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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

New Painting Book - Color Formulas and Techniques for the Model Horse Artist

I have been searching for this book off and on for about five years now. I emailed the company to see if there was any chance it would be reprinted and the reply was they had such grand plans for the third edition. So it sounds like its unlikely to be reprinted. However they were nice enough to send a couple of links to a model horse forum that used copies can be found on from time to time. One link was to a copy which was missing the formula cards but I already had a set of those so this was a good buy for me at a reasonable price; $65.

This is a three ring binder style book with pages that measure 5 1/2" by 8 1/2" which is definitely an odd size. Its also geared towards the larger scale horses like those by Breyer (and I thought our hobby was niche) so really its most appropriate for 54mm and larger horses but there are some things that can be applied to 28mm horses at least those meant primarily for display or competition, gaming horses aren't likely to need this kind of treatment except for maybe a mounted commander or mounted command stand.

But I find the subject fascinating and I'm probably going to learn a lot more about painting horses than I'm ever really going to need.


Nice cover and Carol Williams is apparently one of the top model horse artists in the hobby. This is the 2nd Edition, 3rd Printing from '97. From what I understand its the last printed edition and there is not an ebook or an intent to publish it as an ebook,. This makes not sense to me as the format is just about perfect and you could go full color for very little effort. Copies with that still have the formula cards apparently have sold for well over $100. I would say that the demand is still there.

It has a weird page numbering system with the numbers starting over for each chapter. All I can really tell you at this point is that there is an 1 1/4 worth of pages there. I probably don't need the first 9 chapters of the book as it includes pretty everything a model horse artists needs to know in depth including types of paints and how they interact with each other. Since I'm already a fairly experienced painter I figured I could skip those sections and skip right to the "how to" chapters.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting book, you will have to tell us more after you digest it.

    From the looks of it, I would guess it is published by a legal digest company, as that is the format they use, small pages, repeating numbering and binders for page replacement... All of which are strange for a painting guide.

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    Replies
    1. That's interesting information. Its definitely an odd format. I like the 3 ring binder concept because it lays flat. But, it would make more sense if it had actual color pictures in it. I'll dive into when I have a chance this weekend.

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