Not So Big!

Years ago I saw an episode of Houston Animal Cops that featured a quote I still use to this day.  They had rescued a bunch of dogs from a puppy mill, mostly all toy breeds if I remember right.  One of the vets came in to start evaluating them and when she saw a little tiny Chihuahua puppy in one of the cages, she exclaimed, "You're not so big!"  to which the puppy went berserk, all jumping around and playful.  It was adorable.  "Not so big" is phrase Jeff and I still use to this day and when trying to think of a title for this post, it certainly fit.

I've still been feeling pretty awful today, but this evening I did manage to drag myself into my beloved Studio room and look around at the mess.  It is going to be so hard to get rid of anything in there and the reason I have so much trouble getting everything dealt with is that I get distracted by what I find in the mess.  Case in point - this post.  haha

I came across my wee collection of teeny-tiny horses and remembered I had told someone at the Mid-Ark show about them and I thought it would be neat to take a couple of pictures to send to her... (in other words - further procrastinating the actual CLEANUP of the room...?  no..  never!)

So, I took a few pictures and thought why not make a blog post out of it.  I found these in a dollar store when I was a teenager and I just thought they were the coolest thing!  I wish I would have bought more, but as I recall there was only one package of them.  It is a little set of cavalry (French I think..?) horses and riders.  They are unpainted, incredibly detailed for the size.  Each rider has a bunch of gear, canteen, sabre, scabbard, etc.  While the horses have bridle, breast collar, saddle pad, saddle, bedroll, etc. molded on. 

On the left is one of the little cavalry horses and rider, on the right is a "micro mini" the smallest scale (so far) that I've worked with:

"Charge!" says the pony cavalry rider - haha

Hard to tell the scale, especially if you're not familiar with micro minis, so how about this for scale:



There are three horse poses, the one above and two below: 

There are also a few different rider poses, sword up, swords down, and so on.  When I was painting horses as a teenager I had played around with putting some paint on a few of these, but that's as far as it went.  I've always thought it would be neat to customize them.  I would probably leave the gear that is molded on as I think it is so cool. 

I've been wishing for a while that I could find more of these.  I had done a few brief Internet searches over the years, but hadn't had any luck.  It didn't help that I didn't know the scale.  Very recently, I bought a set of miniature figures on clearance at a craft store.  I thought they would be micro mini scale and would be neat props.  To my dismay I found they were too small for the micros..  but they appear to match my little cavalry guys.  So now I think I know the scale - 1/72!

So that's the quick tale of my teeny-tiny project horses.  On the opposite end of the size spectrum, I also have THIS guy in a holding pattern...

He IS so big... in the background, dwarfing a Traditional Breyer...  I have plans for him too.

More on him later.