Stephanie's BCC entry

Good things come in small packages. It's a cliche, but it's also true, especially in the case of Stephanie Blaylock's 2026 BreyerFest Best Customs Contest Excellence in Finish Work entry. Feast your eyes on this tiny, perfect mare!

Material Girl

by Stephanie Blaylock

This year I went small.

 I’ve never submitted a stablemate scale piece but this mold deserves her chance!

I started out years ago - we won’t talk about how many! - painting the G1 stablemate molds and dreaming they would shrink this mare down to stablemate scale. And now, with the help of Hagen Renaker Tennessee, they have. She is just so special to me.

She’s hard to photograph with my phone because of her small size. She was created in Pan Pastels, Conte a Paris pencils, acrylic paints, and blending gel. She was painted from a reference in a breed book… very much how I started out painting. I would thumb through pages and pages of horse photographs in library books and sketch and paint them. 

For her facial details I went to Maureen Love’s sketches and drew from her facial expressions. 

I’ve included a few of her sketches here. 

It was important that the Finishwork pay homage to her heritage as a vintage sculpt. 

And because I am of a particular age.. I had to name her with a nod to Breyer’s first release name for her after a Madonna pop song. 

So, without further ado… Material Girl.

Congratulations, Stephanie. Material Girl is stunning. What a wonderful tribute to Maureen Love's past and present contributions to our hobby. I doubt you'll need it, but good luck at BreyerFest.

Kayla's BCC entry

There are six categories in the BreyerFest Best Customs Contest: Most Extreme Custom, Excellence in Finish Work, Excellence in Tack Making, Model Glow Ups, Fantasy and Best Custom for Performance. Earlier today, we looked at one of the Most Exteme entries. Now it's onto Performance with this nifty set up by Kayla Blaine.

The Diving Horse

by Kayla Blaine

Diving horses were a popular American entertainment act from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Horses ran up ramps and jumped off high platforms into pools of water, sometimes with riders on their backs. The act was created by William “Doc” Carver and became famous at Steel Pier in Atlantic City. The shows eventually ended because of animal welfare concerns, safety risks, and changing public tastes. Today, diving horses are remembered as a strange, but important part of amusement park history.

The model in this entry has just jumped from the ramp with a rider sitting loosely on its back. 

Horse divers used very little tack, which allowed them to move freely and kept them safe during the dive.

I’m in college, so finding the time is difficult, but I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for years. I was finally confident enough to give it a try. I started sculpting on May 8th on my dorm floor, with no hope on finishing or it even making it presentable. 

Twenty days later, I can not believe I was able to pull this off. I feel like I met my goals, and I am incredibly proud of what I was able to do.

Congratulations, Kayla. That is a wonderful feeling, and also, a well deserved one. Good job and good luck at BreyerFest!

Kim's BCC entry

We're still on foal watch at the barn, but my computer screen is a different story! The last twenty four hours have been filled with new arrivals, as one artist after another shares the results of their BreyerFest Best Customs Contest labor.

In the case of Kim Bonadurer's Most Extreme Custom entry, the result is a depiction of actual labor.

She writes: My entry is called Incipience. I was inspired by watching all the spring foals and felt moved by the instant connection between mare and foal.

I used the classic scale Mariah and Morgan foal and repositioned them into a mare and foal lying on the ground, with the mare nickering to her newborn foal.

I created an amniotic sac of sorts to put on the foal for realism, I ended up using a plastic bag and shrunk it to size with a heat gun and layered school glue on it to give it a translucent look.

Then I decided to take it a step further and build a small base and diorama to create a foaling stall. I made it with popsicle sticks and wood pieces “stained” with watered down paint. Then I 3D printed some black stall bars and glued straw to a wood base.

Incipience means the beginning, earliest stage, or state of something just starting to exist. I felt like it was a great name for the beginning of this foal's life and the mares transition to being a mom.

Congratulations, Kim. That's a great name for this really charming entry. Thank you so much for sharing with us  and good luck at BreyerFest!

Waiting, watching, winning

For almost a year, these two pregnant mares have been hanging out in the front pasture, getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Glamour had her baby - a big buckskin colt - one week ago today.

Here's today's photo update.

Both mama and baby are doing fine.

So now it's Nefertiti's turn.

All indications are she's just about ready to pop.

My extremely amateur prediction is for tomorrow night. 

While we're waiting I drew the winner for the Bag of Fish/Baby Capybara giveaway.

Congratulations, Pam N! Please contact me privately with your address.

Carly's BCC entry

Today is the submission deadline for the BreyerFest Best Customs Contest, and what better way to begin Braymere blog coverage of that event than with a big, beautiful, winged mustang!

This is The Electric Spirit In All Of Us, Carly Kudalis' entry in the Fantasy division.

Carly writes: This piece started as a Breyer Khemosabi, and well, shapeshifted into something electric, energetic, and whimsical.

She may look slightly familiar? 

Sculpted and painted as my wild child who can’t be tamed, Winter, she exemplifies that wild horse spirit, a spirit in all of us when we allow ourselves to unleash it. 

This piece was so much fun to put together. I have such a deep deep love for Pegasus. 

I know unicorns often get the popular reputation, but there is something about flying horses that is just mesmerizing to me. 

And of course I draw my greatest inspiration from my own horses who inspire me daily in more ways than one. It is always such a treat getting to capture them through art.

I hope they know they get sculptures made after them!

Congratulations, Carly. This is tremendous. It's a worthy tribute to your big girl, who most surely knows how inspirational she is. Good luck at BreyerFest!

Making the minis

I was invited to a birthday party for one of my elementary school classmates. We were friendly, but not really friends, and I had no idea what to give her. After a lot of consideration, I went with what was clearly the best possible gift for anyone: a Breyer horse. She was surprised when she opened it. Not because it was a Breyer - my horse girl proclivities were well known - but because it did not need assembling. She'd thought model horses were like model cars. She assumed they came in kits, and you had to build them yourself.

1980 Breyer promotional material

The MiniVerse Make It Mini Animals both are and are not kits.

The animals themselves are like Breyer horses. No assembly is required.

That said, I did have to add eyes and a mouth line to the snake. He looked unfinished without them.

The accessories is where the kit part comes into play.

Some of projects require no more than removing the animal from its carrying case...

and assembling its environment.

Heh.

Of course, I always feel compelled to take things a little further.

Although the props are fine as is, they do look better - and a lot less plasticky - with a little bit of paint.

These are fun, easy projects. 

Well, mostly....

Neither Angelo nor I have had any luck with the fish.

RIP Guppy. You are a bad kids' craft.

If anyone has managed to make the fish look good, please share your secrets! And don't forget, I'll be choosing the winner of the Bag of Fish/Capybara raffle tomorrow. Please leave a comment if you want to try one of these make it crafts for yourself.