Almost time to go

I leave for Bring Out Your Chinas in just a few days. Now that the presentation and the name tags are done, I am starting to get excited. Joanie and Addi have come up with a very different format for an equine collectibles gathering, and I cannot wait to see how it turns out.

I know I am particularly interested in seeing how this guy turned out. He's going to be one of the table centerpieces for our meals. Different ceramic artists are sending special centerpieces, which will be fun to see. I am going to try to post the different ones here.

In fact, it is my hope that I'll be able to do some live blogging from the event. If there is a reliable internet connection there at the convention center, I will try to send pictures and posts.

What was I thinking??

When my husband and I joined our church, we were given name tags. They weren't the ordinary printed kind; instead someone had painstakingly embroidered each of our names alongside the shield that is the symbol for our denomination (Episcopalian). It was a very personal gesture of welcome that we, having only recently moved to the area, really appreciated.

So when it came time to come up with an idea for the Bring Out Your Chinas Convention swag bag, I wanted to do something that would give the participants that seem feeling of personal welcome. I am really good with the idea of welcoming.

I am not so good with numbers. Or estimating time. It's not like a didn't know there would be forty or so participants, which would mean designing and coloring forty cards. In the past I have shied away from Trading Card swaps because I wasn't sure I could finish the two or three cards required. Yet for some strange reason I just didn't think much about the scale of this a project. Needless to say, I really know what forty or more cards means now!



Still it was a fun break from my ordinary work. The horses (and a few dogs) are mounted on patterned or textured cardstock, and I got to play with colors that I don't usually get to use - like Jackie Arns-Rossi's card with the spring green background above.



This was one of my favorites of the group, done for fellow Collie person Mel Miller (her name is on the outside of the card holder).

The rest of them can be seen here. There are five pages in all, so look for the links at the bottom to take you to the next page.

A spaniel for Kelly

Since Kelly Savage is coming all the way from England to help out at BOYCC, it seemed only fair to make a special card for her (see her comments from the previous post). Kelly, it's not a proper English Cocker Spaniel, but it is a Cocker Spaniel for your name badge!

Swag!

When my friends Joan Berkwitz and Addi Hude began planning a true convention for the ceramic horse community, I knew I wanted to be involved. Joan had mentioned that they would be looking for donations for the "swag bag" that entrants received, and to be thinking of something I might want to do. I decided that we needed name badges. It seemed appropriate, because I'm a big believer in the idea that no one should feel like a stranger at a model horse gathering. But they couldn't be just any name tags. We needed artwork! And of course, if we were going to have artwork, all the horses needed to be cool colors. Lots of different colors.

I decided I would use lineart, which is common among those that enjoy two-dimensional horse art games. For the mock-up, I used Jacqueline Ferrigno's coloring book pages. For those that never outgrew coloring books, I highly recommend her site. That's him sporting leopard spots in the first photo.

That first badge was done last year, before I had the lineart prepared for the upcoming horse color book. Unfortunately my own artistic style isn't quite as romantic as Jacqueline's, but they do tie in with the presentation I will be giving at the convention. (The presentation is partially based on the contents of the book.)



When I did my sample, and the first few badges, the holders fit a 3 x 4 badge. That's the larger one at the bottom. Then when I returned to get more holders, the only kind available were smaller. I didn't realize this until I got them home, but they have the advantage of holding a card the same size as an Artist Trading Card. As a collector of those, I liked that idea so I decided to make the rest smaller. The top card is the smaller size. Hopefully no one will mind the inconsistency.



Here are some of the in-progress horses. They get cut out and pasted on the patterned paper backgrounds. It has been fun working with color again after months of focus on black and white book pages.



Here is a scan of one of the horses. No effort goes to waste around here; he's also an illustration in the upcoming book. I originally planned to color the book images digitally, but I found that the time saved on the repetitive parts was offset by how much longer it took me to do things. I suppose I am still a traditional artist at heart.



The horses were colored with Copic Sketch markers. I've always liked them, and for my last birthday my mother gave me this colorful box filled with them. I love their vibrant colors, and the brush tip (see the bottom marker) feels more like painting than coloring with a marker. And unlike my Intuos tablet, I can bring them with me to the beach next week. That's how I plan to spend Spring Break - sitting under the Spanish moss coloring little horse faces for my friends at BOYCC!

The book that ate my brain

As an avid reader, I noticed that in the acknowledgments, authors almost always thanked their long-suffering family members. I routinely wrote articles and blogged, so I really wondered just how bad could it be? Now I know.

I had great hopes that I could juggle studio work while finishing the upcoming horse color book, and still continue to post to the blog. Obviously that has not been happening! Over the last few months, my world has narrowed down to just the one thing: the book. I do not multitask well at all because I tend to lose myself in whatever project is in front of me, but I must admit that preparing a book has taken that obsessive focus to a new level. I am fortunate that those around me have been very patient with my partial presence; some part of me is always working on the book.

I am getting closer to completion, although I suspect that what looks like the end is just the beginning as I begin to deal with the actual publication. Towards that end, I have begun assembling the necessary photographs and illustrations. Just a few weeks ago, I made a trip to the National Sporting Library in Virginia in hopes of securing better digitized images from some old stud books. It was one of the few equine libraries I had not yet seen, so I was excited about the prospect. The building, pictured above, is in the style of an old coach house, and contains over 17,000 volumes dating as far back as the 16th century. I went with some specific goals, so I only had the chance to skim the surface of what was available there.


Civil War Horse, bronze by Tessa Pullan (1996). The sculpture, which stands just a short way from the spot where the Battle of Middleburg (part of the Gettysburg Campaign) was fought, commemorates the more than 1.5 million horses and mules that died in the Civil War.




There were restrictions on taking photos in the upper levels of the library due to some of the artwork on loan, which was a shame. The interior is lovely, and gives the impression that you are visiting the personal library of some nineteenth-century Virginia gentleman.

But this is where I spent most of my time: the basement. Over the years I've learned that the really useful stuff is usually in the basement. This one was far, far nicer than most. The moving shelves in the picture hold most of the stud books in the collection. To get to the necessary aisle, the handles are turned and each case slides along a track to open a path. If only I had something like this in my house! (Lacking such fancy solutions, I have relied on the Kindle to make space for more books.)



I intended to get better copies of images that I already had, but I made a few finds while I was there. One of the best was a handful of images of the famed, but sadly extinct, Hanoverian Creams. This one came from a 1909 book on horse breeds. There is a great deal of mystery surrounding the actual color of the Creams, so finding a handful of images was an unexpected bonus.


Pistachio, one of the last living Hanoverian Creams

So progress continues on the book, albeit slower than I would like. I had hoped to have copies in time for the Bring Out Your Chinas Convention, but I have other projects that have to be done for that event (including the presentation there) that are going to require that I set the book aside for a bit, so I suspect that is not going to happen. My next big make-or-break deadline will be BreyerFest. I am much more optimistic about making that one.

In the meantime, I fear this blog may still be more sporadic than usual. I have gone ahead and set up the blog for the book, but it is only a placeholder at this point. It should go live once the book is well and truly off to the printers. That's also when I should return to the studio, and pictures of shiny ponies will once again appear here.

Articles on Pattern Interaction

With the unfortunate passing of the Realistic Equine Sculpture Society, publication of the organization's newsletter The Boat has ended. The last issue was sent to members this past week.

Like so many readers, I eagerly looked forward to each issue. Twice a year we were treated to 200+ pages of in-depth information on everything remotely related to the business of realistic equine art. I benefited immensely from what others wrote, and I was flattered to be asked to contribute articles of my own.

When my friend Sarah (the tireless Boat editor) asked if I would do a regular column, she suggested that I write something more advanced that the usual "this gene does this" type of series. I jumped at the chance to explore a topic that I had only touched on briefly in previous seminars and articles, which was how the different patterns interact with one another. It's pretty esoteric stuff for real horse people, but for us as artists there aren't many aspects of horse color that are more useful. We need to know which interesting aspect of a reference can be realistically combined with a different pattern, because all of us do that a lot. Can this face marking go with that blanket pattern? If I decide to use grey as a background color instead of bay, what changes about the spots on my leopard? All of these are important questions for us, and I thought it would be fun to look at them from an artist's point of view.

I decided to start with the appaloosa patterns. I had not written extensively about them before, and there was a lot of ongoing research into them. There was a lot of potential for new discoveries. I also, as it turned out, had become the rather unexpected owner of a very loud appaloosa of my own.

Four installments of the series "Hoist the Colors" were published. A fifth is partially completed. Since the position of RESS was that the copyrights remained with the authors, I can republish the articles however I see fit. I decided to upload them to the website. The links for each one are:


Part 1 - Pattern Interaction Overview


Part 2 - Appaloosa Pattern Basics


Part 3 - Base Color Interaction


Part 4 - Appaloosa Dilution

I probably will not get to the (almost finished) fifth part until after the first volume of the Color Book is published. Right now that is tentatively scheduled to coincide with Bring Out Your Chinas Convention in May. So if the blog is quiet in the upcoming months, know that I am just working on that - and the studio backlog.

Once the first book is out, I do plan to split this blog off with a separate one devoted to horse color. I have been told that publishing tends to flush out missing information (that is, you will get a lot of corrections!), which has been part of my motivation in writing. I want to make that easier, so a blog seems logical. I just don't want the subject of horse color, which by its very nature is likely to generate a bit more two-way conversation, to overwhelm the studio chatter here. So watch for that later this year!

In the meantime, I'll still be posting the goings-on here at the studio. I am not sure there will be a lot of new information since I am focusing so much on the books. But little by little I am trying to wrap up stalled projects, and as those are finished I will try to post pictures at the very least.

More snow pictures

The first time I saw Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig's Vixen, there was something about her expression and posture that reminded me of my own spunky little mare. We were fortunate enough to get snow over Christmas and I was able to take a few shots of Sprinkles playing in it. The above picture reminded me very much of the pose on Vixen. Perhaps Vixen is tossing up her tail after dodging a few snowballs thrown in her direction. That was what Sprinkles was doing with my husband - or at least what she was doing before she decided to steal the snowballs and eat them.



That was a few weeks ago, and today we are snowed in once again. It's a good day to work on reorganizing the studio, since potential power outages make me leery of throwing anything valuable in the kiln. (I always worry about color loss when refiring things.) When vital tools - and their duplicates, purchased during previous periods of hiding - go missing, it's time to impose some kind of order on things.



In the meantime, I hope my fellow southerners are enjoying our unusually snowy winter. It's a good opportunity to spend time in a studio - even if it's only cleaning one.