I present to you Gaea, elegant and knowing.  She started out as a symbolless, partially yellowed Sunlight that had no tail, which I got in trade from Jellybean some time ago.  Gaea may appear to have been simple to create, but I encountered much difficulty along the way.  I removed and replaced all the paint on her more than 10 times, and since that paint was pearly, even where the original blue plastic shows through, the pony shimmers.

Perhaps the best way to describe Gaea's creation simply would be to say that the pony made herself.  I decided that I wanted Mother Nature to have lots of natural characteristics, so I needed to attach a variety of items to her body.  Thus it was that I took battered Sunlight along to the craft store and walked up and down the aisles, holding up various things and seeing whether they looked good with the pony.  I returned home with some acrylic paints, a package containing dyed shells and the little starfish that is now on Gaea's neck, a bag of cheap amethyst, some little bunches of clay flowers that were attached to wires with cloth leaves on them, and a bagged bunch of dried, natural pine sprigs, as well as some dyed feathers that I didn't use in the long run.

I set about attaching objects first.  I wanted a "four seasons" type of design, potentially including snow for winter, a water scene for summer, plants for spring, and colored leaves for fall.  I glued the series of shells, flower, amethyst and pine sprigs, then tried to think of what to do with the pony's reverse side.  I decided that I wanted to paint her somehow, so I started experimenting with the paints.  I ended up with the beach half of her body gold and sandy (some gold paint I had bought for another custom pony turned out to have little grains in it to make it textured, so I used that), and the other half silver and cloudy.  It was a disaster!  I removed the paint with rubbing alcohol and tried again and again, with no better success.

After a while, I painted the eyes metallic navy (you cannot see them well at all in the pictures) and added the usual Swarovski crystals to them (also not visible).  I gave up and left the pony sitting on my desk for quite some time.  Later, I tried seeing how the flowers would look attached to the other side as they are now.  They looked fine, so I glued them in.  My problem then was to do the paint job that would cover the yellow discolorations.  Again I redid and removed layer after layer of paint, until the original one had begun to be more appealing.  This time, I left the pony's back and flowered side unpainted, and dealt with the seaside section.  I was still dissatisfied, but suddenly I realized what the piece was missing!  It needed something to break up the gold sand that traveled all the way up and down the pony's legs.  So what better to use than water?

Finally pleased with the basic pony, I needed a tail.  The lady who cleans my parents' house had some dill in her garden that she sometimes brought to us, and its leafy portions had looked very much like pony hair.  She brought me some, and I excitedly went to use it as Gaea's tail, but as I shoved the dill into the pony's tail hole, something fell out and started crawling across my desk!  It was a tiny green bug, a horrible aphid!  I quickly smashed it with the tip of a pencil, along with its companion aphid, which had also fallen from the leafy plant.  More than mildly disturbed, I rushed the dill back to the kitchen to get rid of it!  Soon thereafter, it was thrown away in the garbage.  I couldn't throw it in the backyard for nature to take care of it, for the aphids would destroy our flowers and plants!  It was quite a disturbing experience, and it caused me to wash out the pony and leave her head off for over a week so that the water could dry out.

After the aphid episode, I decided to be safe and use fake plants instead.  I went back to the craft store and hunted around for something dangling and natural-looking.  I came across a bunch of fake eucalyptus on a long wire, and the dangling pink flowers that became Nature's tail.  The eucalyptus was easy to use, since I was able to just trim the wire and stick it in the tail hole without gluing.  The wire is exactly the right width to fit the hole.  I also brought home some wire garland with little cloth leaves attached.  I wrapped a length of these around Gaea's left front leg.  Her accessory, the harp, indicates that this is the Orb-Gaea instead of her predecessor in the books.

With Gaea's plant and sea attachments, and her impressive tail, this pony sets a record among my custom ponies.  She is the first pony to have something different GLUED on each side of her body for symbols (the only other custom with 3-D symbols in my herd is Bijoux, who has the same pattern of plastic pearls on each side).  Gaea also has the longest tail of any of my customs, its longest tendril measuring in at 15 inches!