Akhal Tekes are the greyhounds of the horse world and frankly, pretty bizarre looking if you aren’t familiar with them. They have a very distinctive head with ‘hooded’ eyes and a very long and straight profile, and build-wise they’re exceptionally lean when they’re fit. One of the founding sires of the Thoroughbred breed was a ‘Turkomen’ which is most likely what we’d now call the Teke.
Some of them also have a very interesting quirk of the hair follicles which gives them a beautiful metallic sheen - something which translates beautifully in the model!
akhal-teke stallion Postulat by Olgait, on Flickr
akhal-teke stallion Shakhid by Olgait, on Flickr
akhal-teke stallion Samar-Kan by Olgait, on Flickr
Akhal_Teke_gold_horse by Gary Rust, on Flickr
Diana wrote:The black knees with white socks looks so weird to me, so I had to look them up. They do not ALL have black knees, but more than I expected. A pure white option with blue eyes would have been awesome!
On which one? They’re all totally normal and realistic horse colours! (Well, aside from the bay with the weirdly chestnut mane and tail!)
The way white markings work is complicated, but in the most basic terms think of them as a layer of white paint on top of a coloured base coat. Black ‘points’ on the legs, ears and muzzles are a characteristic of bay and buckskin coats, so any markings would just go over the top if that makes sense?
If it’s the grey one, then, yeah, greys can be weird. Horses with the grey ‘gene’ gradually lose pigmentation over time, usually in a particular pattern, and legs are often the last to go - I think the pigment tends to cling onto areas closest to the bone, hence why the knees, hocks and cheekbones are often still dark while the rest of the horse is almost totally white-grey.
Working Hunter Collecting Ring by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr
Highland Ponies by Christine Sutcliffe, on Flickr
If you want a ‘white’ horse with blue eyes you’d be looking for a cremello or perlino, ( a double dilute with two copies of the cream gene) a fully greyed out horse with some kind of pinto pattern to account for the blue eyes, or a Dominsnt White, which is it’s own kind of complicated thing. XD
Sorry for the real horse spam, when you’re in the model horse hobby for long enough you start to get really into weird colour genetics which get more complicated the more you look into them