I've got a little list

As you can see from the photo above, there’s been a bit of painting going on here recently, majoring on chestnut-and-white.  All these horses went through the usual phase in the middle of painting when I wasn’t happy with them, but eventually I was pretty pleased with how they turned out.

I paint by hand using artist’s acrylics, and I’m indebted to Marion Keefe for a recommendation that she made to me many moons ago, namely, a stay-wet palette. This basically consists of a shallow plastic tray, into which you place a sheet of absorbent paper (like blotting paper) which you soak in water. On top of this you place a sheet of greaseproof/baking parchment-like paper, and this is what you mix your paints on. A lid fits over the top. What happens is that the paint on top gradually absorbs the water through the sheet, meaning that it does not dry out in a few hours as acrylic paint usually does. As long as you keep the absorbent paper wet, and replace the lid when you’re not using the palette (to minimise evaporation), both the blobs of unmixed paint and even the areas of mix will stay wet and usable for days and even weeks. You can buy the palettes and dedicated paper fairly reasonably at art shops, although upon Googling, I see that you could also make your own.

For someone like me, who has to fit painting in around work, family life and many other commitments, this is absolutely invaluable. No wasted paint, no time spent faffing about mixing and trying to rematch colour shades at the beginning of every painting session. I don’t know where I’d be without it. A word of warning though: at the end of several weeks’ (intermittent) work on this latest batch of horses, my palette looked like this:

Yes folks, that’s mould growing on the paint:

In fact towards the end, there was quite a whiff of mould whenever I took the lid of and I dread to think how many spores I inhaled, so take heed: it’s probably not a good idea to leave the palette for so long that it gets to this stage ;-)

Anyway, to drag us back vaguely nearer to the topic: do you make lists? I’m an inveterate list-maker, and back in 2001 I drew up one particular list which I’m still using. It’s a product of something which I and many others used to do in the hobby, particularly in the 1970s and 80s: ‘breeding’ horses in real time. Each year I would write down a list of which mares were being sent to which stallions, and the next year I would duly write down details of the resulting foal. This was nearly as satisfying as breeding living animals, with the added bonus that you always got to choose the foal’s colour and gender, with no disappointing surprises!

The downside, if such it was, was that one’s enthusiasm for breeding generally ran way ahead of one’s pocket for buying models, and so one ended up with a long list of ‘Details Only’ paper horses waiting for a body. It was these that I listed for myself in 2001, and perhaps alarmingly, I’m still working through that list today.

At the time I listed 14 horses; over the next few years I added 13 more. On my list I have a column for what body I had in mind for each horse, followed by a column to tick when that body was acquired, and then if it required customising, columns to record that it had been prepped, undercoated, and finally completed. I know all this smacks of OCD, but I think if I had that I’d have finished a few more horses over the years. Rather, I think it reflects the fact that I like to be able to tick things off as a ‘reward’ whenever I’ve got a step further in anything!

Over time I have sometimes regarded this list with depression, thinking about my slow progress on it, but a recent inspection revealed that slowly but surely, the bodies are getting ticked off. In some cases I have abandoned the idea of a customised body when a suitable OF came along – Breyer releasing a Cleveland Bay, for example, saved me an awful lot of work! And at this point, I have decided to write off the oldest few horses on the list – some of them were in their teens even when I made the list, and there doesn’t seem a lot of point in creating a body for a set of details which is now in its mid-twenties! I will still retain these details, but where I had bodies lined up for them, I will most likely make them into offspring of those details – the next generation down, so that they can hit the showring at a believable age.

The reason I’m telling you all this is that the jumper in the picture is of one of the horses on the list: Flying Fox, a warmblood/TB cross foaled in 2001. At last I was able to add another tick and mark off another horse as completed! That being the case, there only remain 5 or 6 horses for whom I still aim to provide bodies.

The trouble, of course, is that this list represents only the tip of the iceberg. It is by no means the sum total of the bodies that I have to customise; there are many more, packed away in the attic or in boxes under the trolley which I grandly call my workbench:  models which I have bought over the years with an idea of what I want them to be. But because in those cases the body, rather than the details, came first, they are not on my list. Hmm. Perhaps I should make a separate list of those some time…

A new departure - Welsh arrivals!

Well, dear readers, it was my firm intention at the start of this year to write at least one blog post every month. Now that, even with the extra day in February, I’ve still failed at that one, let’s see what we can do…

I’ve never been particularly into Welsh ponies or cobs. Not that I ever had anything against them, you understand – on the contrary, I respect them as attractive, sound, eminently useful equines. I just never really got into collecting Welsh models – I preferred to concentrate on some of the rarer British natives, such as my ‘local’ pony, the Dales. The Welsh always seemed to have plenty of support without needing mine; indeed, the Welsh classes seemed so competitive that I was never particularly tempted to join in. With no Welsh models to speak of, I had no need to research Welsh pedigrees, and though I read a couple of Dr Wynn Davies’ books, I tended to retreat after a while with my head spinning due to the numerous variations on Trotting Comet, Young Trotting Comet, Old Briton, Young Briton, Trotting Briton, Flying Comet, Trotting Railway and so on. However, the past couple of years have seen something of a departure for me, and I now own a number of Welsh Cob models.

This change can be traced, I think, to two things. Firstly, my friend, fellow hobbyist and pedigree enthusiast Helen Cooke died. Welsh, particularly Cobs, were Helen’s first and enduring love, and during her last few months she was writing an article about her model Welsh stud for my club newsletter. I was entrusted with the task of typing up this hand-written, unfinished piece after she died, which meant quite a lot of reference back to lists of Helen’s models to make sure I was interpreting her abbreviated notes correctly. It was a pleasure and an honour to do it, but also it helped me to share something of Helen’s love and enthusiasm for her Cobs. I ended by feeling it would be a shame if some at least of her model bloodlines were not carried on.

Secondly, the following Christmas, I received this little mare as a gift from my BOPAR Secret Santa that year, Sam Helton:

I felt that she would make a reasonable Welsh Cob – certainly as good as any other OF plastics available. Indeed, I got so enthusiastic that I enlisted another friend, Carra McClelland, to look out in the USA for two more colourways on this mould, with the idea that I could make them into three generations of mares. The prospect of having an instant entry for the Dam Produce and Breeding Family classes in BOPAR shows was also a contributing factor!

Carra was very efficient in sourcing the models and in due course these two arrived:

In the meantime I’d also been having an online chat with another friend, colour authority Lesli Kathman, asking her about pedigrees for roan Welsh Cobs. I hadn’t realised that true roan is quite a rare colour in Cobs, many of the horses described as roan really just carrying roaning from the sabino and/or rabicano patterns. Lesli however pointed me to this site, and via that to the home website of the Balnecroft Stud, where most of the surviving true roan Cobs can be found.

As at the time, neither of these sources showed information on younger roan ponies (they have since been updated), I decided that the roan mare should be the oldest and the grandmother of my group. As her parents I chose the chestnut roan stallion Balnecroft Red Shadow and the liver chestnut mare Balnecroft Telyn. The model’s name is Balnecroft Gloriana and she has at least two real full siblings. I made her foaled in 1995, and had a momentary panic when researching this blog as I went back to the updated stud site and read that her sire had been gelded. However, All Breed Pedigree lists four of his offspring foaled after 1995, so I seem to be OK.

I wanted the chestnut mare to be her daughter, so I needed a sire likely to produce chestnut, preferably a model one. Bernadette O’Neill is well known as a fan and breeder of Welsh Cobs in the British model hobby, so I asked if she had anything suitable, and she suggested her palomino stallion Brynog Rhodri. His sire is Bernadette’s Llanarth Nebulous (Robin Hood (r) x Llanarth Rhoswen (r)) and his dam is Brambridge Cariad, who is a portrait model of Bernadette’s real mare of the same name, and has always been a favourite of mine. I was delighted to accept Rhodri as the sire for the chestnut mare, whom I called Clifton Firebird.

The youngest mare, Firebird’s daughter, is called Clifton Felicity and I already had a sire lined up for her, since while all this was going on I had succumbed to temptation and acquired this handsome fellow:

He is a Laura Behning ‘Cardiff’ resin painted by Molly Pengra of the USA, and his name is Llewellyn, although as yet he doesn’t have a prefix or a pedigree. Watch out here for a further post when I get him sorted out.

There is, however, an unexpected and exciting post-script to this story. A couple of years after Helen’s death, her mother Ann offered me another of her horses. Many people will remember PR Penrhyn Golden Arrow, a BFA customised by Margaret Hallam – he was Helen’s pride and joy, and probably her most successful model. Ann had kept him for a while, but after reading an article of mine on how models can be ‘reincarnated’ as their sons or daughters, she asked me to take Golden Arrow and do the same with him. She wanted him to have a ‘forever home’ where he would be shown, as a son of Golden Arrow, and asked me to use either ‘Golden’ or ‘Arrow’ as part of his name.

Naturally I was honoured and delighted to do this, and almost immediately his name and pedigree came to me. What better than to make him by Golden Arrow out of my mare Firebird, and to call him Golden Phoenix, as with this new identity he is metaphorically ‘rising from the ashes’? I’m sure you’ll see him around at the shows and I hope that he continues to do as well as he always did.

Thus, then, my little Welsh cob herd is doing well, and I’m sure will feature again here in future.