Splatter Painting

Ibn Monsata, Arabian stallion customized by Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig from the Classic Shetan and Sagr molds.

The horse above, Ibn Monsata, is one of Sarah Minkiewicz-Breunig's NaReViMo horses for 2025. Sarah posted about the kind of splatter technique she used to create him and a (yet-to-be-revealed) roan on her blog. That post, "Speckled Sparkle: Painting with a Toothbrush," is a helpful read if you want to try this out for yourself. 

Sarah was recreating the look Tom Bainbridge used to get with his fleabitten greys. Here is a close-up of Monsata. You can see LunarVerse, Tom's Classic Arabian Stallion, that Sarah used as an inspiration here. I think she nailed the look with her new guy!

A close-up of Ibn Monsata 

Like many vintage artists, I experimented with splatter painting. This is Janx Sandpiper, a bay roan Walking Pony I customized from a Stablemate Morgan Mare. He would have been made some time between 1986 and 1987—during the peak of the splatter trend. (If you look closely, you can see he was also part of the string mane and tail trend.)

Janx Sandpiper, inspired by Judy Renee Pope's Walking Horse Janx Spectral

Splattering paint (or masking material) has a technical advantage. It creates a truly random pattern. That's surprisingly hard to achieve. It's also just fun.

I decided to experiment with splatter painting and ceramics last year. I used the same toothbrush technique Sarah describes in her article, only with ceramic underglaze. Usually, I use translucent underglazes, but for this, I used opaque colors. Because the opaque colors have a heavier, chalky texture, I could go back and lightly etch the speckling to better reflect the direction of the coat. 

Here is a finished Hadrian glazed this way. 

Splatter techniques were on my mind later in the year when I visited the Breyer factory. Paint splattering is how we did the belton spotting on the black 2025 Ambassador Model "Salud!". Splattered resist was used to create the roaning pattern on the black tobiano-salpicada version. I got to experiment with both types of splatter while I was there.

Here's one of the experimental models from that trip. I wanted to see if I could use layers of resist to create a variable roaning that might read at "varnish roan." I am not sure it worked, but maybe he just needed more varnishing to look less like a grey. 

I haven't decided how to finish my NaReViMo horses yet. Chances are they will sit in primer for a very long time. That's how things often work here at the studio! It is tempting to pull out the toothbrush, though.