back to Snafflez Horsemaker Tack Dressup!

Answers to email I got...

Where did this idea come from?
Back in December we were halfway across the country visiting family when we decided to buy a horse. She's a bright gold buckskin, and we didn't own ANY tack, and she wasn't coming with any. AND the tack shops where we were visiting were having boxing day sales! I needed to decide on tack... fast. But what colour goes good with a buckskin? I found a few internet resources but I'm a visual learner. I wanted to try stuff out. I suppose I could have just made paper drawings, paper dolls, but where's the fun in that? Then I remembered the "dollz" phenomenon, and I have at least the rudimentary html skills to do THAT. And then, a week later when we bought our SECOND horse, a ketchup-red sorrel, it got expanded.

Who drew the pictures?
I did. The horses, the hair, the saddles, the pads, the boots, the markings... all drawn with Corel Photo-Paint.

How do I save a picture
You have to press the PRINTSCREEN (PRT SC) key on your computer, on most PC's it's in the upper right corner of the keyboard. That saves your screenshot to a clipboard. Then, open a program like Paint, or IrfanView, or Photoshop, or Photo-Paint. Then, press CTRL-V to paste your screen shot. Crop out your horse. The background is that grey colour because it's one of the easiest colours to eliminate or replace or make transparent, other than black or white which didn't work because horses and tack went missing on those backgrounds. Perhaps one day if I grow an extra brain cell to dedicate to scripting, we'll be able to just press a button and it saves. But not yet.

How can I get my pictures included in the gallery?
Save them to your computer using the above instructions. We'll accept .gif, .jpg, .png, and .bmp files. Send them as email attachments to design3@snafflez3.com3, but remove the '3's.

Why isn't there more girths, more bridle variety, more bits, different saddles?
Because that wasn't really needed for picking tack colours, which was the original purpose. But apparently there's a demand for the ability to create avatars of horses, and for that we need more variety. Keep sending requests and suggestions, though. Bridle and bit types, and saddles, may come... in the winter.

Why the winter?
Because winters here are brutally cold, and summers here are awesome and not to be spent sitting at a computer, but spent sitting on a horse.

Why aren't there tobiano markings?
Man, you guys are GOOD. Yup, all the markings are for an overo. That wasn't really a conscious decision... all the markings were modeled after horses I know, for friends who might want to play around with the tack I'd made, and it just so happens all those horses are overos. Fine fine, tobianos will come.

Why are the horse colours named "gold" instead of "palomino"? That's not accurate.
Actually, the horse named "blonde" is modeled on a palomino (my horses' dam, in fact, a lovely dappled palomino) while the "gold" is modeled on a bright chestnut -- but both colours can be shades of palomino, or chestnut, just depending on the mane and tail. Again, the original purpose of the horsemaker tool was to make it easier to put together a horse that matched your own horse's colour as much as possible, so you could see if brown or black leather tack was better, and blue or white saddle pads or boots.

Can I use the pictures I create?
Absolutely. You can use anything you create and save to your own disk, so long as you are not earning real money from it, and only provided you give credit (preferably by a link) to snafflez.com. It's just courtesy. This means you can use it on your website, blog, journal, sim-game stable, Horseland, Howrse, or to create an avatar of your own horse to use as a signature or userpic for a forum or discussion board. Please do not use pictures from the gallery: they were created by other people.

I'm doing a custom model horse, and I'm planning to sell it, can I use this tool to plan my colours?
Yes, of course.

What more is coming to this site?
There will be more tack. There may be more styles of horse. We may develop a way to save the pictures, and to avoid all that scrolling. One idea is to shrink everything and make a miniature version that is more on the scale of those itty bitty "dollz" for people to make avatars or icons from.

Besides the horsemaker, we happen to have a large collection of pony quiz questions stored on very old computer disks that we will be making into quizzes for the site. Who knows... like I said before, winters are long here, and when the ponies would rather stay at the back 40 acres in -40°C weather, I'm not chasing them. And that's when weird stuff like horsemaker websites happen.

How will you let us know when updates have been added?
This isn't Reuters News! How about this... check out our new Blog?