Start to finish with Audrey Dixon, part two

NaMoPaiMo ended last Thursday, but there are still a lot of NaMoPaiMo posts left to share, including the second installment of Audrey Dixon's Start to Finish feature. Be warned, this one's a tearjerker. Thank you for sharing, Audrey, and know that you are not alone in mourning your beautiful Izzy.

Start to Finish

by Audrey Dixon

I made some good progress yesterday on my NaMoPaiMo (National Model Painting Month) horse. Just a week to go to get her done!

I finished getting the base color down on the mane and tail, as well as painting the eyes and chestnuts. I also took a white pencil and roughly penciled in Izzy's markings and brand.   

I still haven’t figured out what to do with the base yet. I am going to go looking for a nice stick so she has an in-scale log to be jumping over. 

Today, I double checked the placement and shape of her brand and markings with fresh eyes. Everything looked good, so I filled them in, and also did the detail work and shading on her hooves. Now this really feels like its Izzy.

She still needs her mane and tail highlights, but overall the horse itself is just about done. 

Quick close up of the hoof detail. Even though she just had "simple" dark hooves, they were still beautiful!

In real life her mane always covered her brand and laid completely on the left side of her neck, but that was a detail I wasn't concerned with since the mane on this resin is flying around from going over a jump, and it gave a better view of the brand on her model.

I'm very happy with how the brand looks - hers was very clear and easy to read. And of course, I had to put her little shoulder spot in too. I never knew how she ended up with it, she had it before I got her.

Here's the star detail. Of course it got more white hairs around it as she aged, so I put some of those in as well. I thought it was interesting how clear that little dot in her star was even as the grey hairs were spreading across her forehead. She never got grey hairs in that dot - just around it, so it became more noticeable as she aged!

I just have the highlights in the mane and tail left (and another couple layers on her star) and the horse itself will be done - then I just have to figure out what I'm doing with her base!

But she's almost done with only a few days left of NaMoPaiMo.

A few days later, my portrait model of Izzy is finished.

It has been an *extremely* difficult month for me. 

For the first time, I didn't have my model prepped ahead of time. That's fine, no big deal, but this turned out to be my most difficult year doing NaMoPaiMo - and not because of the painting.

I had chosen my 'Miss Prince' resin sculpted by Sue Kern, and was going to paint it as a portrait of my older mare, Izzy. I really felt like the model was just perfect for a portrait of her.

Unfortunately a few days into NaMoPaiMo - I made the difficult decision to put Izzy down. She was really struggling, and when I went out that morning to feed, it became pretty clear that that call needed to be made. I truly hope nobody has to go through what I did that morning. Losing a horse is hard enough, and I've seen a lot, but this one by far was the worst I've had to deal with.

And then because I was gone for two days dealing with everything and making arrangements, I got fired from my vet clinic job. They were fully aware of what was going on, but I guess the reason didn't matter. 

Izzy meant the world to me. I don't think I could have made it this far without her. She helped me through the most difficult times in my life. It's been a difficult month and I've felt kind of lost without her to go to anymore.

We pulled Izzy from a local kill pen when she was sixteen years old. and mostly unhandled. I did her training myself, and she was by far the best horse I've ever had. I'd trust her with my life. And she felt the same. She knew I would not ask her to do anything I didn't think she was capable of, and she was up for anything as long as we were in it together. To the very end there were still things she would only allow me to do. If anyone else tried she would give them all of the dramatic reactions to tell them to stop. I had an extremely close bond with her, unlike anything I've had from any other horse.

I had planned to take photos of her with my Miss Prince resin before and after painting the model - and I did. But it was not in the way I expected.

So this was defnitely the most challenging NaMoPaiMo for me by far. But not because of the paintwork.