oooh shiny

So I happen to collect dragons.  Anyone who's known me for more than about two days knows this, especially if they have visited my house and seen my office - it's hard to miss the two display cases and wall of dragon art!  While I've collected all types of dragons from all over the world for over fifteen years, some of my very favorite dragons are made by Windstone Editions using the art of Melody Pena.  The first one I ever got was a tiny little rainbow hatching dragon, and every so often over the past years I've picked up another.

Let's just say the past two months have doubled my collection of Windstone dragons and leave it at that.

However, in addition to the many beautiful dragon sculptures, the artists at Windstone also make and sell several other beautiful creatures ranging from the real (meerkats, cats, foxes) to the fantastic (unicorns, gryphons, muses, poads).  From time to time, Melody will hand-paint a set of one type of sculpture and sell them as a "Limited Edition Grab Bag" where you won't know what you got until you open the package when it arrives.  I chose to take part in two of these grab bag offerings over the past few months, even though they weren't dragons, and I'm just tickled with what I've gotten.

First up is the tiny baby unicorn that arrived the same day Curzon had his surgery, which I named Rain.

Rain is a white unicorn with a light brown stripe down her back and legs that fade from white to yellow to green to orange and then pink, with white socks and copper/pink hooves.  Her mane and tail do the same fade pattern, and she has yellow eyes and a light green jewel in her collar.  Her pattern is purple raindrops across her body, with a light dusting of the sparkly "interference" paint which shows up at just the right angle under bright sunlight or bright indoor light (and thus is the devil to photograph).

I haven't been "into" unicorns since I was a girl, but Rain is very lovely and it means a lot to me that she came on the day Curzon was in surgery.  I actually opened up the box while waiting to hear back from the surgeon that he'd come out of the anesthesia.  Currently she's living on my nightstand in my bedroom, where I can look at how pretty she is and smile before I go to bed.

It took an angled shot to be able to see the color of her eyes, which sound weird (being yellow) but look very nice when compared with all of the other colors.  The detail on this tiny little sculpture is fantastic - the shading on the colors, the raindrops splattered across her body, even the insides of the nostrils are painted!

The most recent grab bag editions was for a "Young Poad" sculpture, which is a creation of Melody Pena's imagination and (to me) is best described as a combination of a guinea pig and a bird.  They're very cute, and for this batch she painted over 120 of them, with most of them pictured in the class photo above.  The one I bought arrived today, and this time I was able to find it in the photo - as circled!

I was super excited to get one with lots of detail on her back, almost a butterfly sort of pattern with lots of color and details.  The Poad is airbrushed in green, teal, blue, and purple with a silver stripe down her back and a butterfly pattern in red orange, purple, gold, blue, and teal.  She has red eyes and a gold beak and toenails.

It's hard to see all the colors in a photograph - what looks like solid red is actually a combination of red, orange, and purple!  The silver strip sure showed up strong in the photo, however.

Inquisitive looking little creature, isn't she?  I don't think I'm going to collect any of these as a "thing" any more than I will the unicorns, but I do love having these little "grab bag" editions.  The Poad will live on my desk at home for now, although I'd really like to take her to live on my desk at work but I'm afraid something might happen to her.  I also need to pick out a name, but one hasn't struck me just yet - but she's only been here for a few hours!

Yay for pretty things!