 Hey there, it's DJB and in this video I'm going to walk you through step by step the process it took to create Denali. Denali is quite possibly my best custom to date. He is a stunning and illusion type horse painted to a shimmery sooty buckskin with classic war paint markings. This horse was a byproduct of the Briar Fest 2021 Best Customs Contest. As a little bit of background information, the Briar Fest Best Customs Contest is a contest that is part of the Briar Fest Festival each year. This contest hosts the best of the best in the hobby with several different categories to enter. Each category is judged based on skill, technical applications, and appeal. This contest is known as the top talent of the Briar model horse community, but for many many years this contest was only open to legal residents of the United States to enter. Since COVID and the shutdown of an in-person Briar Fest event, the contest was just announced this year to allow Canadians and UK residents to enter as well. This was very exciting for me as I have always watched this contest and it is the highlight of my year. It was a lot of pressure at the same time because I knew I had to create a piece that would be monumental and potentially good enough to win. I set my standards pretty high for my artwork and when it comes to competitions, I'm not a particularly competitive person but I do have a stronger drive if I know there is a prize at the end of the road. I had to essentially come up with an idea. The category and theme was announced close to the end of February, so I was finishing up on my Namae Paymo horse Todd. It took me a long time to decide what category I wanted to enter but I thought with going for my first year at something that I knew I know how to do and am relatively good at so I decided to tackle the most extreme. I kept this very private on my social media so that no one was biased to not enter the category and the judging would be as fair as possible. I really didn't have an idea going into this. I played with some ideas prior to the contest being announced. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a piece that was representative of myself, my art, and my journey. As a child I used to dream about horses in this galloping position and when I came across this picture of Cinderella cantering on this Andalusian type horse I knew immediately that was my idea. Combining reference with this Andalusian white running stallion that I used as reference for my gambler gallop stickers I came up with Denali. I wasn't 100% sure on what color I wanted to paint him in the beginning so a lot of the original concepts were black or beige and they had paint markings running through so it was going to be a very dramatic paint job. But as I thought about it more and launched into the project I decided to just go with a solid color and I felt like that would be powerful enough. So in order to complete this I had to pick a model. I found this Indian pony in my body box and being that I was making a horse with war paint markings such as those that would be written by the Native American people of the time I felt like this sculpture actually worked really well. I also came across this wooden oval base that I had one at some raffle somewhere along the lines and had been sitting in my studio for couple years now. It actually was the perfect fit for this horse. So the first step is essentially just destroying the horse. So I sanded down all of the original briar and then chopped it into a bunch of pieces. I like to work on a briar sized reference photo so I printed out a photo that I measured to be the correct size of the model and this really helps with getting proportions correct. It's a template and you really can't go wrong with back length and shoulder length and neck length if you have a large reference printed out like this. And so all of those leg parts are just hacked right off and we will be starting fresh because this whole horse needs an overhaul. So the biggest thing that I had to conquer was finding a way to suspend an entire epoxy sculpted horse on one leg. That's a lot of weight. Epoxy when cured can become very heavy and in order to suspend a model on one hoof that's a lot of weight on the thinnest part of the sculpture. In a sense this is horses too because it doesn't make sense that they can have such power and body mass on these tiny legs and then suspend themselves off of one at a time. So it kind of all encompasses the wonderful aura that horses have but it was a challenge. I spent a lot of time figuring this out so I guess I should say that I started this project on March 6th and it took me to March 14th to get this portion down in which the leg was sufficient. I actually ended up using a coat hanger, a wire coat hanger because they are the strongest form of wire that I could find and I enforced that leg fully inside. Starting with a project like this you want to make that foundation really strong or the piece is not going to work. If I had to go back in after I had sculpted the whole horse and correct the leg that would be a serious problem. So and I attached the body to the hip with toilet paper rolls and hot glue to kind of hold that all together. Then I started piecing together the rest using wire to attach the head and wire enforcements in all of the legs hooves and joint connections with a super glue and baking soda mix to solidify everything in place. Now you can see on the base I've added some super sculpted clay to hold the horse in place because I was having a heck of a time making this thing balance. With the front end attached it was wobbling and spinning all over and causing a ton of problems and it wasn't until my mom took a look at it and said why don't you just drill another hole in the hoof so that the thing actually stays on the base. If you have one peg that's round supporting this whole thing it's just going to spin and if you look at most briars that are suspended on one leg they have a square peg. If you look at resins that are suspended on one leg two legs or inserted into a base they always have a square peg. So that was like my first error was that I wasn't using a square peg I was using a round peg. So once I put a second wire in we we fixed corrected that problem. My process is that I will just quickly slather on a layer of epoxy and this just helps fill in all of those gaps make everything solid so you can actually work on it and then you can adjust the shape because you're sanding down actual clay versus just parts that are pieced together and then I will take that into my digital photoshop program. I go back and forth a lot from reality to digital to comparing to my life size reference and the digital drawing I can overlay the actual reference on top and see what is not working and what body shapes are incorrect. I essentially go from that point and I take my dremel and I will sand down all of the epoxy that I already put on the model to a smoother finish and this can help with the silhouette. So at this point where you're not detailing anything I'm just creating the silhouette which means the proportions should be correct at this point the shape should be correct at this point and it should feel like a cohesive horse. So when I start adding the muscling and detailing on top we're not going to run into proportion issues down the road. You want to like deal with this in this phase so that things work correctly and on this photo you can see that I've actually taped the leg to the base so that it would stand. I was had a lot of phases here with this guy and balancing on the base as well as his hind leg ended up being too long so I had to shorten that by just hacking that off and I always check that all the ankles work. We want a really powerful presence from the front for this guy as well as from the side. Here we're starting to add more things and that hoof is starting to come together. The off side is always kind of my weakness. I tend to focus on the beauty side of the model and the off side tends to get a little forgotten and I did find with Denali even when he was finished I wasn't super keen on his off side as much as his beauty side. It was very obvious that I paid a better attention to one over the other and that's something I'm working on and I understand. One side is aesthetically very beautiful. The other side is generally a little more awkward just because that's the way it works unless you're working with like a standing horse or a horse that looks good from all angles and then once I was happy and this guy was standing in his base correctly I started to flesh out the body and the idea was that the body for me is a lot faster than the face. Sculpting faces is very challenging for me and I wanted to save it for last so that I had the most time to spend on it and this photo is March 25th so we've made really good progress in not a lot of time you know from the 15th to the 25th that's essentially 10 days and we have a fully fleshed out horse body so that's pretty good. This doesn't take too long but I do have to do it in two phases so I would do one side of the model and then the other side of the model and this little like rainbow box was me trying to adjust the positioning of the horse and so I continued to work on his body some more but when I kept kept putting him in this stand he was falling forward and it was bothering me because that wasn't the correct angle of his body he needed to be cantering forward and so in that case the horse should be almost tipped up because his chest is being lifted from his hindquarters and essentially in this photo he looks like he is falling down and that is not what I wanted at all and it was really bothering me so I kept putting that box underneath just the way that his foot was positioned in the base adding the tail should work as a counterbalance so I was really fussing around with the position of that and he felt so much better when I propped him up under this box just that little bit of extra leverage in the front end was making it look much more realistic and on April 8th I decided to start on the face now I am not a very good face sculptor I'm still learning myself I use a lot of references I use a lot of sculpting artists as inspiration it can be very challenging for me to sculpt a aesthetically pleasing face and so I knew this was going to be a challenge so the hardest thing is that you can start on a face and here you can see that half of the face is done but then you have to match it symmetrically on the other side and if you've done any form of art that requires drawing a human face or a horse face from straight on or anything that requires symmetry it is so difficult it is so challenging so you can get this one side looking pristine but then you can totally botch it on the other side so I started working on that and I made him some little ears and then I also made his tail base which was just a piece of wire that I added some epoxy to to create the foundation and he was sitting in the base a lot better with this tail and I continued to work on his face as well which at this point we are April 9th so we're going pretty fast in a sense of sculpting like we've gone from nothing to something in not very many days I'm so front on this is actually looking not too bad now I was sending some photos to friends and family and his face wasn't done at this point and the nostrils are a little crooked and the eyes just feel a little sunken the ears are really nice and like the foreheads good and everything is kind of coming together but it was just not quite the look I was going for but I kept going and I kept adjusting the bouncing back from the body to the face and vice versa I don't like to stick to the same thing too much because you will get bored and burnt out so you kind of work on the piece as it evolves and whatever needs work you add work and connecting the head to the neck was part of that work as well and finishing off the legs and the hooves because that was my nemesis as well and so he was coming along really well but I wasn't a hundred percent pleased with his face still when I started adding the rest of the features his eyes looked too sunken and then I was fussing with them and then his nostrils looked funny and he just wasn't working so I kept adding more to get more flair on the nostrils I tried to adjust the lips and I was just like this face just isn't pleasing and then I screwed up the nostrils entirely and they were way too wide and big and he looked ridiculous so I actually did end up taking this luscious sculpture by Destier Models and she is a artist that I look up to highly so I just essentially took her image of her and illusion sculpture and compared it to mine and obviously it is night and day she is an incredible artist but I also reached a point where I was like I need to fix this but I also need to fix it within my abilities I'm not going to make it to Amelia quality by July and I have to be realistic I have to get it good enough to my current ability and then go from there and obviously one day we'll reach Amelia status but you know Denali is probably not going to be that piece and I shaved off the entire nose and my second nose was much more realistic using better photos of everything and studying her sculpture reference a lot more was very very helpful so he was starting to come together and his presence was a lot nicer I also shrunk down his eyes and I started flushing out the base of his ears and he was feeling like what I wanted him to feel like and this was honestly one of the best faces that I have sculpted personally to date then I started flushing out the tail and that added more weight to it so that it was counter balancing him really well there was a lot of lumps and bumps and so it was adding in holes it was refining the hooves it's refining the muscles it's adding in wires so that we can sculpt the mane and these finishing touches are really where the sculpture starts to come together so I do a lot of sanding in between as well so for the mane I did incorporate these wires into the base of the neck that I fused in there with super glue and baking soda and then I kind of freeform shape where the mane should go and then I added just a basic epoxy base onto that and this is really where the horse starts to come to life because he's getting his hair and that's part of his personality and then once that has cured I can start adding actual detailed texture to it and I do this to both the mane and the tail and I start refining the legs as well I hate sculpting legs so I think I did a pretty good job considering and then once we have the forelock on here I actually added just with a sharpie the handprint on the shoulder and the circular on the eye and I was becoming very obsessed with this horse and I'm still not in total love of his offside I think it's okay and I often wonder if this contributed to my placing in the contest just that he doesn't look amazing from both sides but I continue to sand and work on the finishing touches but his face is looking so cool the hair just kind of pulls it all together fastened the tail once I was decided and I just added a thin layer of primer to his body just to see where we're at and I do this a lot I will add thin layers of primer just to see how bad things are or how things are looking and what's working and what's not and creating that flat base coat color that's uniform across the board really helps and once that primer was dry I was really pleased with how he was coming but then there was also still a lot of prepping sanding and priming and at this point we're April 26 so it's taken us about a month to essentially sculpt the whole thing which is pretty awesome I also went back in and I added some epoxy sculpted feathers into the mane and the top of the tail as well as some little beads and I knew I always wanted to do this this is my first time sculpting feathers so I think that was a success and once he was fully primed and I was happy with the smoothness and all of the sculpting and everything was kind of done essentially we were May 1st so I had about a month to sculpt and about a month left to paint which is pretty sweet so I was right on target for that and pretty fast after I prime I do let my projects cure for at least 24 hours when they're in their full coat of primer and that's really important so that you don't run into any issues but I do like to throw on an airbrushed base coat right away and I let this also cure for 24 hours so that it's not tacky it's actually solidified the primer will help you see flaws and you can work the primer to a point and then the base coat will also help you see flaws especially if it's a lighter color like this and he did have these lumps on his hindquarters so I was actually able to sand these down and then paint over them in the base coat phase so the base coat phase I treat as a second prep phase where there still can be corrections made and as long as this is relatively smooth you'll be good to go and I let that cure then using my airbrush again I add a slightly creamier color into the dark points of the sculpture to create some shading I am not painting the mane the tail and the legs because I know that these will be black based on his buckskin coat color and then for the first time too I tried playing with some metallics so this is kind of hard to photograph but you can see that he does have some shimmery sheen to him and that's the metallic coat color that I painted on there and the intention is that he'll look very very healthy he'll kind of glimmer in the sun and he'll glow almost and then I actually didn't airbrush anymore the rest of the sky was pastels for his dapple layer so I use these makeup brushes and pan pastels in both these burnt sienna color and black and I start pastelling the layers onto the the model and then using a faber castel pencil I draw on the dapples essentially removing the pastel that was currently there and I just keep doing this following close to reference and creating those really striking body dapples we're looking so cool and the metallic sheen shows up in some of these photos as so nice and I pasteled a little bit into his face as well but then I also add some airbrushing over top once I have sealed those pastels in so the airbrushing occurs on the black points of the legs and I hand painted into the some of the main black just to see what it was going to look like so a lot of my process is removing the distraction as well so if something is not finished and it's distracting from how the piece will actually look in the end I will jump around to finish those parts just to see where we're at and so painting the legs on this side was part of that as well as the dark area in the muzzle and the eye on that side of the face and then as the you flip the horse we have like a full layer pastel dapples but obviously no other detailing or airbrushing at this point and then I was testing these little flowers that I knew I wanted to put in the base and I had picked these prior to starting I knew I wanted to do red accents on the horse so I wanted red flowers in the grass and we slowly just work at the sky so acrylic paint for the mane and tail and I was fussing with what I markings I actually wanted to incorporate I did that digitally in Illustrator before making a commitment to where I was going to paint the war paint at this point we're only May 12th so it's taken us 12 days to get to this point then for the base I actually did end up covering the entire wood portion with black paint and I stole my boyfriend's studio which he does a lot of landscape models so he has a static grass applicator and I static grassed the base based on his training so he kind of guided me through it but I did actually physically make the base myself just using his products and then I hand placed all of these plastic leaves and little flowers into the grass here I've added the feathers into the painting of Denali and so the base really pulls out the red in the horse and the red in the grass and then I finally made the commitment to paint on the eye circle and the nose stripes and the hand on the shoulder that was my final decision as well as some bands around his legs and I liked that it wasn't super obvious as well it was quite subtle I also ordered him this little plaque from a local trophy trophy business that runs in my hometown so it's a little an older gentleman that has made a couple of these for me he charges like five bucks and it's super awesome because it looks super sweet I take a lot of photos and I do the final seal and the gloss of the eyes and the hooves and I kind of photograph them to check that everything is good and call it a day and then essentially I hauled Denali up a small hike in my local town to take this marvelous photo against the mountainous background and Denali was complete this horse was a labor of love I finished the paintwork essentially in mid-May photographed him on May 22nd so I finished him like quite early considering you submit your photos online you hope they go through and then this year they did it a little differently normally you would be aware if you were a finalist they for this year though they sent the email of your placings so I did receive the email on the designated email day and they told me that that I had won second place I feel so accomplished that in my first year of entering this contest I was very able to create a piece that was so monumental to my journey and this is essentially my dream horse and it holds the symbolism that I carry through a lot of my artwork and a lot of the artwork of my past he signifies the journey and where we have to go and you know he's a placeholder for what is to come so I really admire this horse and and I hope you learned something from this little video of explaining how he was created so thank you so much for watching I seriously appreciate everybody's support and I hope you live Denali as much as I do if you have any questions or concerns you can message me or email me at djbstudios.com follow me on facebook and instagram for updates on my progress and what's happening in the studio as well as subscribe and like this video for more awesome model horse customizing and model horse hobby content