NaReViMo painting plan

I met my friend, Trisha, through a penpal ad in Breyer's Just About Horses magazine. At the time, I was a student at Colorado State University. However, I used my California address because that I did not know when the ad would be published. As it turned out, that was a good call. The ad ran while I was home for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years.

I got a lot of responses, the most exciting of which came from another nineteen year old college student. Her name was Trisha, and she lived on her parents' Arabian horse farm in Wellington, just twelve miles north of the CSU campus.

I answered her immediately. She responded in kind, and by the time I returned to Colorado in the fall, we were already fast friends.

For the next three school years, I spent all my weekends at her house.

Which meant, I spent all my weekends surrounded by grey Arabians.

There were so many of them.

There were a couple chestnuts in the mix - hello Charity! - and later, at least one bay.

For the most part, however, that was an extremely grey herd.

Last month, I bought a herd of Shirmar Arabian models from Trisha's mother's estate sale. When I decided to paint one os the Zaras for this year's National Retro Vintage Month, there was no doubt in my mind as to what color she would be.

This particular Zara was one of the stagecoach horses.

She was a bright red bay with a large star and snip...

and three white feet.

I took numerous pictures of her in her original state. To the best of my ability, I'm planning to keep those markings.

Here's how she looks after one full day of painting.

There's still a long way to go, but progress is progress! This is totally happening!