03/23/2025
The Evolution of Quixote:
When Quixote arrived at my doorstep years ago (for what I now consider a steal of a deal fully delivered), I had no idea what a ride I was in for with this horse who had never made a trip around a carousel!
When the man brought my marketplace find, he was convinced it had come from a Russian carousel and talked excitedly about the history it must have had. I could tell the horse was plastic so I had my doubts, but my knowledge of carousels did not extend much beyond a love for them.
So when I set to work, knowing that man would see my progress, I treated this horse as though it were a real piece of history. I did my best to preserve the original paint job beneath and began practicing techniques and using materials approved for wooden horses while beginning my research into this particular horse.
It didn't take me long to realize that this horse was one of many mass produced on the same mold, and that my strong attachment to it came from the roots of its roots. It had been cast from an original wooden Philadelphia Toboggan Company horse like those on the carousel in Idlewild Park that had sparked my love as a child.
This horse may have been only a copy, but now he was mine. While I kept my techniques wooden horse friendly, I decided I wanted him to be one of a kind. Slowly he began to transform, with inspiration from "my" Idlewild horse but still my constant fear of making permanent changes.
The day I finished Quixote and delivered him to the booth, I was hugely proud, and he's sat there drawing people in and displaying various items for the last few years. Clients discovered him and began contacting me about painting their own carousel horses.
My skills began to develop and one day last year I finally noticed that poor Quixote was no longer a good representation of my work. With his muzzle already needing a touch up from frequent petting by booth customers, and a chip out of his nostril from something dropped, I resolved to bring him home for at least some polishing.
When I got him out into the sunlight for the first time in years, I discovered that he would need much, much more than that. Rotocast horses like Quixote expand and contact with temperature to an extreme degree. The paint originally used on these mass produced copies was basically oil based house paint and has almost no give from the start. My acrylic paint has excellent flex, but it's no match for the jagged edges of the old paint job I'd tried to preserve separating and pinching closed again. My work was being destroyed from the inside out.
So Quixote was stripped down to bare plastic for the first time since he'd left his factory in the 1980s. That task alone took me the entire summer around my other jobs, so what I expected to be a few weeks of his absence from the booth has ended up being closer to a year, and he's still not finished.
Having to destroy all of my work to get to the bare bones, plus another incident involving him that occurred at the same time, made me finally decide to go all in on making him completely his own. Taking inspiration from hours of studying historic PTC horses but combining that with real medieval armor references, got him to where he is today. The materials now used are more suitable to his material and much more durable.
There is so much more work to do, but given how hard I've been on myself over his extended booth hiatus, I wanted to document where we came from and the progress we've both made to get to where we are today.
*Paint stripped
*removed original wood repair and sculpting materials
*sanded
*cut into to add infrastructure and filling material (just because I could sit on him does not mean anyone could)
*excess material removed to allow for proper armor fit
*hoof correction
*new hair, trappings, and armor built and rebuilt and rebuilt again
*carved a real wooden shield to give him something "real" of his own
*primed
*tested paint techniques and palettes
Today he has been set aside while I work on some other jobs, but when I return to him, he should be ready for his real paint at last!
