NaMoPaiMo - Over and Out

Well, NaMoPaiMo (National Model Painting Month) 2020 officially ended yesterday, and I sort of managed to make my goal of painting at least two horses this year.

Horse #2, a Stablemate G3 Cantering Warmblood, was kind of a last-minute project, but in spite of that she gave me much more trouble than Horse #1, the Lucky Charms-inspired Stablemate unicorn.  Probably just goes to show that nothing worthwhile can be accomplished by rushing (at least not by me).

Horse #2 started out to be a zorse -- a zebra/horse hybrid -- but at first I thought she had too few stripes and I added a few more until suddenly she had too many stripes and any attempt I made to fix things after that only made things worse.

So I decided to paint her mostly black, leaving some of the original brown basecoat showing to achieve a sort of sunburned black effect.  However, the effect I got was disappointing, probably because I hadn't really studied how to achieve a sunburned black before making this last-minute decision.

I figured she needed something to visually distract from the disaster her coat had become, so I took the time to research a few black overo pintos and then added some strategic white blotches to my poor black horse.  This time the result looked a whole lot better.

Anyway, after three incarnations and three paint jobs, I was willing to throw in the towel on this horse, at least for now.  So I took her picture, posted her as an "I Did This Too" horse on the NaMoPaiMo Facebook pages, and christened her "Triplet," for obvious reasons.

"Triplet" a Pinto Sport Horse

Seeing the picture, though, I am now less satisfied with what remains of the sunburned black effect and am considering painting it out.

So Horse #2 was definitely not as much fun to paint as Horse #1.  Next year, I think I'm going to stick to one horse and perhaps set myself a different challenge -- maybe painting on a larger scale, or learning how to paint dapples, or trying a really complex colour.

For now, though, I'm happy to put down the paintbrush for a little bit.  I still have other horses I want to paint, but just at the moment I have too much "life" stuff to do to really concentrate on hobby fun.  Which, of course, has not prevented me from making a few impulse buys during the past week or so.  I'll tell you more about them when they get here.