I'M SOOOOOOOO BAD!!!!!!!

Eek! my wallet is weeping! I just bought a unpainted Sheri Rhodes "Bear" drafter resin, he's broken, but will be a 10 minuet repair and was super cheap. But I really have to stop spending every little bit of money I get in :)
Must SELL more horses! MUST NOT BUY more horses! Lather, rinse, repeat.

GRRRRRR Website problems

I am so completely computer stupid that I struggle to even manage this blog. So what do I decide to do? Attempt a long over due update to my website. Well as I'm playing with Print Shop making business cards and magnets, I see that there are website templates. So I figure "why not?" and set up a basic webpage layout. Nothing fancy, but it does have my new logo, a clip art image that I dinked with to fit my needs. OK, it took time, but no real problems. They didn't crop up until I tried to see weather I could load it onto my website. Ummm... when I used the publish to the web function I got some message that I didn't understand(not really surprising :P) so I then went to my site providers web builder, no go there either, theres no option to load from a outside source. So today has been very long and unproductive and I still need to do those overdue updates and figure out how to get my logo to work on my site. I guess that's a job for another day.

The custom that ate my brain

You would think a nice dark seal bay tobiano would be a pretty straight forward, and fairly simple custom, right? Maybe for anyone else in the world, but of course not me! As with all tradgies it started off so well. Prepping and priming, no problems. Masking, no more difficult than usual. Painting, beautifully. Removing the mask.........yea, that didn't go so well, like it wouldn't come off. GRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nothing I did would make it come off without killing the finish, so I just gave up and stripped it so I could start from scratch. Then to add insult to injury it started raining, and I don't mean just a little rain, I mean like days upon days of steady to torrential downpours equaling enough rain to make up for the summer deficit and make a huge dent into our fall totals. LOTS OF WATER!!! Which meant I got no work done because it was taking three days for each coat of primer to dry, and my pastels, for lack of a better word, kept curdling and just altogether being clumpy and not worth the aggravation. Anyway, finally it dried out enough for me to finish the pastel work, and this time the mask came off(different masking method) fine, so on I when to cleaning up and clearing up the white markings. And your never guess what happened next.......... MORE RAIN!!!!!!! OMG! should we start building a ark? Now I'm having problems with the washes of white drying, it's like every time I thought I was finally getting in the groove to get this model finished something else would pop up.

Long story short, he's finally finished, and I think he turned out really well for all the trials he put me through, and hopefully the next job will go MUCH smoother.

EEK!!!!

I can't beleive it! I got chosen as a guest artist for Michelle Platt's new TB resin "Emboldened"
http://www.equinartcreations.com/Emboldened.html I can't wait till I get him in my grubby little hands :) Now to think of a fitting color for him that will work as either a TB or QH.

On a roll

I've been a busy, busy bee here lately. Three horses in a little over a week completed. Whew! I've gotten photo approval on them, but as always I'm stressing that the client won't like them as much in person as they do on screen, don't know why I do this every time, as so far I haven't heard any complaints, but I do none the less. Oh well, I guess it keeps me humble and makes me continue to strive for improvement.

Went a little model crazy over the last week, bought myself both WalMart mustang sets that have the new mold foal in them, just for the foals which meant that Hailey got two new classics, to bring her collection of Breyers to a total of three. Not bad for a four and a half year old :)

Also got myself a real deal on the new JC Penny, Palomino CB, he's gorgeous, and I may leave him OF, haven't decided yet, his only flaws are a tiny bit of over spray up by his bridlepath on the left and some over masking on the right side of his mane, otherwise he is flawless. Love the new mane on him. My other model splurge, came from the same seller and is a Stone TB with a good bit of customizing done on him to turn him into a pleasure mule. I can't wait to find some time to work on him, he has such potential. And last but not least, yesterday I got at Target, the G3 pony, jumper and the hard to find pearl white TB, though unfortunately he isn't mint as he has a grey streak across his barrel on the package side, but I have plans to do a simple semi custom on him of a extreme sabiano TB that I have pics of.

Now just to keep the work coming so I can continue to feed my model obsession :)

Ebay puts Stone in their place.

The most interesting gossip of the last few days is the Peter Stone Company's auction and store being pulled from ebay due to violations. The most asked question being why? In my opinion? Karma! This is for all the crap they produce, and then expect consumers to pay full price for. What goes around, comes around. Make good high quality models, that actually make hobbyist happy without having to pester the company about fixing their sub-standard models, and good things will come to them. Make crap, that hobbyists have to return for repairs time after time, and get crap in return. Maybe they will learn from this experience, that contrary to popular belief, they are NOT the end all, be all, omnipotence that they seem to think they are. Though I won't hold my breath. This is not to say that they don't make some nice horses, but they seem to be fewer and father between. As it stands the prices they are expecting are exorbitant and out of the range of most hobbyist . This is one case where price SHOULD equate quality, but has been falling short in far to many cases. Hairs, fingerprints, scratches, gouges and blisters are unacceptable in my book and do not constitute quality when most if not all can be avoided. Hairs I can see happening on occasion, sometime no matter how hard you try they show up, I know this from experience, but come on this is becoming a common occurrence with them. And fingerprints! Give me a break, simple fix, WEAR GLOVES and gee don't touch wet paint, who would have though. People shouldn't be expected to pay full price for models with these kind of problems, yet that's just what Stone has been getting away with. Right now there are a couple of Stone's that I would love to be able to add to my collection, but since Stone no longer sees the need to produce regular runs for those hobbyists like myself who don't have unlimited wealth, they are well beyond my means, and don't even get me started on all the supposedly LE's, show specials, FCM's and EFCM's that abound. I'm sorry but I'll stick with my Breyers where I know I can get a quality model for the hard earned money I'm paying.

Long time, no blog

I guess that's a good thing, it means I've been busy. Got a commission Albronozo done, the golden buckskin one, painted my copy a yummy buttercream buckskin sabino and have finished the drastic CM commission that I've been working on, though I haven't got him photographed yet for finial customer approval. After the big ebay disappointment I had the opportunity to get a total steal of a deal on a mini Haggis in need of stripping, this not so little guy is so cool, I can't wait to have the time to get him stripped, though I'm not really in any hurry, since I don't know what color I want to paint him yet. I've contracted two more commissions for a total of six horses between them, mostly SMs, which is nice, because they don't take nearly as long as trads and make for a nice vacation from the big guys. On the down side I had found a trad Haggis in my price range and was keeping a eye on, when of course, at the last minuet his price skyrocketed through the roof, making it so I couldn't afford him. Sometimes life sucks :(