Afuze

What I am.

This nose belongs to my cat Lauha.

Well, a human, scientifically called "Homo sapiens".

Things about me...

I'm a female, and from the year 1995. I haven't been horse crazy all my life, but only from about 10 years old. Almost as long I have been a model horse crazy.

And I love cats; I like all animals, but cats are the biggest thing in emotional way, since I've grown up with them and also understand their body language and behavior. I've also been recently interested about their right feeding. Similarly one of my interest is activating and training them, which is a thing I definitely do with at least two of our four cats. 

I have a twin brother. He's an artist too. Overall my family is filled with creative people.

I'm an introvert. And neurologically unusual (asperger and ADD, synesthesia, highly sensitive). Special interests are typical to aspergers (and autistics overall); for me those are animals, art and model horses. That may explain something.

I DO NOT have a horse life. Stop assuming that I have a rider career only because I draw horses and collect the plastic ones.

Art
I am an artist. It forms half of my life while the other half is about pets. What do I draw? Horses, cats, rats, anthropomorphic animals and a bit more too. My best media is traditional; on paper, I mean. Watercolors are nice, for example. My artworks can be seen in my deviantART gallery.

I like writing, as you may see. I've hobbied storywriting from the summer 2011, while I've always done some fact writing, which is definitely my stronger part. My problem is that I don't usually have the crazy writing mood on.

I like building worlds and making art about it. Most people, if any, have no idea what kind of adventures are happening in my head and how much that means to me personally.

Just a drawing, has nothing to do with creativity.

My model horse history
Like with everyone else in Finland, my modeller career started with Schleichs. It was 2004. My first models were the shire gelding and tinker foal, called Myntti and Paind. Before these I already played with Grand Champions and related classic scale toy horses, but they were nothing compared to how realistic Schleichs were (back then).

I started customizing at 2009, after I searched Internet and found the model horse hobby. I immediately knew that it was my thing, and that it's not only about the painting; in fact I'm more interested of the sculpting part than paintwork in model horses.

Resculpting a Schleich palomino stallion in somewhere 2010.

Arpi. The photo is old because I haven't photographed him in ages.

At 2013 I bought some jewellery materials to try tackmaking. It was horrific, but as I just had taken the first bite, I wanted more. So I became a tackmaker, and decided to have a goal to make personal halters for every Schleich I have. That never happened... Todays I'm more focused to the traditional scale, and have focused to halters, bridles, harness, everything that has long straps more than three-dimensional shape (saddles are pain, I say). I make all the metal pieces myself too, no Rio Rondo stuff in my possession. Also some (most) of the lace I use is made by me.

In the middle is Rhodo wearing my first ever 'serious' piece of tack.

Because traditional scale is so nice, I once got crazy at thinking how nice it could be to have dolls for my models. So I got two Breyer dolls at Xmas 2013, and customized their heads in early 2014, so they're rats instead of people. The materials were Paulinda clay, viscose hair and plastic beads that I painted for eyes.

Asko, the western guy.

At 2016 I realised that I need more dolls. But I didn't want to put much money to them as the same amount could go to important things like food and the trad scale horses. So I started to think, and ended up trying to make my own doll, starting from wire armature. It became a cat. It went surprisingly quickly and nicely, so I made more, this time rats. And here I am now, owning almost over 40 dolls, and only two of them are customs. None of them is human, because I don't want humans to handle my horses. Right now my dolls come in these species: rats, cats, mice... I'm working on expanding the range.

What about my collecting history - at 2016 I became a real Breyer model horse collector, as I bought my first two traditionals: Vissy and Killi. I did put a lot of time to plan which models to choose, and I'm still quite impressed by these boys in 2018. Breyers taught me to do better tack since my tack back then was lame on those heads, and I saw it. Have bought few Breyers per year after that, mostly twice or three times a year (none in 2019 so far).

Vissy and Killi.(The bridles are old.)

In 2017 my tackmaking got crazy, and to 2018 I've made a lot of bridles - maybe over 50 of them (and don't even start about 2019...). Halters are easy too. Saddles are painful and impossible for me.


As a model horse hobbyist
What can I do? I collect, customize, paint, sculpt, make tack, photograph, blog, make photo stories and photo stacks. I'm not saying I'm good in anything, but I like to do these.

I have several blogs (while now trying to focus only at couple of them). One, Kuvikko, is my main collection blog, where are models listed by their names under the scale. That's unfortunately in Finnish. Luckily, I have also a blog called Visualrat, which is in English, and there's also a tack page (with traditional scale tack separately). My collection is listed in both there and here (Visualrat shows it overall, while in TLM I list only traditional scale OF, CM and OSC, and smaller customs.) I find it impractical to update my collections and tacks in several blogs, so I've started to seriously decrease the amount of page galleries I have. One main gallery in each language is enough, plus deviantART.

I'm interested about questioning things, and horse world is filled with that kind of stuff. More about this later...

As a tackmaker I like to invent things myself, as it's often just the only way to go. Realism and detail is everything in model horse hobby, what makes this a perfect hobby for me, as I can use my brain. Tack also is my way to study and scrutinize tack function and bits - which is why I ended up inventing a whole new way to make working bits for model horses that lack the space where to put a mouthpiece.

Overall, I guess I'm not the typical example of a hobbyist. I don't even conga. And I don't use Rio Rondo stuff (though it could be interesting to) or human dolls neither. I'm not interested about showing my models (and that's not even possible in Finland, shows don't exist here).