Here is what the “dappled tomato” looks like in his finished dapple black color!

You can see how much carefully airbrushing layers of only black glaze backed off the bright red tones originally in the base color. I had to put a pretty strong side/below light on the piece in order to get the brown areas to light up in these photos. To the casual eye in average natural light, he will look pretty much like a black horse. Happily, he no longer will make anyone think of a tomato when Kim Knight of California shows him off!

Also this week I finished up the dapple liver chestnut tobiano Boreas. Definitely the last pinto china Boreas I’m glazing! Didn’t he come out nice? I love his head markings. He’s going home to Rhoda Wirtz in North Carolina.

I’ve been casting Keeshond dog tiles like mad this past week. I successfully made a second plaster mold from the rubber master mold, so now I can make more of them faster. In fact I need to run down to Denver and get more plaster so I can make yet another because my first one is pretty much played out. (And I figured out why some of them were curling down at the corners when drying so I no longer have bulgy convex tiles!)

The Keeshond National Specialty show (all Keeshond breed championship show) is in Colorado Springs in May and I am determined to have a bunch of finished tiles in frames, and jewelry and trinket boxes, in time to take there. The show is the week before we fly to England so by then I’ll be all packed and ready to leave—and looking for something else to take my mind off that! Spending a couple days in beautiful Co Springs will be just the thing.

Here’s what the Tomato (and my apologies to Kim, his future owner, for making sport with him) looks like after the first application of black color. Eek, now he looks like some sort of Halloween art! But you can see where he’s headed:

I airbrushed the entire horse with black overglaze, lightly or deeply covering the parts of the horse as needed. That “tomato” color underneath now gives this piece that gorgeous richness coming through instead of just a flat black.

Because I will want the tips of the mane, tail, and forelock to be sharply defined, I cleaned off the black overspray on the ends of those areas before firing this stage. That’s why right now those parts look too light and stop too abruptly. But that’s OK, because the next step is to deepen the tips with russet color and then shade with black and merge into the rest of the mane/tail/forelock.

By the way, I need something to hold onto during this process; that’s why the back legs haven’t had any paint yet. Now that the front legs have color I can paint the backs, and the black color will seamlessly blend with the rest of the body.

And here’s a dappled flaxen chestnut pinto Boreas, also to be finished this week. I shot him a little from the top to show off the pretty white marking which flows into the top of his tail, so he looks a little foreshortened in perspective.

I have a bunch of finished pieces going out this week.
Here is the dappled bay Caprice, a lot different now from how he looked in this post! He’s going home to Jeanene Bernardin in California. Lucky girl! I need to add a bay like this to my own collection.

Next are the finished contest pieces:

This week I’m starting on quite a few new things. I really only have another month for glazing, and then I must switch to the sculptures. I have to put all the art supplies and tools I want to take to England into the shipping crate, in mid-April!

I’m going to attempt to “save” this Hagen-Renaker “Roan Lady”. It has a big glaze drip with air bubbles in the belly, and a very very flat painting job. Can this piece be saved and changed to an amazing new color instead? Stay tuned!

I am also glazing another Boreas head, to dapple grey:

Lastly, I present you the DAPPLED TOMATO!

No, this is not a hot new horse color fad I’m creating! This horse will ultimately be a dappled black, the kind that has subtle reddish-gold coloring in the pangare areas and the ends of the mane, tail, and forelock. But right now, before I start painting the black, he definitely is the dappled tomato!

I also need to complete an Optime, a Boreas, and the Breyer “Giselle”. It is hard to say whether I’ll have any more time to glaze some pieces that are not on the commissions list.

I bought my one-way airline ticket to England yesterday. The dogs and I are flying on May 26. Hooray! Paul moves into the Maidenhead house on March 9. There was a month’s delay because the owner of the house had a delay in his move. He is relocating to Dubai! (And I thought we were moving to a new “foreign” land, whew!) So Paul has been in a short-term apartment in Windsor this past month. He’s been running on the parklands around Windsor Castle; I’m so jealous. He’s going to Istanbul tomorrow on business. I’m even more jealous!!!

I thought I’d share the progress on the December essay contest prizes. They are all just about finished. The Hadrian has the most work to go yet; he’s going to be a light rose grey. I decided to challenge my air eraser a bit and so he has a lot of really fine dapples. They don’t show up well in the photo but I was very pleased with how fine I was able to “draw” them. The Boreas head just needs the eyes done and a shot of airbrushed pink on the muzzle. Same with the Lucas Studio pin, they just need the teensy spritz of nose pink!

I’m happy to report that all my various health tests came back with good results. I am not a toxic waste dump of heavy metals after airbrushing glazes for 6 years! And all my other routine tests show that I am in superb health for a 49-year old. Interestingly, we did discover that my thyroid is slightly under-functioning. Which is quite common for middle-aged women for some reason. The very interesting thing is that I don’t have any of the typical symptoms, so I am on a daily thyroid pill now and waiting to see if all of a sudden I feel like the energizer bunny! Because some of the issues include lack of energy, sluggishness, mild depression, and weight gain! I do wonder if my lack of enthusiasm for art work recently could have been tied in with that somehow. I guess we’ll see!

During the course of all this fact-finding about my health, I did some web searching on the materials I use in glazing. One of the more interesting ones was that isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol is really pretty bad for you if you ingest it. However, ethyl alcohol, the kind used in the food industry and in cocktails, is not. So I am experimenting using cheap VODKA as my liquid for making my airbrushable overglazes!! (Might as well go with what I had on hand…!) The mix so far needs a little tweaking but other than my spray booth reeking of booze, I think it should be working fine. A friend also suggested denatured alcohol which is another kind of ethyl alcohol which might be cheaper so I may check into that too. The dappled bay Caprice will be the first china horse to come out of the booze-glaze program! (Hmm, I think that concept is ripe for a funny name of some sort but I can’t come up with one.)

And don’t be alarmed, anything I mix with the overglaze pigment powders totally burns off in the kiln. It’s merely a delivery system for the color which sinks into the gloss finish permanently. People use all kinds of different oils in chinapainting; it all depends on your technique and the look you are going for.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly 3 weeks since I wrote on the blog.

I have to confess that I have been stalled on glazing work on china pieces since my last posting. I’ve been trying to understand what has been the cause of this chronic sore throat I’ve had for several years now. I was wondering if airbrushing ceramic glazes without using a mask or even a professional spraying booth might be irritating things in my head. It is so minor and comes and goes, that it was pretty “ignorable”. But we have been requested by Paul’s company to update all our medical records and get a physical before we go over there, so I took that opportunity to ask my Dr about it.

I got the full range of routine and diagnostic tests run, and we even decided to have a “heavy metals” test done. The materials data sheet for the overglazes I use show that they contain lead and cadmium, among others. Though in very small amounts. And I glaze in very small amounts. But even so, it was worth checking to see if I had any amounts of stuff like that in my system. Plus I was reading on the web that even the common rubbing alcohol I use as the liquid media for the airbrushable glazes, is an irritant to the sinus/respiratory system. Hmmm.

My Dr is pretty skeptical that the glazing is causing this issue; in fact we are guessing it is an allergy. Though I’ve never had allergies, I guess you can develop them. I’ve been on a nasal spray steroid for a week now so we’ll see. But all this has kind of put me off wanting to do any glazing the past few weeks! What a kill-joy for an artistic worklife.

During my little exile from glazing, I did instead get some critical work done on the “Clarity” sculpture. I think I am finally content with the back legs position. I know I said that last fall also… but I switched them completely and switched them back since then! So I pretty much had to build the back end, again. (It’s still not fully built by any means, but at least roughed-in). I sure wish I had kept it the way it was the first time around, when I look back at the photos. Well at least now I should be able to start refining and defining everything.

On the England front, Paul was back here for a (very fast) week. They kicked him back to the USA because in order to get a visa you have to submit your passports and you obviously can’t travel then. But we now have it, our official approval to live and work in the UK! WOOT! He went back there for good last Sunday. He landed early Monday just before they closed Heathrow airport due to the big snow storm over there!

Now I am doing the long solo slog to late May when the Boyz and I get to go over. According to the little ticker I put on my blog page, as of today I have 3 months 3 weeks 2 days to go! (I think I want hours and minutes too…!)

I did finally get back in the glazing saddle today. I found some really comfortable dust masks that I can actually stand to have on my face for a couple hours at a time. That plus the spray booth should be good I would think!
This “Caprice” in bone china is going to be bay! All that dappling detail had to go on first, because for various reasons I can’t use the air-eraser to dapple on a colored horse as the last layer. This is so opposite to the way I used to paint non-ceramic horses. I would shade each layer of the body color and hand-dapple with the airbrush as I went along, with the darkest dapples going on the darkest areas last. I spent a lot of the 6 years I’ve had my own kiln searching for a way to paint dapples with overglazes that way. But this is the way for overglazing to get the look I want, and I’m getting it more right with each piece I do.

Paul is gone and I no longer have any distractions or excuses for not getting work done. The days will go far faster when I dive into projects.

By the way, hello to new readers of this blog. I noticed an uptick in readership/feedburner email subs when I wrote a note over on the ModelHorseBlab forum the other week.