Caroline's BCC entry

All the entries in the BreyerFest Best Customs contest are amazing, but every year there are a couple that absolutely take my breath away.

This Performance class entry by Caroline Sigwalt of Horse Heaven Studios falls into that category.

Just look at it!

Caroline calls this entry The Perilous Crossing to the New World.

She writes: The trek to the new world in the 1500’s brought lots of challenges, including bringing horses to help the conquistadors conquer new lands. Rough seas could send contents of a ship flying and seriously injure horses if they were standing on their own. To protect the horses on their long journey, the crew put horses in slings to ease their weight off of their feet and allow them to rock with the ship. This is also how they unloaded the horses off of large ships. When ships anchored off the coast, the horses that had survived the journey were put into slings and carefully hoisted up over the ship before either being lowered into water and forced to swim to shore, or lowered onto a dock where they could walk off. 

Horse transport between the Old and New Worlds remained hazardous for quite sometime, but was a large part of “driving forward” in the settlement of the Western Hemisphere.

Caroline says her two main inspirations were ship scenes from the move, The Black Stallion...

and the suspended horse at the Kentucky Horse Park's International Museum of the Horse.

Here are some of the reference photos she used to create this entry.

And a glimpse into her customizing process.

Here's the backdrop,

the sling...

and then finally, everything comes together.

Perfection!

Congratulations, Caroline. This is one of my favorite BCC entries not just this year, but ever. I love every single thing about it!