Here in part 2 we have a glued half tail bow.  Once you are certain your glue is absolutely dry and won't come apart, you may begin to open your fan.  We actually want to open it so that each side is over extended past horizontal and open as far as we gently can without tearing the paper.  Here I am holding my half tail bow open between my fingers to show you.  If you are gentle you can press it a bit more open and very slightly pressing some of the sharp creases out of the folds will both soften the pleats to look more like ribbon fabric /and/ help hold the tail bow open.

Then it is going to be time to check the size and fit against the tail bun of your horse's braided tail.  Here you can see I am holding the tail bow up against my sculpture to check and see if I need to recollapse the fan and trim it down in size a bit more.  It was still just a bit larger than I was aiming for so I went back and trimmed my purple edging down until the fan is smaller.  

Once you are satisfied that the tail bow fan is the right size, then you can carefully spray it with a clear sealer while you hold it open!  Do this for both sides.  A hair dryer on a low setting can help dry this sealer coat fast and it will hold the fan open as well as adding another stiffening layer.  Always be sure to step outside or use a very well ventilated area for spraying and do not breathe the fumes.  Wearing a suitable safety mask is strongly advised such as an N95 mask or a full respirator rated to the material you are spraying.  Then I wash overspray off of my hands carefully or you can wear gloves.

Here is the backside of my new tail bow fan.  If you do each side differently then you can choose which side you like best and simply turn the side you don't want to show down against the tail.  I left my thread from my knot tying long so I can use it to tie to the tail braid's bun.  Now do the very same steps all over again with the second 1 inch folded square of paper to make another fan.  Trim to the same size so that they match.  Now you have your upper and lower tail bow fans ready to mount onto your sculpture!

You remember those long pieces of paper we painted blue or purple and folded as well, right?  Here I cut them into smaller pieces with about four folds each.  You will want seven in total so if your strips were long enough you can get four of each color.  Then if you mess up one you'll have one extra just in case!  Instead of using thread and tying a knot in the middle, I collapse each accordion folded bit and add a tiny dot of super glue at one edge.  Let that dry then trim it to a slight point and retouch that with more paint if you need to.  The side you didn't glue can then be trimmed to the height you need and opened to make a very TINY little fan.  I'm aiming for the mane flight 'flower' petals to be about 1/4 of an inch tall when done.  If they are too tall simply close the fan and trim with the craft knife.  Again, be careful with how much glue you used because it is very easy to use too much.  Any torn paper or discolored parts can be touched up with fresh paint, pearl powder, and once open - sprayed so they'll be sealed and dry in the open fan position.

Here we have the upper and lower tail bow halves all done and ready to glue and tie to our sculpture's tail knot.  Once they are in place you can give them one final coating with a varnish or other sealer to make their coating thick and strong so the bows aren't too thin and fragile.  I like to brush that on rather than spray it so I do not get overspray on my horse. If it turns out your tail bows are still a bit too big and you already sealed them, you can trim the edge very carefully with scissors without refolding the fans closed. If you need to even up the colors you can very carefully touch up the paint and reseal the fans but it is tricky and easy to mess up. I did go back later and touch mine up and it make them look even better!

Above the tail bow halves are my 7 flower fans for our mane flights.  They are now ready to be attached to wires or straight pins so they may be mounted to the sculpture's neck.  In my case I chose to use straight pins that are very strong, easy to trim shorter, and can be glued into tiny holds I drill in his neck along his mane braid. 

Here I have stuck the tip of the straight pin up into the bottom of a mane fan with a tiny dab of super glue to help secure it into place.  Do this for all 7 mane flights or use wire of your choice.  Extra height can be trimmed off later when you are done.  For now the added length makes it easier to handle the flights and further decorate them if desired.  They can be used as they are now, or you may add 'petals' or bows right below the flower - or even tiny seed beads if they will fit over your wire.

On these two I am adding a small black strip of paper below the flower which I can add the silver stripe across.  If I cut each side into three parts then I can gently pull them apart to look like ribbon bows or 'petals' below the flowers.  Once spray sealed I can add any final paint touchups, glitter along the top edges or whatever I like for final bling.

Once completed, these mane flights are ready to trim the straight pins short, drill the tiny holes into the neck of the draft horse sculpture and glue them into place!  I alternated the blue and purple flowers. 

This concludes Part 2!  I hope you find this demo useful to make draft horse decorations for your 'Porthos' resins or any other draft horse sculpture.  I will add a Part 3 at a later date on how I add the decorations and show you my completed dappled grey Porthos dressed up with all of his mane and tail decorations in place, fully finished.

So I sculpted a draft horse and had him cast in a limited edition resin called 'Porthos'.  He is an American Percheron looking back behind him and could easily be finished by the painting artist of the client's choice as a Percheron, Belgian, Spotted Draft, Sugarbush, or many other breeds with some small alterations - especially to the style of his mane and tail. The point being that these pieces could be completed as portraits of real horses by your favorite equine artist.  I myself am painting a few of this edition and will be producing 'Porthos' in some other sizes and materials, including custom glazed ceramics.  Here's a shot of my dappled grey boy in progress but unfinished.  In resin he stands about 8 inches tall by about 8 inches long.  We call this 'small tradtional scale' and if he were a 17 or 18 hand tall horse I could have cast him a bit larger - but I wanted to keep his pricing not too high!

Now you could finish your Porthos sculpture with a loose mane and tail, or lengthen his docked tail for a European style, or you could go the whole way and add the mane flights and tail bow of the American showing standards.  This is my long overdue 'how to' with a few options.  First, a company called 'Horsing Around' in England sells pre-made mane flights in a few different styles in what we call 'traditional' scale, which is what 'Porthos' was cast in for this limited edition.  The links to their draft horse decoration choices are here:  Horsing Around Draft Horse Decorations for one version.  Here is another version:  Horsing Around Draft Horse Decor2

That way, if you or your finishing artist don't want to make your flight ribbons for the mane by hand, you can order them.  But the tail bow is still and issue so below I am going to walk you through step by step how they are made for real draft horses - only I am using small pieces of painted paper instead of sewing actual cloth ribbon strips into a block.  Here is a link to a businesses that makes actual draft horse mane and tail decorations for American breeds.  Go to their photos section to see many examples of their work! The Gilded Draft If you aren't on Facebook, do a general internet search on 'draft horse decorations' and look at the images you find!

Once you have some colors and styles chosen for your mane flights, of which their are 7 for American Percherons at the time of this writing (and may vary for other breeds) and you see what tail bows look like, this step by step instructional blog posting will make a lot more sense!    Mane flights can be as simple as stacked ribbons or folds of mylar or ribbon to form partly opened flowers.  I am going to show you one way to make the flower style.

The first thing I did was estimate that a 1 inch square would be about right for a tail bow width for my Porthos sculpture.  It'll actually get trimmed down a bit narrower before we are finished.  Any standard light weight paper will do, ideally acid free.  Two 1 inch squares are then painted in a basic, simple stripe pattern or you can paint them a solid color.  In my case I did a stripe pattern of blue in the center, black on either side of that, and purple on the outside edges.  My camera makes purple very difficult to capture.  On the back side I have painted each square plain blue - using acrylic paint.  You don't have to be super perfect on your lines because you can lay a ruler over the papers once dry and sharpen up the edges with a black pen.  Or in my case I used a silver metallic gel pen to add accents. 

It is a good idea to hold up your paper squares to make sure you get your bars of color about where you want them.  It turns out that I should have made my blue wider, my black narrower, and my purple wider.  But for a first try I think they came out pretty well anyway as you'll see at the end of this article.  If these were a real horse's tail bows we would have sewn strips of colored ribbon or fabric to form this square much like you would for making a quilt block.  I then dusted the blue and purple with pearl powders to make them gleam like satin ribbon, then used a basic gloss spray sealer on each side and allowed to dry.

The next step is that I folded the painted 1 inch squares back and forth in an accordion pattern like window blinds or like making a fan.  I counted roughly how many pleats a typical tail bow's fan has and used that as my target number.  If you need help with how to pleat  your folds like this do an internet search for ideas.  It's very simple and I used the flat of my fingernails to help get sharp edges pressed flat and as evenly as I could.  Then I set these aside. 

Next I start the mane flights for the 'flowers' that stand up along the horse's neck the same way except that I am using pieces of paper just over 1/4 of an inch wide, about 1/3rd the width of my tail bow squares.  These I choose to paint either blue or purple and without stripes.  These were treated the same - dusted with blue or purple pear powders and then spray sealed.  Once dry, each strip is then accordion folded back and forth.

Here we can see all of these starter pieces laid out together with the mane flight pieces in blue and purple on top, with the tail bow squares below.  You will need a total of at least 7 mane pieces though I am only showing two here.  All of these are refolded and pressed about as snug as the folds will go without holding them tight.  A small test tail bow piece made out of plain white paper is shown off to the right that I made first to make sure that I understood what I was doing before I painted the pieces I would actually be using on my Porthos sculpture.  You can see that tail bows are simply opened fans!

You will also notice that my target tail bow fan is actually a bit smaller than my 1 inch squares but we'll get there one step at a time.  Measuring a 1 inch square to start with and then trimming it down for whichever horse sculpture you need it to fit perfectly is just easier (for me) to just start with a 1 inch square.  Every sculpture will be slightly different so I hope you can use these directions to make tail bows and mane flights for any draft horse sculpture and not just for my Porthos!  Obviously if your sculpture is smaller than 'traditional' scale then you will need to downsize your decorations accordingly. You could also try making the mane flights out of actual folded mylar but it is more difficult to handle.  It looks awesome though so it's worth trying!

Next we are going to choose thread that is either a matching color or a contrasting color such as black or white. In my case for this first set I have chosen a turquoise thread because I thought it would be a nice touch with the blue and purple.  With your folded paper square pressed as flat and snug as possible, wrap the sewing thread around a couple of times and tie a snug knot right in the center of your pleated paper.  On real horse tail bows using ribbon, plastic zip ties are often used to bind the pleats to form the center of the fan. 

Afterwards, begin to open the tops of the folds upwards until they meet in the center above your knot!  This is where we will apply a tiny dab of super glue because we want the folds to meet and stay in this half fan shape and not come apart later.  Hold your fan and gently blow on it until the glue is dry.  Be careful that ONLY those two strips touch.  If you fold the entire fan closed while the glue is drying and any extra seeps out, it could glue the fan closed.  Do NOT worry if the sides of your fan are not perfectly the same height.   When you are sure the glue is dry, fold the rest of the fan up on both sides until is it entirely collapsed and facing upwards above the knot.

With the entire fan compressed so that both sides are folded tight with the knot at the very bottom, we can now trim all of the fan at once to ensure an even edge all the way across.  Folding and gluing can give you unequal sides with one side slightly too high.  This trimming makes it all crisp and also allows you to cut down the width of your tail bow slightly to better fit your sculpture.  If you know you need 1/16th of an inch off each side to better scale it to your sculpture then slice off about 1/16th of an inch.  Once you open the fan back up you can compare it to your sculpture to check and see if you need to slice off more.  Better to slice off a bit too little and have to trim it again than to slice off too much and have to start all over!  I used a sharp craft knife to trim my tail bow because scissors crushes the paper and mars the color.

So here we have one tail bow square folded up, tied in the center, folded up in half above the knot again with each side glued together so we get a continuous double folded fan form.  The bits below the tail bow piece are what I trimmed off. It would be nice if the edges of my black stripe lined up perfectly all the way across at the same height but no matter how careful you are with folding it up the middle, it's just not going to be perfect.  We can actually fix that carefully a bit at the end.

This concludes PART 1 of my step by step instructions on making draft horse tail bows and mane flights!  We are half way there!  Continue reading in my next blog post in Part 2.