Pony Delivery: Hartland Donkey & Two Tag Alongs

 Howdy! Welcome to my first Pony Delivery post, which is pretty much what it says on the tin: when I get pony mail, I make a post about it.

Here is today's delivery, and the last one I'm allowed to make for a while. It's a Hartland donkey along with two Hartland nursing foals. Really, all I was looking for was the donkey...I came across it in some other, more expensive eBay listings and quickly fell in love, but I wasn't willing to pay upwards to $40 for it, especially because I wanted to customize it. So I did what I always do and hunted for deals and found this listing, only around $12 ($20 with shipping) because the donkey has some melting on its side (yikes!). How that happened I'm afraid to ask.

Here is the man/woman of the hour, the donkey! This thing is literally so adorable and I cannot wait to paint it. As you can see, the melting is fairly significant on the neck, but thankfully its only on the one side.

Now, a note: I worked on sanding this dude a while before making this post and I actually found that the melted areas are a little gummy, so they were easy to wear down/peel off with an X-Acto knife. That being said, before any other customizers come for me: YES, I know I should have put some epoxy sculpt over these areas. I miiiiight still do it. But I'm also pretty poor at sculpting anything besides simple ears, so I shied away from it before priming this donkey with some still pretty obvious gashes in the neck. This may cause some of you to recoil in horror but I do very, very minimal prep on my models before customizing, and the main reason for that is that I don't do commissions or anything, I simply paint these for myself, and so I don't really mind seams or small bits of plastic sticking out and whatnot. However, fret not, because this donkey is not out of the woods yet--those gashes are pretty ugly!

I'll also be making a post about my customizing victims soon so you guys can see my concepts for each body I have, including this guy!

Moving on...

Here's the first of the nursing foals, and as you can see, this guy has melting too, which was not disclosed in the listing! Pretty disheartening but I managed to file/cut away a good bit of this. As with the donkey though...this little dude is not out of the woods yet, cause oof. He's adorable though, isn't he?

And here's the second nursing foal. No melting or glaring damage, just some dirt, which is awesome! These two will also be customized along with the donkey. Actually, they're almost perfectly in scale with my Hartland QH family...twins perhaps? That would be really cool for my PA stable!

And here's everything all together. It's definitely gonna be some work getting them to look presentable enough for customizing, but I'm feeling very inspired to get it done with NaMoPaiMo coming up.

To end this post, I'll leave you guys with a question/request: what color should I paint the nursing foals? I definitely think I want to do the twins idea, and my QH family is also not painted yet...so drop some color ideas in the comments!

See you later!