New horses for 2010

I have been dying to be able to announce these two new pieces ever since last Mayhem, when Sarah first showed them to us while they were still in progress. Sarah has more information about "Elsie" and "Oliver" on her blog, and as she mentions the two will be produced in earthenware here at Blackberry Lane.

These will be the first non-mini edition, and I am excited about the opportunity to work on a larger 'canvas'. I also have a soft spot for broodmares. When Sarah explained that she wanted to do a set that touched on the universal theme of motherhood, I was sure I wanted to produce them. Even so, I wasn't really prepared for how much these two really resonate with me.



Which is probably a good thing, because while their "story" makes my heart sing, that mare's tail is making my mold-making mind reel! I have no doubt that we'll get them translated into ceramic, but I suspect they will make for some interesting blog posts before it's all over.

Just call me Gimpy

I meant to send a post before my surgery, letting everyone know that the posts to the blog might slow down a bit for the next few weeks. Unfortunately getting everything in order so that I could take six weeks off took more time than I expected.

But just so readers know, I went in for foot surgery this past Friday. The doctor shortened one of the bones inside my foot, reconstructed the damaged joint, and secured it all with screws. At the moment I am pretty much confined to the sofa, which is probably just as well since I am pretty heavily medicated. (The instructions on the prescription bottles say I should no operate heavy machinery, and Alan insists that includes Xacto blades.) Hopefully by the end of this week, I'll graduate to crutches and then a bit later just an orthopedic "boot".

Although posts to the blog will likely slow down, I had a number of older topics that I took pictures for but never got around to posting. I'm going to try to get some of those up in the next few weeks. These are older projects, so they might seem a bit out of order, but they have some useful information.

I will also be posting about the new editions from the studio for this year. I might be sidelined at the moment, there are a lot of exciting things planned for the near future.

Thistle auction

There are more pictures of the claybody custom Highland Pony mare, "Thistle", on the website now. (There is a second page of pictures that is linked to that page.) Her auction page is up on the Auction Barn here, though it doesn't go live until 8pm.

She'll be the last piece from the studio before I go on hiatus following my surgery, but I'll explain more about that in a later post.

Snow day!

We got our second snow in as many months. Three inches fell overnight, so it's still sitting undisturbed (aside from a few bunny tracks). In a few hours, it will be covered with sledding tracks and converted into snowmen. Like this guy from a few weeks ago:



There he is guarding my mailbox with his nerf sword. I thought the "angry eyebrows" were a nice touch. Of course, Emma would point out that he is facing the wrong way. Evil brown delivery trucks approach from the other direction.

But for now there is a view of pristine snow from the studio window (that's the window visible to the right in the first picture). It has been a good morning for working on the blog index, which is now up on the website.

Organizing it made me realize just how much information has accumulated here on the blog. I was also surprised to see just how often I posted about mold-making, since I don't consider that to be my real area of expertise. I am, truly, still learning that skill. But it is true that the best way to learn is to teach, so explaining the process has really helped me to better understand it myself. I was also surprised to see just how often horse color has creeped in, because I had decided early on that the blog would be about the studio, and not about my research. I guess the two things are more intertwined for me than I realized.

Hopefully with the index the information posted in the past will be more useful to others. I know it's going to help me remember what I have already talked about here, and what hasn't been covered and might be new and interesting. After more than three years, the real challenge is not to repeat myself too much!

As promised...

This time it's a shiny Highland Pony. This is "Thistle", a claybody custom sculpted by Sarah Minkiewicz and glazed here at Blackberry Lane.

She'll be headed to the Auction Barn late next week.

The fun part

I want to thank everyone who wrote over the last few weeks to encourage me to publish the horse color book in its entirety. I am still not sure how that will work from a logistics standpoint - publishing the book in two volumes seems to be the most likely route at the moment - but I have decided that it will contain everything that I know on the subject of breeds and their colors.

I also decided that I needed to make an effort to include more photographs. Even with the planned illustrations, there is just a lot of text. Walls of text. So I've been reaching out to people with photos of unusually colored horses with the hopes of including them. It feels a bit like a scavenger hunt, which has been fun. ("Got a true roan Shire? Check!")

The photo above is one recently added to my "have permission to use" list. It's a particularly striking example of silver dapple in the Highland Pony. My friend Caroline Jones took the shot and agreed to allow me to use it and several other pony pictures for the book. It makes me wish that the body of the book was being published in color, but even in black and white the color on that mare is hard to miss.



It's the color I keep envisioning on Sarah MB's Halflinger mare, maybe because it reminds me of the Miniature mare that Sarah, Joan and I visited during Mayhem one year.

I've also had Highland Ponies on my mind because I'm about to list (at long last!) the second of claybody customs that Sarah and I did, and this next one is a Highland Pony. She's a silver dapple dun gone grey, and like the mare above she's just full of dappley goodness. As soon as the Charlotte weather gives me something other than dreary overcast skies, I will post teaser photos.

The book

Much of my attention lately has been taken up with working on my horse color book. It's a project that I've been working on, on and off, for years. I decided last year that it really needed to become a priority, or it was never going to be completed. I set a target of having it ready in time for BreyerFest 2010. It will be the 21st BreyerFest and the 15th annual North American Nationals, and it seems to be shaping as an informal "old timers" reunion. Knowing that my friend Ardith Carlton will be there (with her own book on artist Julie Froelich) has given me a little additional incentive.

The manuscript is still far from finished. Whole passages are rough, and the text is peppered with little side comments about facts that need to be double-checked. (I live in fear that one of them will escape the editors, and the book will be printed with something like "surely this color notation is wrong - check!" somewhere in the text.) It was close enough, however, that I started testing formats and book sizes with the hopes of finding a good fit - and getting a page estimate.

I suspected the book was running a little too long. Unfortunately for me, my suspicions were off. It wasn't running a little too long; it was running way too long. I ended up with an estimate of close to 800 pages, and that was just the text. I was only just starting to work on the illustrations so they were not factored in to the count. Not only is number of people that interested in horse color rather small, there are page limits on perfect binding. So I am mulling over my options. Do I drop the rarer breeds? (Does anyone really care if the Asturcón are sometimes chestnut?) Do I pull out some of the specifics and publish them in a separate appendix? Or do I break the whole project into two or more volumes?

So those are the things I am mulling over, all while I am laughing at myself. This was supposed to be the small book - the "easy" book - that I published before tackling the "real" horse color book. How long could a book on the history of color in the different breeds be? I would write this short one, and then tackle the harder "everything I know about identifying colors and patterns" book later. I should have known that I don't know how to do short and easy projects.



But I have been encouraged by these old printouts I found while going through my old notes. They are from the first horse color seminar I gave. The date in the corner is 2001 - the same year that my youngest son was born. He was five months old when I gave the presentation. Somehow I managed to complete the whole thing, including more than 30 illustrations, in just a few months with a newborn in the house. If I could do that, I should be able to make this book deadline standing on my head. At least, that's what I am telling myself!

And this time around, I have much better tools. I used illustrations when I did the presentation in part out of necessity. It would be too difficult to track down the copyright holders for the photos that I would need to illustrate my points. I also thought that whimsical ink and marker drawings might make the subject matter a little less intimidating. It worked wonderfully.

Except that it was time-consuming. I reused the lineart, as you can see with the stock horse that modeled the pinto patterns, but I had to ink it each time. And the colors were limited. I left out the (then newly discovered) champagne gene because I could not find the right shades of taupe! If only I had known how to make digital images, I could have save myself a lot of effort.

And that is what I am doing with the book. Although it will have photographs, my experience with the presentations taught me that sometimes the most helpful image is a drawing.



For this project, I only have to ink things by hand once. Here is one of the inked line arts that I will be using in the book. There are several different ones that are posed according to what parts I might need to illustrate. This one is for large body pattern illustrations where the face markings are less important. There is one with a dramatic head turn for when I need to show what is going on with the face.



Here the ink drawing has been scanned in and I've started inking it electronically with my fancy new Intuos4 tablet. The original ink lines (now a light gray) are still visible under the darker digital ones. After that has been done, I'll be able to create a template of not only the lines but also the basic shading. That will give me a base that can be used for making multiple illustrations more quickly.

Being such a visual person, and being able to make whatever image I think might clarify the text, probably isn't going to help my page number problem. So I'm setting the book and the drawings aside for a week or two, and returning to the studio. I find that sometimes answers come after I let a problem sit for a bit while I immerse myself in something completely different. Perhaps an inspired solution will come to me while I erase hundreds of little dapples!