 My name is Darren. I am a model horse artist. I customize Briar brand horses. Briar as a company hosts a three-day event every year in Kentucky called Briar Best. I have never been. As a part of the festival, they also host a contest called the Best Customs Contest. It's the best of the best, but only in the US. I live in Canada. Yes, you heard that right. Canada. I booked tickets in 2020. I will in fact be attending the festival. But COVID happened. I officially spoke too soon. In 2021, Briar Fest was online. This was the first time the Best Customs Contest included residents of Canada and the UK. I entered the contest with Denali. One second. But 2022, I knew I could do better. I created honesty as my entry and found out I couldn't enter. Decided that's stupid. Now I make a custom every year to challenge myself and be a part of the fun. This is the story of Tallulah, my unofficial Best Customs Contest entry for 2023. When seeking ideas for the contest, I came up with this concept for a fantasy horse. Something unfamiliar to my normal style of work, but this imagery sat in the back of my mind ever since. When I knew in 2023 I would not be able to enter the actual contest, stepping out of my comfort zone seemed like the perfect thing to do. I got right to it and without hesitation started tearing the model apart. I started with a Briar Picasso on the Desatado mold, and the customization was supposed to be simple, but I ended up reworking basically all of the body. Once I had a pile of body parts on the carpet floor, I realized I didn't have a plan. How was I going to do this? I need dragonflies. But in my hours of searches I realized something. My dad. My dad claims he doesn't have an artistic bone in his body, but he is a fly fisherman. And he ties his own flies, all of them. Every single fish that he's ever caught has been on a fly he has tied himself. He could definitely make me a dragonfly. My dad doesn't always understand what I do or how I think. He doesn't always understand my need to be an artist or my love of horses. But when I asked him to do this, he couldn't be more excited. It was a moment we got to share together and create memories I will never forget. He first created a prototype and then was able to make not one, but four, masterful dragonflies. And I'm so grateful that we worked on this project together. It was then that I realized this project would be a collaboration. And what better collaboration than to collaborate with all the people closest in my life. Who let me be me. Who put up with horses and art and briars. Who've been there since the beginning and will be there forevermore. I know I am incredibly lucky to have this system and to immortalize that feeling gave this piece a reason to be. It was no longer about the silly contest or the fact she was unofficial, but rather a tribute to my family. Naturally, the next person I recruited was my husband, Chance. He puts up with my horse obsessions the most out of anyone and on the daily. Ironically, being deathly allergic to horses didn't stop him from dating me. Chance is equally as creative. He crafts miniatures and models of landscapes, both whimsical and realistic. I let him create the foundation of grass for the base. It's fun to be able to work on projects together that fill both of our creative desires. My mom was also an easy addition to this project. She is the biggest supporter and lover of horses in my life. She gave me the horse girl gene. She's been there through it all. She nourished my childhood with real horse experiences and tags along for every model horse experience. She's also a crafter and creative, but in different ways. My dad has this fly tying station on one side of the room and my mom has this crazy sewing room right next to it. I wanted her to create flowers for the base. She's made similar before and they're really pretty. We decided to make them a bit larger than scale for this fantasy realm. We've been long-distance friends project being so far. The last person in my family is one without any artistic ability. So naturally, I asked my brother to use his handwriting. Are you happy with that? During my writing sucks. Why are you making me write something for you? Because what other artistic talent do you have? Nothing. I don't have artistic talents. Just do another one. Do like a few. Fill the whole page. He did it though and I used that writing to make the plaque. All of my custom projects start with toilet paper roll bases, reconnecting everything with wire, and making sure that I rebuild the horse in a sturdy, durable way. For the mane and tail, I used this foam core as a solid base to lay out the idea of the horse as her mane was going to be holding her up. Once I have the right shape of everything, I used tin foil and some smooth-on free-form air to fill in all of the large-sized gaps. Then once that's secured, I can sand that down and then add some wire reinforcement to the large piece of foam core for the mane. Then I add lots more free-form air to this and then I can go back in with my epoxy and re-sculpt all of the details, which included a new muzzle, some new eyes, new neck, new front leg positioning, all the good things. I gave her a softer expression with slightly closed eyelids so she felt more fenomen. I drilled two holes for where the new ears would be inserted and I also drilled holes into the ear that I had sculpted, wire reinforced them. I wanted some pieces sticking out of the mane so I used wire to create the flow of these but I felt like some of that foam core was a bit too chunky. Silhouette is really important for a piece like this and we want it to flow and move with the eye in the best way possible. The tail I actually was creating separately from the horse so that I wouldn't burden the model. Here I'm adding some wire for the hanging pieces of mane that I knew I wanted to come down from the body and using some more of that free-form to create the shape. This stuff really easily sands so it's nice to use it. It's also very lightweight so it keeps the weight of the model down because she was going to be very sculpture heavy. I didn't want to use solid epoxy because that's when things get really heavy and risk cracking. Once I have a good strong base, I get right to sculpting hair and this was the majority of the re-sculpt work for this piece. There's a lot of hair and it has to flow all really nicely and not look like a wall. I want it to look cascading. I want it to feel like actual mane. I didn't pay too much attention into fine detailing all of these strokes. I wanted to leave them a little bit softer. The suspended pieces were also created with a piece of wire as these needed to be thin and small for the dragonflies to hang on to. Once I was completed most of the mane sculpture, it felt a lot like a wall. I had to cut a hole out of the piece of mane to better create a silhouette for her. Not ideal, but we made it work. I like to prime in between steps to see where I'm at and then there was a lot of sanding involved once I was completed most of that sculpture. I made sure to add an air hole. I could then attach the large chunk of tail that I had sculpted separately. So I enforced this with several pieces of steel wire to make sure that it was really good and sturdy. I didn't want this cracking. She really starts to feel like a cohesive sculpture at this point. Then once I have her primed all ready to go, I just start by adding a white base coat and I wanted to do this to better check my prepping. This was also the time that I worked on the other pieces, so I measured her out for the base for my husband to create the grass and I was able to take her on site to help with the dragonfly creation process. Then I started with these green tones on the tips of her tail, her legs, and her underbelly. I wanted her to be a really soft gradient. I also added a fair amount of pearlescent into the paint to make her really metallicky shiny and more fantasy-like. Then I go in with this really pretty turquoise color and paint that over her top line. This is one of my favorite shades of blue. Then I was adding some pearlescent turquoise over top. On top of that blue was a dark black color. Then I was able to hop right to it with the white markings, just mapping those in with a slightly larger brush and how I wanted them to go. I wanted them to feel like ovaro markings but allowing them to morph into a more aesthetic look versus hyper-realism. But I still wanted the hair growth of everything to be the right direction. For the hair, it was a lot of reworking painting process to get that fade correctly from black to blue to green. I added lots of pearlescent colors into the hair with a darker shade in the wells, a lighter shade on the high points and lots of metallic to blend those together and make it feel really whimsical. I found that the dry brushing method for adding the metallic at the very end was really useful. I also hair by hair detailed all of the edging to the markings. I also added some pearlescent pigment to the white so that it had a bit of a shimmer as well. Then I seal her off with a satin sealer and gloss her eyes and hooves. I then painted the out edge of the base that was given to me from my husband with some black and I glossed that with a Falejo varnish. Then it was the process of crafting the foliage on the base which was just a combination of plastic plants that I liked the look of. But I wanted this to feel very enchanted forest, very whimsical. I allowed some of these plants to flow over the edge of the base so a lot of this was me cutting off leaves from several different types of plants and creating my own little pieces of foliage. I can apply that plaque that was created by my best friend and brother and when we insert Tallulah here she looks like she's in a whimsical forest. I attached the dragonflies which my dad created really wonderful legs on so that they were actually able to hang on to the hair which was a key feature in making this feel really authentic. Tallulah embodies everything that I am and everything I have yet to be. She represents the artistic ability within all of us and she will forever be a memento of the people that brought me here to create this very art.