Tales from the Body Box - Breyer Paint By Numbers pony gets a new lease of life!

Today's introduction comes from a Breyer paint-by-numbers kit, wilfully mis-used!

In the original boxed set, you got a set of acrylic paints, a brush, and a blank white resin model which is, rather than printed like traditional paint-by-numbers boards, actually cast covered in grooves which mark the colour outlines and numbers. I can't find a photo of the exact same sculpt as I have, but this one is the mould which replaced it when they updated the sets - you can see the deep lines in the resin.

The trouble with this is that the outlines and numbers would still be extremely visible after the painting was completed, which would bother me. Clearly, it also bothered whoever had this body before I bought it - they've been filled and smoothed over with what looks like Apoxie Sculpt! Now, I can't remember where this one came from; whether it was bought from a friend, from ebay, or a sales table - at any rate, somebody who gave up on trying to fix it, and passed it along to sit in someone else's body box instead!

I found the poor thing a few weeks ago when digging through the dustiest corner of long-neglected resin bodies, which have been there around a decade, while my painting habit switched on and off intermittently in chunks of years, but never ventured toward tackling those bigger models.
At first I thought 'Hmm, I remember getting that', then 'It's actually really nice', and decided to move it to a slightly more prominent if I keep seeing this I'll feel guilty enough about the delay to paint it kind of place. And it worked! One evening last week, I was feeling in a painty kind of mood, none of the Stablemates I picked up seemed to inspire me, then my eye settled on the old paint-by-numbers pony. With a bit of sanding and smoothing prep, it was ready to finally get a coat of colour.

I don't know what breed the sculpt was originally intended as - the lines in the mould and the box design to copy showed a bay leopard-spotted appaloosa - but to me it read as either a rather chunky arabian, or a pony with a lot of arabian influence, like the welsh. The head especially looks ponylike, so I decided to go for a welshie, and that's what she became...

I chose a relatively simple colour, typical of the breed, and plenty of white markings to lift it with some flashy brightness. Some sabino roaning or body markings were a possibility, but as I went along she just seemed to feel right staying relatively plain.

I really do like this sculpt, there's a lot of energy in the pose and it matches the lively character of the welsh breeds, even if that wasn't what Breyer meant us to do with it! I wonder if perhaps the reason I'm enjoying it so much is cos it's so little seen - the plastic moulds are released over and over again in different colours and there's customs too, we get familiar with them and they stop being fresh and exciting to look at once you've owned one or seen plenty.
But I've never seen one of these paint-by-numbers kits before, either completed as per the instructions, or by another hobbyist going off-piste and doing their own thing with it. Probably because of those carved lines - small children getting creative painting toy sets might not care about them, but in the model hobby they'd be a deal-breaker - we wouldn't want to photograph and display or show a horse with that much spoiling it's looks and ruining it's realism. But once they're gone, it's a very pretty little thing indeed!

This one reminds me of all those ponies who run away when their owner wants to catch them, high-tailing it off down the field as if to say 'I know I'm faster than you!'

I've named her Harecroft Aderyn Tân, Welsh for 'firebird' (using just the 'bird' part, Aderyn, for short)

Has anyone else tried the Breyer painting kits? They do produce quite a few using standard sculpts without the lines and numbering, and a variety of Stablemates in packs or singly, so there's a lot which can be painted without all the prep work this one had to go through to look decent.
I have had a few of the SM kits, mostly unicorns to snip the horns off and turn back into horses in moulds which are otherwise hard to get hold of - but I always use my own paints, cos I can't get on with other brands (not to mention some of the hideous pastel colour choices they pack them with!)