When the year of the horse approached, I was considering how to do the horse model. Like previous animals of the year, I wanted the Chinese New Year animal to be cute and with proportions that don't match an actual animal. This is why early on I decided to call it the Small Horse, so I'd be able to do a more realistic horse later on. I considered several inspirations, mostly references from Chinese culture background, such as the famous “Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow” from the Han dynasty or Tang Dynasty horse sculptures, I also considered the very simple Dala Horse. Ultimately I went back to a favourite of mine, the little blue horse by expressionistic painter Franc Marc from 1912. I have always loved this not very well-known painting since seeing it as a child when my parents dragged me to an exhibition to see expressionistic paintings. For many years, a reproduction of it was hanging over my bed when I was a teenager.

Instead of drawing a 3-view, I just worked directly off the actual painting, although I took some liberties. After all, the horse on the painting is not directly seen from the side. It's not clear whether the left and right legs on the painting have the same posture, but after trying to make them different, I found it looked strange, so I kept them the same. When I was ready to start painting the model and unified the objects into one, it turned out the textured version could not be exported, it's an error that happens when the Boolean tool has been used. This error seems to be caused by too small surfaces somehow, as exporting at higher scale works to go around it. I tried to make a version where smaller parts have been removed, but the error persisted.

In order to still be able to paint on the model, I had to go back to the version where objects are seperate and paint the objects separately. This can also go around the error in export. Then the next thing to do was to paint on the 福-character (meaning luck or fortune) for the Chinese new year version.

When I moved over to the vector software (Affinity Designer), I had to make sure to align the parts with cut off sections (from the unified model) with the painted parts, which were still the full objects. In some cases, full objects are normal, such as the head and main body. Then some additional ornaments had to be added for the Chinese new year version. This time I tried to use some new ones, because using always the same ones is too boring.

The test build went smoothly and everything aligned as planned. Until this point I had two versions of the ears. One which will just create an inner side with a part exactly the same as the outer part and the one which now made it into the model. While the one with inner side would have been more realistic and it has been done the same on previous animals, I decided to use the simpler cut out version, as it fits this model better and is much easier to build.