 Hi there, it's DJB, and in this video I'm going to be reviewing my old customs. Back when I was a teenager, I was involved in model horses for a little while, but not to any extreme extent. It was just pretty basic customizing, and I actually found an old flash drive that has a bunch of photos of these really old customs, so I thought it would be fun to go through them. I just want to show you that everyone starts somewhere. These are some of my very first works. The first guy that I have is this little bay stablemate. So you can see like this is really nice grain happening in the texture of the coat. It broke its ear or something. Something broke on it and I wasn't actually able to sell it, but I did try and sell it for a while and it never sold. But I mean look at that really nice goopy neck. That's so cute. We love a goopy neck. Yeah, there's a couple different photos of her here in all her glory and my really good flash photography skills on my bed. I can't say that that's super nice looking. This guy is beautiful. Oh man, that's not okay. Look at the grain. What even happened? It looks like he has hives. This horse had an allergic reaction. I did sell this stablemate. I don't know where he went. I sold him on eBay likely. This hoof is really nice too. That's really good hoof definition. So this model was created with pastels and so back in the day I definitely would have had crappy Walmart pastels and crappy Walmart sealer. I mean it's a good try. The dapples, you know, they're getting there. Oh that grain is not good. This guy I named Million Dollar Masterpiece. Look at the mane. I just painted it on the neck. So this guy actually got an overhaul. So I went from this piece to this piece and basically I just painted over the coat color that was already there and just made it a lot nicer. So you're still seeing some of this grain through there but you can tell that like things are a lot cleaner and neater than they were on this original piece. He's basically yellow. Like this is like a green zombie grew buckskin color happening here. I don't know what I was thinking. This actually wasn't that long ago for me. This was a Giselle that I picked up and I decided that I wanted to customize a briar but like for real and this was what I was going to make of it. So I did it the whole body in pastels and it turned out pretty good. It turned out quite a bit darker than I wanted and quite a bit shinier. Like a lot of the sprays I was using back then were not working well. So her dapples are quite nice in there and then the paint job is actually pretty good considering I didn't have like a fancy Kalinsky paint brush at the time. It was just a whatever paint brush. So eventually this horse was stripped. A body was used to create this horse which clearly looks a lot better. I learned a lot from this paint job but really trying to be good and it just it didn't kind of work out and the paint was very clumpy and blotchy. So I just gave up and stripped her. This little guy actually was one of the ones that I really like and I did like hair by hair roaning details on him. You can kind of see there and he turned out really good. I actually did see this guy model her sales pages not that long ago for resale so he was floating around the model horse community for a while. I did sell him on eBay at one point. So here's like an improv guys studio photo of all of my work. This little pony actually was turned out pretty good. There may be more photos of her. This was a nightmare. This guy I still have it's one of the only first customs that I kept just because I thought it was like pretty decent. She nanned it like her first live show but that's because there was like three entries in the class. So does it really count as nanting? I'm not sure. And these two were stripped because look at that mapping just splotch gray all over and that's call it a day. See this is what I'm telling you everyone could start somewhere and this was my somewhere. Like I thought this was like so good and so unique and like people were gonna pay hundreds of dollars for this horse because it had mapping and this guy was actually pretty cool. I should repaint this color now actually because it was a really cool reference but not a great execution. I'm sorry another classic example of just map that just map it. Just just map it with gray. It's so bad guys. It's so bad. I can't even be proud of this. I'm embarrassed to be showing you this. This is one image that was actually floating around the internet for a really long time because it was a show donation piece. So years ago I had a show in my local town and this was the donation I made for the show and I am surprised they accepted it as a donation. The paint is so so thick. You can see the texture of the paint and you can see the grain that continues to happen. All of my horses have allergies apparently and this was kind of like me trying to do a repeat of that previous custom and I think that we turned out significantly better. I have improved since 2012. I believe this one is 2017. So five years gap this is like the improvement. So like you can start like this. This is what I'm telling you because I started like this and you will get to this. You just have to be a little more patient and a little more meticulous and a better process because this was clearly not working. All right this guy's kind of cool. So this is my second I believe traditional custom and this was on the Esprit mold and this was back when it like came out and I was super excited because this mold was super hot and popular and everybody wanted it and so I said I gotta make a custom of it because I can be rich if I sell my custom work on eBay. So back then I was hustling. He turned out not bad. Done completely in pastels. You can see my attempt at making some dabbling in there that didn't work very well. Pretty basic chestnuts happening here. Pretty basic hooves happening. Trying to have some mapping on those markings so like not terrible. I had some knowledge. The tail had some definition in it and I did actually re-sculpt his nose. Gave him more flaring nostrils which are not anatomically correct in any way and I bent this leg for whatever reason because I wanted to. I felt the need to bend his leg and like I remember this dent in his butt and I was like this doesn't look that great but I'm just gonna go with it and I was too far in like the prepping phase and the painting phase to correct it so I just left it and like you can tell I used a kneaded eraser for that and I just like smashed it. This guy sold on eBay years ago. I don't know what happened to him. I thought he was cool. I think he did sell for like 80 to 100 dollars back in the day but definitely not an amazing piece of work but not a terrible. Like there's good things happening here. I was really trying for shading and I think that that worked and honestly I haven't painted a lot of chestnut since so I couldn't really tell you that I've improved in the chestnut department. Fritz! I loved Fritz and no one liked him. Oh Fritz. He was a cute little bay paint horse terribly executed. You can see that there is color coming through those paint markings and they are not opaque in any way and I was doing like the whole thing where you put a name with the model and then they sell for more because like Jamie Baker was doing that at the time and her work was selling for three grand so I thought well my work must be worth the same if you put a name on it. I mean this face marking is not bad. Like this custom was not bad. He was just not appealing to the general public. Since then he has been chopped into a bunch of pieces. This was one of my very first, it actually was my very first traditional customs. I don't mind this custom. I think she's pretty decent. I recently did sell her though because I just wanted her out of the house. She was in the way. I hate this mold. I named her Hollywood Dreamer. She won at a photo show. She wasn't a bad custom and she's got good things happening like the color is very soft. It's very smooth. Her like textures were very smooth. There's nothing wrong with her but her face marking was so splotchy. It was so thick and lumpy. 2010 paint job so this is good 10 years ago back when I was just dabbling but all done with pastels. This guy I apparently only have one photo of. I can't remember what I called him. It was something weird. I don't even know what color I was going for. I think it was supposed to be sooty palomino and it turned into a sooty something but he won like overall custom reserve champion in a photo show apparently. So I used to make these ribbons actually. If my horses won in a photo show and there was no awards I would make my own ribbons because I was that psycho and if they didn't give ribbons I would print these and I would use my parents entire printer ink cartridge printing photo show ribbons for my horses that won things. Now his dapples were horrible. They were like reverse dapples. They were darker than the rest of his body. This guy I was so proud of. This was like my one of my first drastic. You can just tell that I just lopped that leg off and just stuck it underneath and was like yeah he's laying down now. So he was a mash of different models. So this is obviously like the Arabian body. I don't know where this leg came from. I think it was a Tennessee walking horse leg. All the legs were from different horses and this was my Rabacano amazing hair by hair detailed paint job that is much out of scale. I think he turned out kind of cool like there was nothing wrong with how he turned out. He just was early and not well executed. Oh there's a bigger picture of him. Look at that hair detail. Yes. I haven't done a Rabacano since just even the hooves. I wasn't very patient with models so I never really finished very many that's why this album is quite small. Oh look there's another one of my 2012. I tried to sell him clearly and he did not sell. Oh god. Don't look. Don't look. Don't look. I page your eyes. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm really really sorry. This is a micro that I tried to customize or something and then tried to paint and then took a picture of because I was proud of. I don't know. This is where we're at now with the same scale. So we're doing better. We're doing way better because this is concerning for my reputation. It's so lumpy and this main is just like I took a hard tool and I just mashed the crap out of it. Just mashed it. I mean this wasn't finished. This was like a work in progress but you don't even need to work in progress this. You just need to throw this away and I think I did actually. Okay moving on. So this is actually one of my customs that I liked. I liked it. It's not well executed. I photographed it with a ton of little hairs all over it and you can see the paintbrush was not making nice round spots and these spots are not opaque but we tried. It's an oracle. We can tell that it's an apple loose an oracle and that's all that matters. Whoo! Not good. Not cute. Not cute at all. No, no, no. Don't delete this file. We need this file. She actually sold on eBay. I think she only sold for like 20 bucks or something but that was a lot for me for a stablemate that I paid like a dollar for. I remember I freaked out because I saw this horse in a limited edition gal YouTube video who is now Kingston Studios on Instagram and I freaked out because I was like oh my god my customs is famous. They're in these grand shows but I never heard if this horse placed or anything and apparently people have seen this horse in the show circuit. We improve. It just takes like 10 years. This guy was really cool. I only have these two photos of him and I painted him as a Carmelo and I hate Carmelo. Like I will not paint Carmelo so don't ask me for a Carmelo commission because I will decline it. I hate the color. I hate pink skin on horses and I hate blue pink eyes. It's just I don't find it appealing but this guy I made Carmelo and I remember he sold for $80 on model horse sales pages and I lost my mind because I was like this horse was like this small and someone paid $80 for it and I just sculpt some fake roses and put it in his hair and they wanted him. It's a really neat idea and I actually want to redo this. I believe this is like a warm blood leg that I just attached and his blue eye isn't horrible actually. I did a good job. As a beginner person I did a good job. You can tell that the paint slipped in the rose but and that is all folks. That is all my past revelations. So you can get from this place to this place and if we look at like the properties of this photo this is 2011. So this is like nine years ago and today like I'm painting a lot better. So I think what comes into play a lot of the time is actually just maturity. As you mature your brain gets better at mimicking photographs and obviously your technique improves as well and just practicing a lot. So like this was when I was just kind of dabbling in it. I was not serious about model horse customizing in any way but I was very serious in traditional art so it came okay to me but it definitely wasn't anything spectacular. Now obviously I'm more dedicated and it's really showing in my work and I'm getting kind of a lot better and I'm still learning things and I still have technique problems but in general like I would definitely buy this piece over this piece. I think anyone would so and don't get discouraged. Like this takes time and it takes a lot of practice. So this guy was like one of the very first ones and this guy was one of my very first ones back into the hobby. So she is like not amazing there's definitely a better consistency in the paint a better coverage in the paint. The like body isn't amazing still the pastel is not working great. The hooves are a lot more detailed and like she has personality in her face like this I feel like is like I'm trying to paint but it's not going well. This is like okay I'm trying to paint seriously here guys like believe me this is an actual horse there but a lot of my very first ones even getting back and started were not great. Like this guy isn't super great either. I was trying to do really fancy Sabino markings and they were sort of fancy but like not amazing still right. So it takes time and stablemates are great because you can do so many of them at once and you'll just get better like here this dappling is starting to get better the markings are starting to get more intricate and we're learning more as we go here eventually like this was what I got to where it's like this is starting to look like a real horse right and these details are in scale and the hairs are really small so it makes a lot of sense and so I've only been back in the hobby for about three years now and just in that three years time my work has improved immensely. Three years ago and this is like now so this is like one of my most recent Tobiano similar color customs so I hope you have enjoyed seeing like where I started from because I find that really fascinating and some of my embarrassing embarrassing works so thank you so much for watching feel free to subscribe and like this video for more weekly Wednesday content.