Painted Andres!

We have shipped out a bunch of Andres in the last 6 weeks, and some painted ones are showing up here and there, how exciting for me as the sculptor to see him brought to life! The following silver bay was painted and photographed by Tammy Myrold:

Dramatic sooty bay painted and photographed by Sara Gifford:

 

An ethereal star dappled gray by Mindy Berg:

  

Andre is available for ordering until April 30th 2014. Sales info on his webpage here

Andre in Primer

Sometimes I can skip the primer step if I feel confident that I have gotten every little imperfection sorted out to my satisfaction, but will all of Andre's feathers I felt I had better not skip it. The other advantage of primer is it makes it far easier to get decent photos, since a white object is really hard to photograph. One of the drawbacks is I now have to wait a few days for the primer to completely set before I can resume work on him, so it looks like his release is going to be in February as opposed to my optimistic estimation of January. I struggle with my model horse photography, and am going to try to get more photos together, but so far, after two photo sessions, I have a small handful of ones that show him pretty well:

Andre coming soon, and Tiny ending soon!

As it turns out we are having a non-winter here. In fact there is almost no snow, so instead of skiing we resumed riding. There are flies out now, so wrong for January in the Colorado mountains. Perhaps February will bring much needed moisture. Speaking of February, and I can hardly believe it has almost been a year, Tiny's edition closes on FEBRUARY 12TH! His webpage with ordering information is here.

A few photos from the gobs of awesome ones people sent me of their painted Tinys:

 Painted by Tammy Myrold

 Painted by Billie Campbell

 Painted by Jaime Baker

 Painted by Stephanie Michaud

 Painted by Lauren Hoeffer

Painted by Mindy Berg

And, yes, Andre is coming soon! I don't have an exact release date or price set just yet, but it is going to be before Tiny's edition closes, so best to get those Tiny orders in ASAP to avoid being stuck behind the Andre orders.

Heavy Drafter-O-Rama!

Fall is such a busy time for us, with country living comes extra preparations for the coming winter, and at 7200 feet in Colorado it can be quite a winter! Somehow we lucked out on firewood with both neighbors giving us some, and Todd only had to split it, so that helped a lot. 

This summer we spent less time playing and more time working, with most of the work being in the form of brush clearing and fence building. We only have 3 acres, but parts of it are pretty wild with two creek crossings with steep banks. The brush clearing project has been going on for several summers, in fact, and is ongoing. But the fence is done! Hurray! That means that for the first time in several winters the horses can just be turned out and not stuck in their corral. A major life improvement for them.

In the spring:

I am shoving more brush into the burning pile:

 

Todd building braces:

 

 

Wayne and Sonya helped us for a day, what great friends!

 

 

Release day! They were so happy!

Now for what you actually want to see!

In the studio a lot of progress has been made on Andre the drafter. I dare say he is one of my all time favorites, there is something so endearing about him with his expressive face, flying feathers, and plethora of wrinkles! I do not know when he will be released, I am a painfully slow sculptor and often need to set things aside to give my brain a break. But it won't be terribly long, sometime in the next few months certainly. Here are a few pics of how he looks currently:

 

Now being that most model horse people know a lot about breeds of horses, there are probably still a few of you thinking to yourselves that his legs are too short, or his neck is too short, or, wait, his eyes are too small, aren't they?  Andre isn't meant to depict a specific breed, but more the typical body type of several European heavy draft breeds. Here are photos of a few of these "hay fueled  tractors":

Not hairy enough in the feather department? Try this one:

Or this one:

Are they really that fleshy? This guy says yes:

Are their butts really that big? Really? Ask these well endowed individuals:

 

Also apparent in the photos is the relative smallness of the eyes. Horse eyes only get so big, so when an average horse is 15 hands and maybe 1200 lbs, these guys can be 16 or more hands high (heavy draft breeds aren't as tall as the leggy drafts, like Shires or modern Percherons), and 2000+ pounds, with about the same size eye as the 15 hand horse.  

I pulled these photos out of my reference folder, and don't know who all the photographers are. When using photos for sculpture reference it isn't as important than if you were doing paintings from them and need permission. I do know that many of them were from Ton van der Weerden's Flicker  A few were from equine photographer Lothar Lenz's Flicker  I am not sure about the rest, but if you want more heavy draft goodness check out this Tumbler: Hell Yeah Heavy Horses!

I love these heavy drafters and plan to do more of them, in either sculpture or painting form, in the near future.

Andre resurrected, "Hairy" painting to eBay

The original pastel painting "Hairy" has been listed to eBay:

"Hairy" is a 9 X 12 on Pastelmat professional pastel cardstock. Pastels used were NuPastel, Unison, Mount Vision, and Sennelier. 

View the auction here

Auction ends Monday September 16th

All of this painting put me back in the mood to sculpt, and for some reason I was compelled to pull Andre out of the closet. Remember Andre? I started him years ago, then another artist released a resin in the same pose (it happens) so I set him aside. Here is how he looked the last time he was on this blog:

 

 Putting him on the sculpting stand and looking him over I realized that with a few adjustments he could be cantering. And who doesn't love a big chunky cantering draft horse? No one, we all love cantering draft horses. The butt wrinkle possibilities alone are mind boggling!

Marwari anyone?

It's finally starting to feel like spring around here, with that comes a much more challenging to-do list. Winter has it's drawbacks, but there is quite a bit more 'free' time to pursue other things like the pastel painting. That will have to be set aside for awhile while I try to figure out how to squeeze more time out of a day. Here's the last one, I will probably have prints made at some point:

Speaking of prints, all the current orders are shipping today! Yay! They turned out gorgeous, and are on heavy archival paper. Fine Print was very patient with me and all my beginner issues. This also means I now have prints on hand for quick shipment. To see what's available visit my Etsy shop. Since I am taking delivery of the prints and doing the shipping I decided to go ahead and sign and number each print, with the edition sizes being set at 200. 

On to other news, I am going to be releasing at least one more mini in the next few months, and possibly another in the fall. Minis work out better for me in several ways, so that is where my focus is going to be for awhile. There may be a shrinky of an older edition, too, but I have not yet decided. While shrinkies of older popular editions are well liked, people seem to LOVE new sculpts! Here is my current project, a Marwari, and I am totally open to comments as usual:

 

Fat Tuesday

Fat Tuesday (February 12th) will be the day of Tiny's release, finally! It seemed appropriate that such a large little guy have his big day on Fat Tuesday. My idea for the mold worked and he will be cast all in one piece with the resin being poured into the mold via his left hind leg/tail, so he will be super easy to clean up for shipping with no need to fit the base and deal with hoof pegs or a belly vent. I'm passing this time savings on to my customers by keeping the price at $75.00, even though he is larger than the average stablemate scale horse. He's in scale, he's just a big horse! 

There are a few new mustang paintings, too. I have found a few photographers willing to allow paintings to be done from their photos, as well as BLM photos which are public domain. The more paintings of mustangs I do the more I want to help, even though it will only be in a small way, it all adds up right? A portion of each mustang painting sale will go to mustang charites, starting with a local group that advocates for our local mustangs by raising awareness, purchasing and setting up safe mustang handling corrals and chutes, and working with the Forest Service to eradicate noxious weeds, maintain fences, and keep the watering holes cleaned out. The first three mustang paintings are in the giclee print process pipeline as I type, with my goal being a 2014 calendar this fall, as well as various sizes of prints and possibly other items like note cards being available.

This guy is not quite finished, I need to add his auction tag, but he's one of my favorites. Photo reference provided by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM):

Branching out to 'on the range' paintings with this one titled "On the Edge". Photo reference provided by TJ Holmes who has a wonderful blog about our local mustangs. This is the stallion "David":

 

Here's the most recent painting, finished just yesterday, "Aspen of Spring Creek Basin" from another one of TJ's great photos:

Obviously this painting thing is becoming an obsession. Painting AND horses AND the west...I think I'm doomed.