob to the next, but I stick to brush painting, never pastels or airbrush, cos I just can't mentally cope with applying anything in spray form, whether that's colour or sealant

Here is Danny Whizzbang's photo bigger - perhaps it's the fact he's trotting above the sand surface, with a shadow? I use the sand to obscure the base, it's a faff to set up so I don't use the 'sand school' effect with models that don't really, really need it More pics of him here.
And here's Alsk​ær bigger (the ​æ does look really difficult to read in my image font, I should've put ae side by side singly!)

Such beautiful collection of customs!! Very interesting this recap of your work from 2021!
What will we see in 2022?

Such a beautiful way to present all your stunning painted models! So hard to pick a favourite but that fox amazes me every time I see it!

Shanti wrote:

Such beautiful collection of customs!! Very interesting this recap of your work from 2021!
What will we see in 2022?

Thanks! My first customs for 2022 will be racehorses, favourites from recent years who were great rivals in some big races - the second one finally retired a few days ago, so that's spurred me on to create portrait models for the pair of them miniature - I've already done the resculpting work to match the manes to the styles they were ridden with!

And I'm looking forward to painting more Stablemates sculpts for the first time - they're releasing so many new ones every year now they have to keep providing new moulds for the club people, as well as scaled-down minis of bigger moulds, and of course they all take a while to come down to the regular run range - and even then a lot of them are blind-bagged so you can't just outright order them - so there's quite a lot I haven't got to yet.

Bonnie wrote:

Such a beautiful way to present all your stunning painted models! So hard to pick a favourite but that fox amazes me every time I see it!

Glad you liked it! I had to make sure they all had names by the end of the year, cos it wouldn't look as efficient and aesthetically pleasing if there were lots of random gaps where I hadn't managed to think of anything in time

The fox was an irresistible project, I love him too!

George wrote:

Here is Danny Whizzbang's photo bigger - perhaps it's the fact he's trotting above the sand surface, with a shadow?

Lovely up close, too! Something about the way you shaded the hair and feathering made it look genuinely soft and like it was letting light through, I think. The shadow and being off the ground certainly, too! And maybe the way the fence line behind him slopes instead of being at a perfect horizontal? More like a real like snapshot of a moving animal. Great work both on the custom and the photo.

amazing !! I looked at your previous years and they are all spectacular pieces.
I have a few favourites across them all but one really stuck out - FitzTrick ? with huge big circles all over the coat. I've never seen a horse like that before
Your cormorant is also very beautiful too. Well done George, and it's great that you've kept a record like this. I've learnt a lot about horse colours from your posts :) thank you