 This is the making of Odyssey, my unofficial best customs contest for 2022. Odyssey was created without knowing if I was going to be able to enter the contest or not, but I wanted to follow the rules of the contest and I wanted to create an even better, more extreme, drastic custom. And in order to make this super extreme, I decided to take a Shire draft horse model and shrink it down to a stock horse model. So this would be unrecognizable of what mold this horse started as. I started with this sketch of a Pintelusa Mustang stocky type horse and I knew that I wanted to use this draft Otheo model to create the customization. Starting with the sketch is really helpful so I laid out the pose I wanted to do and I knew I was going to have to cut a lot of these feathers off of the legs. This was going to be a lot of sanding and removal of the plastic. So I got right to it and started hacking up the horse. This was a lot of plastic on this model so he needed so much plastic removal. So here we pop off the tail. I always remove the ears because we don't need those. And I start by sawing off the small portions so I'll start with the ears. Then I'll go to the mane, then I'll go to the legs, then I'll go to the head and I like slowly remove everything so that I have a solid base to cut into because if you cut off the leg and then have to cut off all these feathers it would be a lot more work. I started just by hacksawing chunks then dremeling all of the plastic off. I'm basically looking for a skeleton to insert inside of the model because we're reducing him down so much and this guy just is very plastic heavy. For the feathers I proceeded to hacksaw off majority of the plastic and then dremel it down a lot. So I didn't film too much of this because it was very repetitive and it just took several hours of basically this and trying to carve a normal sized horse hoof out of that chunk of feather plastic. So this was the outcome that I got and he has legs and I chopped off his head. I was playing with the placement of everything and it ended up turning into a demolition and I just cut him up into a million pieces and I thought this was crazy that this is how the horse started. So the only remaining was this little piece of hoof. Then I was able to print out my drawing to the briar size and I was able to reposition all of these shoulders hips and legs to better fit the pose of the model and so this is kind of my process in general cutting everything up and kind of puzzle piecing it back together. So here I'm doing that with my toilet paper roll filler method which I have another video on. I had to cut him in half to shrink him down so that he wasn't as thick so my goal was to really shrink this. He ended up being a little bit bigger than I had originally hoped for. So then I ended up cutting some of this foam and adding that into the crevasse of the model here. That was just helping as like a filler for something to glue together. I got him standing here on three legs and this is a lot of checking how everything is going to go, that the balance is correct because he needed to stand on the three legs and I was deciding if I wanted the same head pose as the drawing so it's fun to when the head is loose to kind of play with that. And once I was fairly happy with how the body was coming together I wanted to solidify it so that's where I used my smooth on freeform air and I mashed that all over the horse so we fill in all those large gaps with this because it's very lightweight and it also solidifies the model so that I have a stronger sculpture to kind of work with. So when we're working with the leg positions we just want to get it together and then we can remove parts and resurface it a little bit better. After that cures I sand it down a little bit so that I have a smooth surface to kind of work on and get like the anatomy a little bit better because some of that was a bit chunky in there. And then I can continue to build so I attach the head and neck with some wire and then I fill in the gap with that with some tin foil. You can see that all of this plastic has been sanded at this point he's got no black left basically and then we start the sculpting process and I didn't film too much of this particular horse but we reworked him and I just built up the muscles on top of that plastic base to fable my original at the time and then when I gave him hair he really started to come to life and then you can see him next to his counterpart he looks nothing like the Othelmo is able to prep him and sand him down. I was able to start the painting process so I always start with airbrushing a base coat so I use white generally and that helps check for flaws and everything. Painted him with some brown tones and some gray tones and really adding those tones into his armpits his flank around his muzzle around his eyes. Gray tone on top of that brown tone but I'm bearing in mind that he's going to be in apollosa so I don't need to focus too much on his hindquarters. I added a slightly darker gray shade on top of that to help build up those layers of color. I give him to my pastel station and I proceed to pastel some herring detail onto him this helps with the shading so I get into those creases make those a bit darker and make the high points of the muzzle a little bit lighter so this is also the layer that I was going to add dapples. I make these layers really dark really nice and how I would want them really smooth. I can pull out the pastel to make dapples using a pencil eraser I like the favorite castel pencil erasers for this but I am avoiding his hindquarters entirely because I know that he's gonna have an apollosa bum so he doesn't need dappling on his hind end. So here's the phase that he was in and then I can start mapping out those markings with white paint. His blanket I wanted to leave spots so I actually am literally painting the spots on making them a little bit bigger than I would want because we're going to add some herring edging to them all. Some markings mapped out and then it's a process of just continuing forwards with this until things are solid white so lots of hair detailing around all of the spots around the edging of the blanket and many many many layers of white so this just takes a lot of time to reach full of pastel. There he was with both of the markings mapped out. He was also able to paint his mane and tail and I also took a little fan brush and proceeded to hair detail most of his body and I was accentuating some of those dapples a little bit more kind of painting them on and then dabbing with them with my finger so that there wasn't a harsh contrast. And that is basically the creation process of Odyssey. He turned out really cool. This has been the creation of Odyssey. I hope you enjoyed. Maybe you learned something. Thank you so much for watching and happy customizing.