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…