Make: Hartland
Scale: Traditional-ish
Mold: Rearing Mustang
Color: Metallic Green-Blue-Purple-Magenta
Gallery: Other
Medium: Liquitex Artist’s Color Acrylics (Gesso, Bright Gold) and FolkArt (668 Metallic Plum, 654 Metallic Amethyst, 670 Metallic Blue Pearl, 655 Metallic Aquamarine)
Status: Painted June 2013 and SOLD (Custom Order)

I very rarely do anything larger than a stablemate and I certainly don’t do them as custom orders– but when the chance popped up to paint a Hartland— how could I say no? 😀

Since the only theme given for this guy was “iridescent” my Muses got to go crazy!

I started off with the general idea of an oil slick, crossed with the color-changing paint I’d seen on some cars, and with a touch of the glass vases that popped up in the Google image searches. (Which was the inspiration for the spots.)

Once I had the idea in mind, I roughed out the color positioning. The general idea was that the colors would flow from aquamarine->blue pearl->amethyst->plum, but the blocks were meant to carve out little kingdoms of undiluted color.

You can see from the pictures that this paint goes on almost translucent… the final product has dozens, if not hundreds, of layers. And the ‘hundreds’ is only a mild exaggeration, this guy took forever and day to paint.

I really wish I’d been able to take better in-progress photos, it was really hard to see the progress after a while so I’ve left out a lot of the pics I did take. *dreams of finding a hobby photographer that will take payment in blue appaloosas*

In my original doodles the faux-appaloosa spots started out as being white with gold rims, but in the end it looked much better just solid gold. It was one of those time when ‘good on paper’ failed to live up to ‘good on horse.’

Otherwise this little guy did manage to sync up with the picture I had in my head when I started. The shifts between colors are as near to invisible as I could make them and he has this wonderful luster to him that I never managed to capture quite right on film. (Or what passes for film, nowadays)

Since this guy is a traditional and about six times the size of my normal works, the pictures for this guy are wider than my normal stablemate photos, so you’ll have to click through the smaller pics to get a good look at this guy! 🙂