My Breyer Stablemates: G1 Drafter and another Appaloosa

The clydesdale is really lovely, the rich dappled colour is nicely done and his markings really add to it. I much prefer the loose mane'n'tail version, I hope that one comes round in the regular runs eventually!

This Clidesdale is much nicer than the Chess piece, I really enjoy much more to see horses with loose mane and tail. The color is also really great and we can see easily it is a Clydesdale.
I am glad it is just the end of a period, I am really enjoying these daily posts but I understand that it is quite tiring to post continuously. I think you really deserve a break but please don't forget to return.

Beautiful!!! I love this model and in this color he looks gorgeous!! Congratulations!

What a lovely Clydesdale! Very nicely painted too! I also like the chestnut TB with jockey, very nice piece

Thank you! I'll be back soon with more.

You've added some real beauties and hard to get faces to your stablemates, congrats! Django really is a lovely mold, as is the thoroughbred (even if he is a bit narrow!). Both are two I want to add to my collection, though I do have one thoroughbred - as a green unicorn.

Atticus' color is stunning, that's another one I appreciate seeing up close (I have never been able to decide how I feel about that mold altogether).

Those string reins are a good idea! That's neat that they made one of their ornaments into a regular model. I would love if they released some of their Beautiful Breeds ornaments as regular models . . .

Two Breyers in their original packaging:
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The first is the “Rearing Andalusian” (2006, this colour version 2009-11), but as you can see on the packaging, it is meant to represent a mustang here. 
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I now have three colour versions of this sculpt:
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This olive grullo version is probably the least interesting colour, but still a very nice model.

The second is the “Walking Arabian” (2006, this colour version 2009-11):
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It’s a new sculpt in my collection. Not bad, but a bit toyish in my opinion:
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Here we see it with my some other Arabian horses:
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Arabians are perfect for that girly design. They have large eyes in small heads with cute noses, a good hairstyle with that typical ponytail and they can easily be designed to match the taste of the younger customers.
Schleich is the brand that abuses in that style, their 2014 Arabian mare is a paradigmatic example.
It is also normal to see an Andalusian featured as a Mustang. Most Mustangs are derived from Iberian breeds and it is easy to find a Mustang that looks like an Andalusian horse. I think the grullo choice is actually interesting.

A lot of that batch of Stablemates have rather cartoonish features, whether they get away with it or not depends on the breed and as Roger says, the Arabian is rather close to being 'cute' by it's very nature, they're a breed which can easily look like an idealised fantasy pony when the art style tends toward prettiness over gritty reality in the first place It's also built like a barrel (those square shoulders!) and rather too thick in the leg for a true arabian, I have all mine as the Shagya-arabian breed, essentially a pedigreed cross-bred with some heavier riding horse ancestry, which tend to be chunkier in both build and legs.
The G3 Rearing Andalusian works really nicely as a Spanish Mustang (i.e. strong Iberian ancestry but born in North America, not Mustangs imported and/or bred over in Spain itself), that's also a very handy breed allocation for all the times they make it in distinctly non-Andalusian colours like pinto or spotted!

Thanks, Rogério, Andreas and George! A Spanish mustang and Shagya-Arabian, that's how I will treat them!

I was lucky to find the “Kittens and Foals” set (2008-2009) containing all the Stablemate companion cats. The outer box was missing, but the inner box was in a good condition:
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Breyer issued the cats only a few times, so they are quite rare. According to “Identify your Breyer”, the lying cat was only made for two sets, first in 2003. The sitting cat was made three times (the Kittens and Foals set was the first time) and only once as a Siamese cat. Finally, the standing tabby cat was only made once, just for this particular set.
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I was very pleased that I found them, even though I realised that they were probably not going to be proper 1:32 scale. And they aren’t, but to my surprise, they aren’t too far off. They are tiny! The standing cat has a shoulder height of 1.1 cm (35 cm in 1:32 scale) and a length of 1.9 cm (61 cm). Breyer says they are kittens, but well, I don't know, they look like adults to me. I’ll shown them from the other side too even though that is not their best side:
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Three foals too. I already had a trotting and a standing foal, but the lying foal is new:
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The lying foal comes with a base, which is a bit unusual. It isn’t fixed to it.

Two foals have already found parents, the standing foal will get a parent soon. I don’t understand horse genetics, I am just guessing that when the adult has a similar colour, it can be a parent.
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When the cats are put next to the horses, it isn’t obvious that they are slightly too large.

Congrats!!-Wonderful set and the foals look great with the adults.Liking the little cats as well!

Finding a horse parent based upon a similar color is not very effective for horses but even companies do it sometimes. One classical mistake is when they use a white foal for grey/white parents. Commercially it works but foals of grey horses are never white. Though, for many other colors it may work but I am not an expert either. Happy that you've found a few cats, they're tiny at your favorite scale. Whatever Breyer call these, they're adults for your collection.

They're a lovely set, I don't have the cats but must've managed to get all the foals separately second-hand over the years (I buy a lot of played-with bundles and rescue all the horses which are nice enough to keep as they are, and repaint any which are broken or ruined), cos I have all three of them though I know I never bought the set new!
The cats do work just fine as adults, when you see them beside the horses. Maybe not if you posed them with the draft moulds, but with the Arabian being quite a small breed they scale nicely photographed with her.

Roger is right, a foal will never be the colour officially understood as grey, because that's something which happens as the horse ages - cells stop producing pigment, meaning each year the horse sheds it's winter coat and grows a summer one, there's a greater percentage of white hairs in there. They're born with colour, and end up white, taking many years to get there with a lot of pretty stages of speckly and dapply grey in between.
But foals can be colours which look grey to the eye. It's not too much of a problem when companies make grey-looking foals, I tend to call mine pale blue dun (called grulla in some countries), especially when they're given darker mane, tail, and legs.
Dun foals often have a lighter colour baby coat to start with, and then darken up when they shed that first fluff. Take a look at these Konik foals - the one on the left is fairly close to the Stablemate foal in question, grey with a warm hint of brown in the coat. You can see he's already started to shed his baby fluff on his face.
Of course, a horse could be genetically blue dun and also grey, ending up white after all

Let's see whether I understand this. Foals that turn out to be either white or grey when they are adults aren't grey as foals (and certainly not white). But what colour are they when they are foals?

What do you call an adult horse that is white? Just grey? How can you distinguish its colour from an adult horse that is truly grey (I mean between black and white)?

They can be any colour before they grey out. Bay, chestnut, dun, palomino, anything at all can go grey if it's got the grey gene along with whatever other colour it inherited. Grey adults pass on the colour gene for whatever colour they were at birth, not only grey.
Even pinto patterns can go grey - the patches just get fainter and fainter, til the while horse looks white and you can only see the markings if you wet them or clip them and the pink & black skin shows through the fur.

We tend to call white-looking horses 'white grey', if they've finished the process and are pure white all over. And in casual conversation, people will say white, while perfectly understanding that the individual wasn't always white and it isn't a genetic term.
It's one of those annoying things where snooty horsey people will sneer and say 'actually it's called grey' like you're an idiot who knows nothing, but average common people who have and ride horses don't think there's anything remotely bad or wrong about just using everyday words to describe colours - like saying 'the white one' to identify a horse in a mixed group, the same as you might say 'the brown one' for a liver chestnut, or 'the patchy one' for a tobiano pinto.
I used to have an aged grey pony, and definitely said 'Oh, why did I get a white horse' many a time, when faced with brushing out stains from grass or mud, or sleeping on a poo (why do they do that?!)

There is the pure white, like the CollectA Camarillo but this is super rare and an exception. The only thing I know is that it has pink skin under the coat instead of black as it happens with white/grey horses. Interesting, zebras also have black skin,.

Yes, there is a rare white-white which is born that way, and has pink skin. I think they have blue eyes also, not sure.

To make things even more fun, in my experience foals which will grey out are often born darker/more deeply pigmented than their non-greying siblings. I don't know why; maybe other horse folks here like George can corroborate or disagree? And to make the factory paintjobs seem worse, greys always start to grey on their faces/heads. By the time the rest of the body looks grey, the head is usually white or at least around the eyes- the very first place to grey. If you have a foal with a grey parent, look around the eyes for a scattering of white hairs. Even a newborn will have a few.

Makes for a quick and easy way to tell greys from roans- greys have white heads, roans dark ones.

Then you have that blacks aren't born black, but a mousy greyish color... only born-blacks I've seen ended up greying...

Roger, if I understand your question right, almost every white horse technically is a grey. Most people I've known would call it grey, but both colors may be used interchangeably and everyone understood what was meant. There aren't any grey-for-life horses between black and white, except for colors that look grey such as blue roan or dun, grulla etc. which would be referred to as those colors.

(Firstly, sorry for all the links but I can't get the photos to host here for some reason...)

I am not savvy to horse sense in the way that George and Kelly are, but as it was explained and simplified to me is this:
This is gray (look at the dark skin at the nose and around the eyes)
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and this is "white" (note the pink skin at the nose and around the eyes)
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The dappling gene develops from a darkly colored foal, with the dapple pattern developing as it ages into a young adult. Then this animal will progressively get paler and more white as time goes on.
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And a roan may be similar in color (whether it is a red roan or blue roan or grulla etc.) But as Kelly mentioned, the legs and head will retain the original color while the body will gray out.
Blue roan and a proper gray compared
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Red (also called strawberry where I live) roan
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Blue roan
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Grulla
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And there is also a color formation called rabicano which is essentially the coat roaning out in a specific area.
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And of course you can get genes that pile up....
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Feel free to correct me! Hopefully this is helpful....?


But the point is... horse colors can be fun!
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Thanks a lot for all the answers, I've learnt a lot from them. I think I'll have to reread them regularly . From what Kelly said, do I understand correctly that in very rare cases, foals can be truly white. For example, could this horse have been truly white as a foal or still grey?
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It looks like an albino.

This one is incredible!
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Yes, that white horse would've been born white.
It's caused by a set of genes which cause white markings on an otherwise coloured horse, often still called 'sabino' for short though recent genetic analasis has proved it's a bit more complex than a single gene which causes it.
The percentage and distribution of white can vary a huge amount, so it might just look like socks and a blaze, or could add few patches and splashes of white on the body. It can kind of 'spill' out of defined patches to look like roaning, too. Or the whole horse can be mostly white with a few dark marks, sometimes in hard-to-find places like inside the ears!
The ones with barely any visible colour on them are called 'maximum sabino' or 'maximum white sabino'.
Under the white markings, the skin is always pink (think of people with vitiligo - no matter their skintone, the affected areas are very pale as there's no pigment at all), and that makes it grow white hair.

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Digger, formerly of the Household Cavalry. You can see how the white is mainly the face and lower limbs, but also the way it patches up into the body colour, and the flecking of white hairs mixed in with the brown ones. This is what most people would think of if you told them to imagine a sabino, kind of the 'average' amount, where the markings are wilder than just a simple short sock, and the basic colour's become roan, but there's still a lot of the colour left.

But look at this photo of racehorse Russe Blanc - from a distance in races he just looked like a bright white grey, same as the old famous Desert Orchid, for example. Up close like this, you can see what's different about him - his skin is mostly pink, with a few dark blotchy marks. That's the giveaway that he's sabino. Now imagine he happened to get less of those black speckles - he'd be almost entirely pink-skinned, leading to an all-white coat from birth.

Thank you, I am beginning to understand it a bit better. Some Breyers have pink noses, I suppose they are sabinos.

A few more. I bought this lot almost blindly, because the seller’s photos were very unclear. Almost like buying Mystery Surprise Bags. It probably made them cheaper and fortunately it turned out to be a great lot.
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First, a prancing Morgan (2005-2006, sculpt from 1998). Not one of my most favourite Stablemates (I don’t mind it either), but I like the very dark bay. I think it suits him very well. It also goes very well with the standing foal from the “Kittens and foals” set. I don’t know whether the Morgan could be the father, but at least the colour is very similar.
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He came with a saddle and reins, which look good on him. I wish I had a dubious-looking gangster as a rider.
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Next we have a beautiful Clydesdale (2003-2004, sculpt 1998). It’s a sculpt I was really keen to get, but somehow, it had eluded me until I finally got this one. If you have followed the 1:32 scale topic, you have already seen it there.
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It isn’t the right colour for a Clydesdale, but George suggested that it could be used as a Dole. Regardless, I like the colour. Here he is with Atticus the Clydesdale:
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Another sculpt I had been looking for for quite some time was the Highland pony (2006, sculpt also from 2006). I hadn’t managed to find it for the right price in the right condition, but now here it is! It’s a lovely looking pony, I am very fond of it. I believe that this red dun colour is fairly typical for this breed.
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Together with my Fell pony:
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And another one that I had hoped to find, this bay Andalusian (2009, sculpt 1998). Probably not a real Andalusian given its colour; perhaps more likely a Lusitano.
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Here with the same sculpt in a very different colour:
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This lot also contained two riders. One is an English rider, which may be from the “5204 English rider and saddle set with bay warmblood”:
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The last horse is a palomino Belgian (2006-2008, sculpt 2006):
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It had a few black stains that I managed to clean off with some white spirit. Not sure whether Belgians can be palomino. Or is it sorrel? Here with my other Belgian horse:
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They came with quite a few accessories. A jockey, a trophy and two check-outs (but no, I am not going to sell any horses).
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And more:
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I discovered that the hurdles are not by Breyer but by New-ray. Also a very useful sign without directions.

Another very nice selection! I really like that Morgan, like you it's one of my least favourite (but not hated) moulds, but I think that's by far the nicest colour they ever did on it, making him one of my favourite G2 Stablemates from any mould - the deep dark shading is beautifully rich and the crisp white markings really set it off.

The Andalusian can definitely be his own breed, it's one of the commonest colours they come in. Greys are more famous, but of all other colours they do come in, bay is the most often found.

That Highland is really great, she was from a British Breeds UK special run set, which wasn't sold for very long so you don't see it as often as other paintjobs, but it's so nicely done with the shading on the joints.

And yes, you're right, the Belgian is a pale shade of chestnut rather than a palomino. As with Haflingers, the big giveaway on whether a breed is chestnut or palomino is the presence or lack of cremello individuals : breed palomino to palomino and a proportion of the offspring will get double cream genes, and be pink-skinned, blue-eyed cream. If there's no cremello seen in the breed, there can't be palomino either, and that's your proof that all the pale, flaxen horses are genetically chestnut.