Breyer Adiah HP

This week I treated myself to one last Traditional scale parcel day for 2020, the top of my wishlist for this year's models ticked off before the end of the year.

Adiah HP was the stand out must-have from the mid-years for me, a welcome return for a mould we haven't seen in regular runs since Totilas himself in 2013 (unless you count the Holiday Horse release, which I kind of don't because they're usually both more expensive and more limited in supply than the usual horses).
It's always kind of puzzling how Breyer just seem to ignore certain new moulds after one regular run, and we just don't see them again outside of the selection of exclusives and specials for years and years, while others crop up in the regular run range continuously, or even have several different colours on offer at the same time. Think of Big Chex To Cash, Topsails Rienmaker, Slick By Design and Latigo Dun It, all overlapping in the catalogue, versus something like the one Marwari back in 2013, or Bluegrass Bandit who hasn't been seen since 2008!
So, like many collectors of regular run OFs, I was delighted to see the mould was coming back, although there's been a slight modification - this one's a mare.

I thought you'd like to see both sides - click any image to view it full size - as real collectors' photos often help me make decisions on what to buy, and because they show an actual production line model in hand from different angles, I find they're often more useful than Breyer's much better quality publicity photo.
The lighting isn't ideal here as I'm in the middle of winter with a latitude and climate which makes actual sunshine a very rare and fleeting thing in my garden, it's hard to find a patch of light big enough for such a large scale model from November til March, so I had to cheat and do this indoors under false light.

Adiah comes with the clear plastic disc stand for one fore foot, like the Huck Bey and Salinero moulds (yes, that one which wobbles creakily forever, or breaks off at the peg!), but I photographed her before attaching it, just because I try to avoid bases in pictures if possible, and that style's too fragile to risk pulling in and out of the foot through the grass sheet like the good strong slotted bases with a metal peg in the foot. 

Once the base is on, she's reasonably steady, but if you've had any Breyers on these bases before, you'll know you can never quite relax and trust them, and they need a secure shelf in a part of the room which will never be accidentally bumped, preferably with their tails touching the wall or back of the bookcase, and after your first unprovoked domino event in the middle of the night, with the addition of some tape or bluetack just in case. I'm saying they will stand up but you'll forever be scared they won't stay up!

I really do think this colour looks stunning on the mould, pinto was such a good choice. The real Adiah is 3/4 friesian and 1/4 Dutch warmblood, an eye-catching dressage horse who's won up to Grand Prix level, and they've done a nice job of matching her markings, with crisp, neatly masked jagged edge details, even on the fiddly bits - here's a look underneath!

The mane seems to be a sort of deliberate mistake, though - Adiah is a chestnut pinto in real life, so her mane is brown in colour : spot the coloured braids along her neck here, or see this photo for her loose mane which shows the blondey-brown even better. But the model has black shading on those two braids, meaning your eye reads her entire colour as a bay pinto instead.

But when a horse is this beautiful, surely we can forgive a little thing like black plaits?! Just look at her!

My favourite part of the whole paintjob is that little black spot on the end of her nose.