"Normal" tricolor
"Normal" tricolor is a tricolor with white, black and beige, these are the most common tricolors and can be collor point beige, siamese or himalayan based. If they have pink eyes and light beige markings they are most likely himalayan based, if they have red eyes and good noticeable beige makings they are most likely siamese based and off course the black eyed tricolors are mostly black eyed siamese alias collor point beige based.
Then you have the curious think called odd eye, having one red and one black eye, most times these are siamese or himilayan based and at the black eye the pigment of the original collor of the mouse comes back, wich makes his one eye black, because black mice normally have black eyes, often they also have a black patch around that black eye.
The normal tricolors are my oldest lines, the contrast of black, beige and white appeals to me. I started this line in 2010, I can't think about stopping with this line, every litter is a suprise in how their markings are. Two good marked mice can give a litter with bad tricolors and two bad tricolors can give good ones!
Breeding tricolor
how to breed tricolor? Getting tricolor isn't that hard, if you breed 2 tricolors, you will have new tricolors. When both parrents carry one splashed gene, they will have some broken in the litter, but when one or two parrents carry two splashed genes their youngs will all be tricolor.
The tricky part is to improve their markings, the first tricolors are often really splashed with some small white markings. The idea is to select the best ones, when you have more white on the mouse, the black splashed will start making patches in stead of splashed markings, but you don't want too much white, because then you don't have enough of the other two colors. I usually select the ones that have the darkest black markings and/or the ones with no splashed in the beige markings.
Achievements
The fact that I have been breeding tricolors for over 5 years, I have had many ups and downs with this line.
I had illnesses that caused my young litters to die at early age, I am very pleased that my lines were strong enough to get over these set backs.
I haven't gone to many shows with my tricolors as they are hard to get good enough to even score 90 points as their type is hard to improve and their markings always have splashed! But my Aliya born in februari 2012 achieved the amazing score of 95.5 and an F on the ECC show in Oktober 2012, this score brought her to the first place of the mice and the third place of the entire show.
Currently I am working on getting the normal tricolors standarized, I started in January 2014, this year I got a full clean yes from the judges and now the adventure started for real. Unfortunately 2014 was a very bad year for my tricolors and I lost a lot of my breeding stock from illness, age and everything. In Januari 2015 I got very lucky, my own animals weren't good enought for the show, but another breeder also entered two tricolor mice wich saved me! January 2016 is coming and I am planning on getting as many tricolors in the show as possible to get the standard for tricolors!