Breyer Stable Surprise sets

Another little parcel of horses I've had tucked away saved for a while, and opened this weekend - the full set of 2020's four Stable Surprise sets, each contaning one adult and one foal.

These were intended to be sold as a lucky dip sealed mystery box, kind of like the Stablemate blind bags, an idea I didn't mind when they announced it because retailing at about £9 per box, and me being into customising, it wasn't too great an expense if I ended up with duplicates - they were all moulds I like, I could happily repaint the doubles.
But a few weeks ago a seller listed opened boxes on Ebay, and I reasoned that by paying just £1 more per set, I'd know I was getting one of each, and not having to spend out on ordering multiple extra sets til I'd collected all four - especially as I'm minimising my buying while the pandemic continues, to avoid giving the postman too much unneccessary stuff to deal with. Oddly enough, the seller upped their price right after I'd bought and paid for my four, so perhaps they decided they weren't charging quite enough for the privilege of being able to choose your horses!

First up, the Icelandic horse set. Lovely speckly red-chestnut roan stallion, who comes with a solid black foal, which although nice, seems a bit of a mismatch as it's rather big for what is a pony sized breed, and the colour's not related in the slightest!

I've named the stallion Morgunroði, an Icelandic name meaning 'morning red' and referring to a brightly coloured dawn. I rememebered the Icelandic backdrop I've got, this was the inside of the box of my trad scale Elska and is just the right size for photographing SMs of the same breed.

The foal I've named Lina, which is picked from the Icelandic names list but chosen as something which doesn't stand out obviously, because of how she doesn't look very Icelandic - it can work just as a pretty filly name of any nationality!

Next we have the paint mare and foal, a much better pairing of moulds and colours here, I think!

A nice tobiano pattern on the loping quarter horse mould - admittedly I'd have preferred masked socks seeing as they were doing masking for the patches anyway, but I've long given up hope of regular run SMs going back to sharp socks and just had to get used to the annoying blurry ones if I wanted to keep collecting them!

Such a sweet foal - I really do like the smallness of the patches, which sounds a bit strange typed out but you know what I mean, it's always good to see a nice wide variety of markings on pinto models and we don't seem to get as many with this white to colour ratio!

Third set, the new standing warmblood mould with a trotting foal, another pair where the colours don't seem all that linked!

This is my first in this mould, and in general I like it, the head is lovely especially, and I like having another plain basic standing pose when so many moulds are sculpted in action. But I can't help thinking there's something off about the hind leg/pelvis proportion or angle? I just can't put my finger on what or even where and it niggles in a most annoying way that I ought to be able to tell what I don't quite like, but can't!

Lots of the SM trotting foal seem to be aggravatingly tippy, needing blue-tacking on the shelf to avoid initiating unwanted domino effect disasters among their foaly friends, but this is one of the lucky ones who's come out of the mould really steady on her tiny feet!

And the final set, the walking thoroughbred with a scrambling foal. Yet another where the colours aren't remotely related to each other! 

I started off photographing him on the scenery I'd got set up anyway, then had a better idea - not being a normal thoroughbred colour, he either needed to go partbred or have a change of breed entirely, so I switched the backdrop, flipped the base around to the side without the grass, and gave him a little braided collar : one akhal teke! 

Though not perfect, this mould is by far the nearest we have in the SM range to the akhal teke for conformation and light wiry build, here combined with the metallic golden colour the breed is famous for. I've named him Altyn Bürgüt, meaning 'golden eagle' - reading up on Turkmen naming traditions and fashions, the names often refer to the horses' coat colour, or liken them to birds, so this seemed ideal!

Of course that meant his little bright bay filly needed a matching picture, and she even got to borrow the collar (because I forgot to make her one of her own - I'll do that later!). I've named her Damouchka, because unlike the Icelandic foal not looking Icelandic, this one's long and leggy enough to work alone as an akhal teke baby.

(P. S. This is my first blog post compiled on the new Blogger format, forgive me if anything's a bit wonky or weird; some features are clearly redesigned to work better on phones and just don't on laptops!)