After base coating the entire model in Goosefeather I spray the model thoroughly in clear matt sealant. You can use different base colors for different greys. When a bay turns grey you are considering the base color of the horse was brown, so you do a base with warmtones. Not glistening white. Black horses will grey out in shades of silver and grey, so white or antique white works best for those. Chestnuts will have reddish warm tones so goosefeather works well for them as a base.
You can either airbrush your base color on or thin the paint down and lightly sponge it on to cover the model. This is the method I prefer on the majority of my models because it leaves a suede like texture all over the horse giving the illusion of short pile fur. If you are more interested in a strictly show piece model and want the finish flawlessly plastic-slick, then airbrushing may be for you. I personally have never seen a slick plastic horse in a pasture before, so I go with the more natural, more realistic looking finish myself. It's all a matter of preference and when it comes to art, there are no right or wrong ways.

You will need rubber gloves.
When doing pastels be prepaired to A. Get it all over you. B. Pick an area of the horse you can hold to and don't touch ANYTHING else but that area. If you can, hold the tail, and when you have to rotate it, hold it in a way so as your thumb rests on the forelocks with the rest of your hand on the mane. Or hold onto the lower legs as these will be darkened nearly black anyway and can be coated last. But use rubber gloves. Fingerprint oils will destroy your model if you touch it. It's not totally impossible to remove fingerprints but it's hard. So use gloves. Clean gloves and if they get too much dust on them take them off and replace with new ones. The operative task is not to smear or smudge the model.

After base color has been thoroughly sprayed in matt sealer and has dried, we begin by taking our dark brown pastel color powder [I use PanPastels brand pastels] and with a fairly medium to large brush, blush it on over the rump, up the back, the shoulders, hind and front legs, up the neck arch and ears as shown in the photos.
Take a slightly smaller brush and now scrub the dark brown again deeper into the afformentioned areas.

IMPORTANT: Since you are doing all of the pasteling at once and not spraying in between them, you are limited as to how much pastel you can get to stick to itself to darken the model color, so take into account that if you can only get a good three layers worth of pasteling on there before no more will stick to go darker, do two in brown and one in black. You can alternate the colors til you get it the way you want. After doing a few you will get the feel of it.

Take a fairly firm yet soft medium to small brush and rub the pastel into the muscles of the horse so they are darker in comparison to the rest of the body. You are creating shadow and muscle. After using brown color, now take black pastel powder and starting at the rump scrub in circular motions the black to darken the areas. Scrub down the hind legs. Color the entire hind leg all the way down with the color being darker on the back areas. A grey horse in most cases has it's coloring remaining on the top side of the horse. Don't apply pastel on the areas you see above as those are the greyed out areas. Leave the stomach, behind the barrel, and inner front leg. Faintly add pastel to the forehead and cheeks. Shade the chest in the front and the muscles of the neck.
This the the main step of the dappling, so make sure the color is deep and dark. Scrub it in til it wont go any darker.
DO NOT SPRAY SEAL THE MODEL.

The fun part.
Now with a box of Q-Tips, (the large size-you'll use well over 50 or so) you are ready to begin the dappling.
Take a dampened Q-Tip with preferably a sponge setting in a shallow dish of water. Or if you wanna be gross you can just lick the thing. I wont say what method I use. lol You don't want the Q-tip soaking dripping wet, just dampened. I start at the flanks and barrel. Take the Q-tip and gently roll it in a tight circular pattern taking up the pastel color and literally cleaning it from a small spot. After the Q-tip has become soiled, turn it over and use the other side. After that side has soiled, toss it and grab a new one. You will go through MANY Q-tips. Sometimes they will become soiled after just one dapple. Continuing to twirl and rotate the tip picking up softly the color from the base coat. This is why we don't spray the model after applying the pastel layer.
This is also why we spray it thouroughly before adding the pastel. You create a sealed surface that the pastel will wipe off of easily.
You should start off in the base coat area at the edge of the pasteling. Blending is the key. Dapples are not even. They are not perfectly round. They are sometimes prominant and sometimes soft. Just start at the flank and clean it off in twirling, rotating, lightly scrubbing patterns picking up the color. If you take off too much let it dry and reapply some more pastel to it and try again. It's extremely forgiving because it's not sealed.

Continue the lifting with the damp Q-tips around the barrel, then the underpart of the neck and throat. Dapple the chest, leaving the coloring in the muscling areas for shadow. A trick to making those prominant star shaped dapples is just pull off some of the cotton from the Q-tip making it harder and scribble-scrub your little dapple in. You can use that method for the rump and back and upper part of the shoulders. You don't want to scrub too hard and scratch the base coat. You want some cotton on the tip, just enough to make the tip a little smaller and defined. Just scribble the dapple giving it a starburst type look. When forming dapples you get a rythem. I normally go in little star or square motions to scrub them on. Continue the whole body.
When you do the stomach, add only brown or dark grey pastel to that and Q-tip nearly all of it away leaving only faint dapples that are so shaded they're nearly faded away.

Now you want to roll the Q-tip along and then across the upper front legs wiping the pastel color from the legs except from in the muscling. Antiquing it. Then take your small to medium brush and reapply a bit more black or black and brown mixed to the muscle line and to the knees. When doing dapples on the legs both front and back, you will see on horses that the dapples are more like veined out stripes with starbursts come off of them. They resemble lightning bolts. Using a thinned Q-Tip again, streak it down the leg scribbling here and there making it spider down the leg to the knees. You can do sparatic star dapples on the legs also. But it's like the dapple is in a small area so it's streaked down.
Cover the entire muzzle with black pastel adding some to the whole eye socket as well. Then take your wet Q-tip and wipe it off letting it settle in the details of the face. You put it on then wet-wipe it off. That's all. See the final illustration above. You're horse should have a light creamy face with the coloring down in the veining accents and grooves giving it a very defined look.

Now Take a small pastel brush and reapply the black just around the eye socket and color in the entire muzzle again. On grey horses the black muzzle has a tendency to go further under the chin than above on the nose. Just above the nostrils and right to the jawline underneith. But with many horses it can still vary. Arabs alot of the time have this style. Blacken the legs from the knees down. If you are still holding on to the hind or front legs just wait til last to blacken them.

Ok, now you may be thinking that the dappling on the back and shoulders looks alittle brown and alot too dull. Or you may be thinking "I don't like the look of the dapples I made." The color hasn't been as dark as you'd like because it was hard to get the dust to stick after so many layers. Well this corrects it.

You are now ready to deepen the dappled color. Take your medium brush and with black pastel just weave liberally through the dapples. Even over top of some of them. Go over the back at the mane base and the top of the neck and down to the shoulders adding more black to sink the color and dappling down into his coat. Reapply the dark black to the knees down again. And this time take your grey then black or just black and shade the male or female parts under the stomach. The anal area and crevise connecting them. Fade the shading out under the thinghs and just to the stomach. You can even wipe it away and reapply to make it look even richer there to. Remember not to forget the inside of the ears and nostrils. On grey horses it's mostly dark.
Now that your body is pretty much done, SPRAY SEAL it with clear matt. This will lock in the dapple coat. Remember: You wont be able to remove anymore dapples now. You can only go darker, so make sure this is it.

To do the tail take antique white or add a tiny amount of cream to regular white. If it's too glistening it may clash harshly. And just roughly paint the mane and tail. You don't even have to go all the way up to the neck line if you are leaving the roots black. After it's dried, spray seal it. Then after it's thoroughly dried, do as you did with the body. Add heavy pastel black color and then wiping downward with the flow of hair using the wet Q-tip to remove the black leaving antiqued grey. Remove more and more the further down the mane and tail you go leaving the ends nearly clean with just the antiquing in the detail. Darken it in multiple layers if need. I did the forelocks in black on this model and put the greying further down the mane. You can do the mane and tail on dapple greys either solid black (like Ben and Dooley above) or nearly silver white (like Raphael Bey above). Or you can do it in a mixture of both black grey and white.

For the eyes just refer back to the page on painting eyes for the full step by step process in doing that. These pictures are there also. CLICK HERE to go to that tutorial.

For the muzzle using dark flesh color Liquitex brand, paint a scattered path of flesh pinking on the muzzle. 60% if not more Arabians have pinking of some kind on their muzzles or lips. You can do a snip, a little on the lips, break it up some on one side some on the other, or do the entire muzzle in pink. It's up to you. There's no wrong way to have it. There are some crazy looking muzzle patterns on horses out there in the world. Some can be downright weird looking. Paint the chestnuts (the little glands on the insides of the legs) either light tan then stroke with some brown pastel to darken and shade or do them darker grey nearly black.

Lastly is adding the socks and facial marking you want. I used a tattered stripe blaze and front socks for Israh El Storm. Start out with thinned white paint and keep going over it til it's covered throughly. For the hooves. This is a neat little thing. Paint the entire hoof in a golden tan or golden ocre for black hooves and then take a small brush and in downward motions streak black pastel down the hoof. Then take an old discarded brush and get it wet. Then with the wet brush streak downward into the pastel. When pastel is stroked wet it will leave it's own natural streaking. When doing a light natural colored hoof, you can either use wet acrylics and blend the streaks in using light beige and browns. Or you can paint the hoof light creamy tan and take beige pastel dust and streak it wet. Then after you streak it down and it dries, you can lightly streak it across the hoof for growth layers. Spray seal the entire model for the last time.
Using DELTA CERAMCOAT Polyurethine Gloss Varnish [found at Walmart] faintly coat the hooves for a semi glossy look. Coat the eyes, [as explained in the Eye Tutorial] the nose, the mouth crease, Inside the genital creases and openings, and for an Arabian that has a desired show look take gloss and apply it thinly (don't load your brush. In fact a half empty brush amount) around the entire muzzle, up the face to the eye, and around the eye socket. This is done to mimic the oiled areas on real Arabian's faces. Show breeders of Arabs shave their muzzle whiskers off and oil their faces around the muzzle and eyes with baby oil to give the face definition and shadow the points. It also makes them look hot and glistening with sweat from the desert heat. That's why so many photos of flaming red chestnuts and even some bay arabs have what looks like black eye points in their show photos. It's the oil wetting down the fur to the skin to look much darker. It's not their true coloring. The eye socket color is really the same as the rest of the horse.
For Israh El, I opted not to use the oiled look as he's more wild and out in the sands than in halter showing.

On chestnut greys the coloring process is still the same only you're working with orange and red pastels. The mane and tail is in deep chestnut with the darker brown pasteled over it and then wiped with the Q-tips. Light dapple grey horses like Isis up above, is done with the base pastel color in grey and dark grey with a hint of black. It depends on the base color, how much of it you want showing through, how dark and what color you want your dapples.

For other dappled coats, it's basically the same principle. Just shade on the darker coloring over a sprayed base coat and Q-tip them away leaving the darker rings that surround the dapples.