I have collected plastic horses since the early 2000's, when I was more or less ten years old. Horses are among my favorite animals and I draw and mainly collect them, but there are so many other animals I could also want in miniature. Let's make a list of them.
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| A really old photo. The collection has since moved into other shelves and some maybe even to plastic tubs. |
From equids, I could prefer to get donkeys, and more mules.
Cats - I am a crazy cat person, and have lived my entire life with cats. To me, they are way easier to understand than dogs, and people who think cats are evil or not cabable of emotionally bonding with you are weird. My cats clearly want to be with me more than I allow them to, and I wish I could make them able to spend their time with me as much as they prefer. But anyway! I do have a largeish herd of Schleich cats and some other plastic cats of the same scale. I also want to customize and repaint some, but Schleich cats are pricey and I just happen to stick with the horses instead when it comes to my customizing projects.
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| Schleich cats on a scratching tree which was made by Kave. |
Cats are sometimes seen in my drawings, but I never understood how to draw them, and having a long pause will not help me get back to sketching them. Maybe having real reference material at home is the problem; I can see what I do wrongly, and cats don't care if I want them to show a certain position or a detail from the tabby pattern... Now it's hard to imagine that there was a time when I almost remembered how to draw tabbies from memory only, and it didn't take much time.
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| Most of these were sketched from photos. |
Also some of my dolls are cats, naturally. In fact, the first entirely selfmade doll of mine is a cat, because I wanted something different from the usual rats.
One of the biggest reasons to why I want to learn to sculpt and customize cat models are the limited head positions in Schleich cats. I know cats and how their mind works, so I have had a lot of fun with placing the plastic cats into various spots in the Rat Room, for example on top of a cage or something. Well, I wish these could look like glancing up or down instead of to the side or forward... Cats are liquid and bend into way more positions than the toy world lets you see.
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| That tuxedo tom, Ryysis, seems to have gotten some personality traits from my own late Figaro, who also was a curious troublemaker. |
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| I have witnessed how a big chubby cat melts into a sofa during a sunny morning. |
Some big cat models by CollectA, Papo and Schleich may also interest me, but to be honest, I don't trust their catalog pictures since they usually don't match to the quality of the models which are actually sold...
Dogs - I am not a dog person, but I like them as a species and need them for my traditional scale modelverse. Thinking about what kinds of dogs my dolls could share their lives with is fun. With dog models there is almost similar problem as with cats: they only come in a short selection of lame poses. Most are made to be intact males in show positions, which doesn't interest me and will not serve for the story photo purposes at all. I want pet dogs, not show champions! And more mutts, please.
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| This Schleich dog was so ugly that it seemed perfect for a modelverse. |
Rats - No comment.
Mice - I am a rat enthusiast, but mice are nice too and they probably get done more in miniature than rats. People generally assume mice are cuter, which is not true, but at least they come with the giant ears which people also want to put on rats although it makes zero sense. Make the animals look like what they are supposed to be!
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| Mice in a pencil case. The red mechanical pencil is similar to one I own. |
Other rodents - Nutrias, muskrats...
Dinosaurs - These are my oldest interest ever, and I still have all my childhood toy dinos with me. There's over 300 of them. I will never understand how a dino freak changed their collecting direction from them to horses, but at least I now know what quality the plastic dinosaurs can come with - as a kid, I never knew about Papos or other brands which make very detailed dino miniatures. I now have a few, but that's not enough - and I don't think I have space for anything very big. Sad.
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| Apparently even dinos practice that awkward fake smile when they know they are being photographed... |
Among dinos I have to read also other prehistoric creatures, and one of them is dunkleosteus, the giant bony fish. I don't know why, but something in that fish fascinates me.
Other animals - Bats, crocodiles, lizards, moonrats, shrews, opossums, squirrels... The list goes on!
From things which are not animals, what do I want?
Cars - Hmmm, cars couldn't be bad, but I could be picky with them and will not have space for any. I have painted one car once, and I was terrified because it was a limited edition model, and my acrylic painted details didn't go very smoothly... I also only bother with the older car types, and have no other knowledge than visual. Hah.
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| I painted ladybug markings to this Beetle... And it went to my aunt. |
Dollhouses - When I became a model horse dork, it didn't take long that it expanded to other minis too. Dollhouses are very popular in Finland and here are clubs, special stores for them and blogs too, but I have never been able to do anything with them. The standard dollhouse scale is 1:12 alias classic, and my modelverses have always been in smaller or bigger scales. And naturally, I will never have the space or money to get a dollhouse, even if it was "small"... Yet my criterias are too big and nothing sold in stores will match them. Here we are.
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| Do I possibly enjoy crafting cages a little too much?! |
That's the basic list I can think of now. Of course it is not so simple really, and I may remember many interesting "I want a model of that" cases later.
