CollectA's 2023 horses

Last week I ordered most of the CollectA models with the early-2023 release date. I did leave out the Arabian foal on purpose, though - the shop I use (bigjigstoys.co.uk) does free postage over £40, so it'll help me make up another good size parcel if I leave one out now, and order the matching Arabian pair together when the stallion comes into stock later in the year. But all the rest of the Standard size range came to me in one lovely big parcel yesterday.

First, the Holstein stallion, in dark bay. He's well shaded but because it's such a dark variation of bay, it's harder to tell at first glance, though still an improvement on the initial CollectA paintjobs which had minimal shading over a bare coloured plastic. He also doesn't get eye colours, though that's something I'll come back to as we go through the rest of this year's horses!

The sculpt isn't quite so crisp or detailed as the majority of CollectA's horses. This stands out most in the lower legs, where the hooves seem rather small and a bit too upright in angle, and there's no sculpted definition for the tendons, or at the coronet - the division between the furry leg and the hard hoof is shown entirely with paint colour. His ears are also a bit on the chunky side, and there's a lack of musculature all over - if you compare him to any of the older CollectA moulds it's quite noticeable. Here's my Hanoverian, a similar German warmblood breed - worse painting, better sculpting :

The Holsteiner still isn't a bad model, though - the proportions are sound, the anatomy is fine, the expression's appealing. Even at their most blunted and lacking detail, CollectA are still miles ahead of Schleich in terms of that anatomical realism, so while this one might seem at first like a step towards Schleich levels of simplicity, he does still match the correct shape of a horse!

The second one out of the box is this Andalusian, one of the older sculpts, from CollectA's 2010s glory days of fine legs and perfect precision detailing!

Palomino is one of those colours which has only been accepted and recognised in the Andalusian breed in more recent years - they used to have a very strict stud book, only allowing bay, black, and grey. Chestnuts and many dilutes existed, but weren't allowed to be officially registered, unless they could be snuck in under the 'grey' option, which didn't require you to state the base colour the horse was before it started to change!

When I first got into model showing over twenty years ago, the hobby rule was that any Andalusian sculpt in a 'wrong' colour would just be shown as a Lusitano instead, and it's very hard for me to get that habit out of my head! To this day I often file any cream dilutes or chestnuts automatically into the Portuguese side of my Iberian model herd, and I think I'll do that again here, though there's nothing stopping anyone having a palomino Andalusian these days - don't take my decision as advice!

The paintwork here is interesting, as it's a bit more like the old way CollectAs were painted - the pale golden tone on the flanks is the solid bare plastic we're looking at, with a hint of darker shading across the body to give it some depth, which seems to also include the mane - the roots are definitely a richer deeper blond than the tips.

Next up, another unusual colour for the breed - a perlino Thoroughbred.

Perlino is what happens when a bay horse gets two cream genes, one from each parent - they double up, causing the colour to go even paler. Cream's very rare in the Thoroughbred breed. I've seen some very impressive lifesize portrait paintings of early imported ancestors which were palomino and buckskin (incorrectly called dun in those days), but the colour was bred out very early on and for the last few centuries the British thoroughbred has been exclusively bay, chestnut, grey, or black.

Flashy colours like palomino and sabino crop up mainly in Japan, and there's quite a thriving market for loud coloured offspring of loud coloured parents - whether or not they had much success on the track they're guaranteed a place at stud, and so the colour continues into the next generations.

I suspect this might be where CollectA got the inspiration for a Perlino Thoroughbred, as it certainly isn't the British, Irish and French racetracks I'm more familiar with, and it's a bit of an odd choice when they could've gone with a much more typical TB colour to broaden their range in a more likely way - we've seen this mare in black and bay, so how about a chestnut or a grey? Too boring, perhaps!

Personally, I'm going to show mine as a Kinsky Horse, a relative of the Czech Warmblood. A lot of Thoroughbred blood was used in the development of the breed (one of their early names was 'half-bred', a TB stallion bred to a local mare) so they tend to be finer and lighter than some of the older warmblood breeds, and a Thoroughbred mould in a cream dilute colour works just fine.

Here she is with a bit more sunlight. Although I have my reservations about the colour choice, it's certainly a nicely done perlino, with the shade not too brassy or too pink, and the mane and tail darker. The pinking of the skin is also done in a pleasant and subtle way.

 
And she has a blue eye, look! Essential for the realism of the colour, and neatly painted in, I was very pleased to see this one did get the added level of detailing for the eyes.

The new-look Clydesdale with his wild sabino makeover was one of the best repaints on offer this year, and in person it's just as impressive! It's a shame they didn't add any variation in the black, as it's very solid monotone - there could've been a bit of depth if they'd added just a hint of grey-brown for the flanks and face, but I think he gets away with it as the markings are so eye-catching and contrast so well. Rather than spraying or stencilling the patches this time, they've gone with a sort of wrap-around decal application, little bits of white stuff carefully applied to each model by hand. There's potential for slight variation between individuals, depending on how accurately each piece was laid on, but the markings themselves will be the same template for every horse - like we saw on the Paint Horse last year.

You can see a tiny flaw in the marking application on the hind leg this side, there's a bit of white where there shouldn't be, but it's very minor, and I can easily dot a bit of black paint over it when I remember. On the whole, I do prefer this way of adding markings without leaving it up to the factory artists to hand-paint, when the results can vary wildly depending on the care they take and the time they're given, or using a stencil to spray through, which inevitably leaves a blurry edge.

I think this is the nicest of the colours they've released on this mould so far, and of course it is a very beautiful and dynamic sculpt, with a great action pose and all that flying hair! Again, as a dark-eyed colour, there's no brown painted in for the eyes, they're a glossy black instead.

The foal gets a makeover to match his father, and again the markings are crisp and sharp, though he doesn't have any white on the body, which is a bit of a shame - perhaps it's too fiddly to apply to a smaller mould, though even a tiny patch either side would've been better than nothing! He does have that hint of brown in the paint, though, which is a nice touch, especially as black foals are born pale, go through this dark chocolatey stage later in their first summer, then don't turn fully black til they grow their next coat. So while CollectA missed the 'baby coat' stage which is a sort of mushroomy grey-brown, they did still remember not to give a foal an adult colour.

Here they are side by side. I admit it matters less whether an adult-and-baby pair have good co-operative poses when it's a stallion rather than a mare, as they wouldn't be turned out together in the field, but I still like to take a family picture or two!

Now, the silver grulla Morgan stallion. This one sadly doesn't quite live up to his catalogue photo, as the dappling isn't so soft or subtle as we were promised. Last year's dappled grey Hanoverian was brilliant in that respect, so I'd got my hopes up for this 2023 release, but it's not quite there. In the promo pic, the dappling continued up the neck and faded out gradually, where on the actual production models, it reaches the shoulder and then...just stops.

The fade-out of dappled into the flanks and on the quarters is just fine, so I'm not sure why they couldn't have done something similar at the front end and had them carry on up the neck. I think there is a slight difference in the paint thickness for the final row of dapples before they stop, as they don't look so defined as the central ones - kind of like the ones on the hindquarters, they're there and still have the sharp edge, but not so starkly pale as the shoulder area. I'd be tempted to blend the brightest ones in with a bit of my own paint to tone them down, only then the model wouldn't be Original Finish any more and I'd struggle to file him properly on my collection website.

Another angle - he's got a very handsome head, the leg shading is lovely, and I like the face markings a lot. His eye, though, isn't coloured.
Looking back to last year, any CollectA horses treated to the new modern paintjobs (the Arabian mare, Hanoverian, Paint Horse) had their eye colour painted in, with a hint of gold in the brown, a black pupil, and an eye-white too. But this year, the only models which have eye colours are those with blue eyes! I wonder if they were just a bit too time-consuming for the production line and whoever's designing was asked to leave out that level of detail this time round, unless it really had to be there for a blue eyed colour!

Here he is again, in the shade, which doesn't make quite such a pretty photo but does help illustrate how the dapples are less 'spotty' in some places than others. Again, this might be individual variation, I like mine better than the other in-hand example I've seen so far (which was in the US, so possibly a different production batch than was shipped to the UK?) but can't promise that all this batch have the same application of dapple layer!

I've saved my favourite til last, here is the Mustang mare in a wonderful splash pinto colour! 

The edges of the markings follow such a realistic line, it's great. Splash is one of the hardest pinto types to do really well, as it seems less logical than the much more common tobiano and overo patterns which we get used to seeing, understanding, and speaking as a model painter myself, being able to invent in a believable way!

Splash seems to defy all logic, so you can't easily predict the likely outlines and placements of markings, but you can tell when it looks wrong - so many times a custom-painted splash pinto will look like the paint splashes the pattern takes it's name from, but CollectA have avoided that and hit the nail on the head here. One of their very best designs!

This is one of my favourite CollectA sculpts, a mustang which looks true to the breed without being overly dramatic. Yes, mustangs can fight, and yes, they can rear, and yes, they probably do both those things a little more often than the average domestic horse - but they don't have to be sculpted looking fierce or standing on their back legs every single time. I love that this mare's just trotting along minding her own business, doing horse things, and not in a temper about it!

Her colour is officially given as bay, but there's a sort of light and sandy tone to it which reminds me of a sooty buckskin, so I think I'll be crediting her as a slightly different coat colour when I come to catalogue her on my collection website.

Because the white face marking includes the eyes, they're blue (hurrah for eye colour!)

That's the majority of this year's CollectA horses covered in one big review this time! As I said, there's the Arabian foal out already, the Arabian stallion to follow later in the year, along with the Boulonnais, and I'm far too addicted to CollectAs not to want every breed for my collection as they're released, so I'll be reviewing them here on my blog in due course.