A few new CollectAs for my collection - filling gaps (18th December)

Last week, looking up Quagga references for my upcoming painting project reminded me of a serious gap in my collection - I hadn't got a Grévy's zebra yet! So I decided it was about time I ordered the CollectA one



Here he is! I love that they've made this less-appreciated species, almost all mainstream toys and models seem to be plains zebra subspecies, but Grévy's have secretly been my favourites since college, with their big saucer ears and long noses



They've done a pretty good job with his pattern, getting the great first impression of a lot more stripes crammed in, and no worry of getting a 'bad one' due to human error or a hurried paintjob, cos they're printed on so each CollectA Grévy is the same, even though each real one is a little different.
I've seen some disappointment that the stripes on the hindquarters are too vertical, but with the natural variation in real zebras, I don't think it's too bad - some will have a lower divide between the vertical stripes and the horizontal ones. Have a look at the rump of this one (my own pic), there's a good section of vertical lines before it forms a triangle and the stripes change angle.


EARS!


You get a similar intensity of big giant ear when you make a kissing sound at a real gravy zeb (p.s yeah Grévy is pronounced 'gravy', not rhyming with 'heavy')

How do the CollectA zebra species look with each other?



Really good! I prefer the off-white plastic to the bright pure white of the Grévy's (that's how they're made, rather than yellowing cos one's new and one's not), but over all that doesn't matter, especially when photographed separately you wouldn't think 'Well, that's too white!'


"My ears are bigger than yours!"
"Yeah, well, my stripes are bigger than yours!"

While I was putting in my order, I thought I really ought to catch up on a few more releases - 'to buy enough for free postage' was my excuse


First, the foal to go with my knabstrupper.


It's curious how sometimes CollectA release the adult and baby in the same year, but other times we have a single mare or stallion for a while before they make a matching foal of the same breed.


The wild, heavily-spotted leopard appaloosa pattern of the mare is rather nicer than the simpler spotting they've designed for the little one, but they make a good pair together


Next, the Russian Don, who was held back to the latter part of the year when she was released, so I wasn't able to get hold of her when I ordered my batch that spring.
I'm really pleased to see this breed in model form, is she the only one from any mainstream brand? With most companies focusing on the best known breeds with an established fanbase, it's great to see CollectA going for the less common ones, and giving us chance to tick off breeds with a huge importance in their own country, and a lot of history. They deserve the attention!


The colour's really well done, with a metallic sheen in the paint - I generally hate the overdone pearly/shiny/metallic paint craze on all kinds of model horses which don't need it, but some breeds do have a coat with that sheen, and the Don is one of them. But my favourite thing about the mould is the cocked-back ear, a tiny design choice which gives her a touch of life and realism - with her ear turned round, she's suddenly a model of an actual horse, with reactions and thoughts, not just a posed example of a breed.


And rounding out the parcel nicely, the Sugarbush Draft mare and foal. Well, I couldn't buy one without the other!


Another example of CollectA Chunky-leg Syndrome not being a bother on a draft breed, her legs don't look out of proportion like a light breed would.


The matching baby - I'm not sure if he's supposed to have so much grey shading on his head, or whether that's overspray from his muzzle gone way up his face! But his blanket spotted appaloosa pattern is neatly applied, and he has a very sweet and playful look to him :)

Great new models! I love the zebra and sugarbush horses a lot. Congratulations!

I especially like the zebra

This is a wonderful topic, so informative, with so many beautiful photos of stunning models!

I like all of them but especially your pictures!
Grevy's zebras are defintely not as popular as plains zebras but what turns them rare as figures is their pattern, that striping with close lines is a nightmare for mass production. It was a
blessing that CollectA decided to release a grevy's, we really wanted it for a long time and the figure is very beautiful. I love the chating around the ears and what is biggest, humans are the same, no?
I love all these horses and I can't collect more horses, but those are so beautiful, I wonder how long I will resist to that Russian Don. It is the only representative among the major brands as well as the Mojö Fun Orlov is also the only of its breed. Funrise also made a Russian Don but that's another era.

Thanks, everyone :) I guessed the zebra would be the most popular around here, with so many wildlife-appreciating folks around. On a model horse forum, he'd be the one most collectors skip past and don't comment on, so it's really nice to know there's people who enjoy zebs as much as I do :)

I find the photography is a big part of getting a new arrival, I always set up some scenery and do pictures which aim to make the models look more real. I'd love to do actual natural-outdoor-scenery photos, but haven't got anywhere that the real foliage and grass wouldn't be a ridiculously out of scale giant forest. So it's always fake grass, and a picture backdrop, but outside in the garden so at least the sunlight's real!

That zebra is ever so wonderful

And your horses are so great as only CollectA can make them

Wonderful photos of wonderful models! Congrats for the new models.
The Russian Don is one of the best horse models by CollectA - if not the best. Well, maybe the best. My favorite horse model for sure.

I like very much your pics, I'm not a horses collector but your background are really interresting. keep up the good work

Gotta find the Russian Don mare sometime. She looks like a Polish or Russian bred Arab.

I though I'd add these here, as the topic title is still perfectly relevant - today I got some more new CollectAs

The place I usually order my CollectA models from does free postage when you spend over £40, so it's always best value to make sure I choose enough to reach that total (I tend to tell myself the saved postage fee almost pays for a whole extra foal model, so really I'm saving money by spending a bit more )
But there's a couple I'm not posting here yet : the Konik foal I'm hanging on to til CollectA release his matching mum and I can photograph them together, plus a figure for a little non-equine repaint project I have in mind

So who's in the box?



The Camarillo White Horse, the last of the 2020 releases I still needed to tick off the to-buy list.



He's now named Harecroft Angelo, because I made a typo when saving this photograph, accidentally titled it 'CamarilloAngel' instead of 'CamarilloAngle', and this mistake seemed perfect to adapt into the Spanish-origin male name for him!



It's a nice sculpt, quite different to any of their other horses so far. I'd have liked to see a bit of the blond-ish shading on the tail as well as the mane; I'm really not quite sure why they'd have decided that a tail's any more likely to stay spotlessly clean when in real life it's quite the opposite and a shampooed horse's mane will usually stay far cleaner for longer than the tail does



It's quite curious thinking that there's more CollectA Camarillo White Horses in the world than real-life individuals of this breed, they've always been a small population (a single herd, founded by one man and his stallion - read the history here) and even with efforts to keep them going, numbers rise very slowly. There must be a lot of endangered species where there's more figures with collectors and children, than living animals left in the world, but it must happen a lot less with domestic species.



Next up, the 2021 Hackney. He's a gorgeous colour - CollectA chestnuts in the past have tended to be rather flat and plain, but they've really given this one a vibrant deep colour, and I love that he's got sharp painted socks with defined edges, not faded-out airbrushing. His paintjob has to be one of their best chestnuts yet.



He's also got a great expression, pricked up ears and a general look of enthusiasm without being too wild and unbiddable!



I've named him Harecroft High Society, as my only other Hackney model is called Harecroft High and Mighty, and I like to do family naming themes when I can!



But the big down side to this model is the huge chunky legs. On most of their other recent breeds, the thick legs don't bother me - when they're drafters or cobby horses, they're meant to have that much bone, when they're ponies, being short and chunky kind of fits with their proprtions without standing out too badly. But on the breeds which are very fine with neat long wiry limbs and sharply defined joints, thick legs just look so out of place they don't even resemble the breed they're meant to be. I'll still file this model as a Hackney on my website, but I don't think he looks much like one.



The only other adult horse release for CollectA's first half of the year is also my favourite - the Mongolian Horse. I've had an interest in this breed for many years, and although I've got a few roughly-the-right-build ponies which I've dressed in Mongolian-style halters for my collection already, it's brilliant to finally have a specially sculpted model on the market!



They've really captured the distinctive proportions of these horses, with large heads, thick necks, flat backs, and a certain narrow/shallowness to the shoulders and chest which it's hard to pinpoint or put into words, but easy to see when it looks 'right'.



His colour's nicely done too, with just a bit of shading and a very very fine airbrush speckling which doesn't really show up in the photos but in-hand makes it very clear he's sprayed all over rather than making use of bare coloured plastic with just the legs and mane'n'tail painted, like they've relied on for older bays. I'd have liked a little bit more muzzle shading, to include more of his nostrils, but it's not too disappointing that I don't enjoy him as he is.



The other side, I like the little tuft of mane left at the shoulders. These domestic Mongolian horses have a longer 'falling' mane like any other horse or pony if it's left to grow, rather than the stiff 'standing' mane of the Przewalski. A lot of people assume the upright manes are a natural feature based on common ancestry or primitive genes, but it's just a tradition to cut or trim them in certain ways. Some you'll see with manes left long and tied in bunches for racing to keep out of the horses' faces, some are cut straight across the bottom to make a thick choppy edge, the most common cut is short with a few inches of bristle so they stand upright, like this model.



Mongolian horses aren't given names in the way other cultures do, with the same sort of distinctname words we'd expect people or pets to have - their horse-naming words are descriptive terms, instead. So the name a horse is called or referred to by might translate as 'small dark brown', 'dun with short tail' or 'chestnut pinto who belongs to [person's name]'. With this in mind, I've called my model Tsaivar Khüren, which simply means 'light brown'

My final buy, to push the order over £40, was a second attempt at getting the same pony!
When I first bought the bay Dartmoor stallion, he arrived and I was deeply disappointed with the paintjob - it was so bad, I couldn't stand keeping him as he was, so I repainted him. You can see the colour I got in this photo, but if anything mine was even worse, with the paint on the head, neck and mane (which was black in the promo pics) looking a sickly faded greyish purple, and the dapples being spots of greyish pink.
As time passed and I kept on buying CollectAs, this left my original finish line-up in the weird state of 'every release except the dartmoor', which felt increasingly awkward the longer it went on

I know models often change a little bit throughout the run, as paintwork's adjusted on purpose, or just evolves as the factory workers find little shortcuts and easier/better ways of doing things on the production line. My old dartmoor dated to around 2013, so perhaps enough time had passed that the paintwork was better now, and I'd get one good enough to keep? If not, I could always repaint it again, so it was worth the risk...



And look, he's fine! Ok, so there's still the spot dapples, which he'd be even better without, but they're much closer to his coat colour now, so they don't stand out as stupid-looking pink dots, and best of all, the paint on the head and neck is black, not washed-out lilac



He's really a pretty little thing, this improved paintwork does justice to the quality sculpt underneath (and look, fine detailed limbs, cos this is an older model), and I'll be more than happy to have him on my shelves, finally rounding out my complete CollectA collection up to this point :)



I've named him Harecroft Ragged Robin, after a native wild flower which can be found in the national park this breed calls home. I think nature-based names work so well for native and feral ponies, and this one's perfect for a stallion cos if he was real he could be known as Robin for short, a typically male name instead of something which sounds too flowery and mare-like!

I don't collect horses but these are really beautiful models! Especially the Mongolian horse. Congrats! I also spend a certain amount to get free shipping because sometimes the shipping could cost as much as 3-4 figures, so definitely saves you some money if you were going to get them anyways in the long run

Beautiful additions, the mongolian is my favorite also.

I sometimes enjoy to add a horse figure to my wildlife collection. Posts like these help me a lot to decide which ones to get. A Mongolian is surely not as beautiful as a Lusitano but for any reason it is a very interesting horse to me and I like the CollectA model. I think they made it quite recognizable. All your other horses are beautiful too. I don't know how much the plastic color influences the painting but CollectA used some bright colored plastic with their first Deborah's horses. I remember reading here about purple and colors of that kind. However, it is known that sometimes painting get different hues after a certain time or through light exposure, it is complex but fortunately not that common.

Lots of love for the Mongolian chap! I'd love to get some extras to repaint at some point, too, they're a very varied breed and I could have fun with some fancy duns and roans and pintos

I did wonder about light exposure fading him out, but mine was bought fairly swiftly after release date, so it hadn't been sitting around for years before I got it, and I assume the one in that linked photo was brand new stock just arrived in hand, too, so I don't think they'd had chance to get faded by sunlight?
Mine will be living in my bedroom from now on, though, so he won't have any sunlight exposure cos I've got three bookcases in front of the window with the curtains and blinds closed behind those - I may as well be a vampire, there's no light in there at whatsoever

I confirm that the first batch of the Dartmoor Pony was like the linked photo and has been improved. I preferred mine in black though.
Hackney's colour looks really fantastic, but overall I think I like much better the previous generation of CollectA's horses.

It sounds as though you order from Big Jigs- I love this shop for CollectA too!
Wonderful new additions, the Mongolian is a very sweet boy, I love his face! The chestnut's really pretty too, I love that colour, it's so rich!

wonderful models

Wonderful models

Wonderful photos and description of your new collecta additions!!
Love the Hackney although not appropriate conformation for this breed. He looks like a sweet character! The Mongolian horse looks very nice too. Both horses joined my collection too.

Wonderful additions.

This week I had a parcel of brand new CollectA 2021 models

I wouldn't normally have another order so soon on the heels of the previous one, but with supply issues the way they are this year, I thought I might not get another chance at these releases til next year if I left it too long, and grabbed some of the very first batch to reach this country - by the time I did my daily check to see if they were in stock yet, there was already only three of each left!



First, one of my favourites from the 2021s, the Chincoteague pony. A great little pose with spirit and attitude, and a well done colour with shading and crisp edges.



As with all CollectA horses these days, there's the inevitable chunky legs, but on these small tough pony breeds it doesn't matter too much, as they still feel in proportion and not TOO thick.



I love the look on her face, big eyes full of expression despite being painted plain gloss black, they catch a shiny sparkle from the natural light.



For a pony breed, it is quite a large model, and probably wouldn't work strictly to scale if you needed the Chincoteague and some other breed in your collection to have the right height difference. She stands well above the older CollectA sculpts of pony breeds - I held her beside a Dartmoor and a Morgan from the same brand, cos I happened to have those to hand, and she was only millimetres off matching the Morgan in height, but utterly dwarfing the Dartmoor pony which in real life would only be a matter of an inch or two smaller!

Next up, a figure you might be more interested in if your collection tends toward farm, the new Donkey



This is their second adult domestic donkey, the older one was a very sullen-looking heavy creature which went out of production (or at least out of stock on model horsey websites) a while before I got into CollectA, so it's about time they brought out a replacement.



To be honest, I'm not entirely a fan of this sculpt; I've said on here before but I think it's a missed opportunity for a really great donkey model, when instead we've just got an ok one.
I mean, it's not bad. If it was terrible, I just wouldn't have bought it, I'm not a completist collector who finds huge satisfaction in getting everything whether they like it or not, so the fact I even have one proves that I thought it was still worth the money, and that it's good enough for me to happily have it for my shelf, and to give my donkey foal a mum to stand next to.
But the sculpt just doesn't feel perfect to me : the anatomy of the head shape is off, and the feet are too big. And it wouldn't be fair to just pretend I love it and not point out the flaws, that's not what reviewing's about and I'm here to share my honest opinion.



Here is the Paso Fino mare, a slightly odd choice to go for dark palomino when the Peruvian Paso was done in a very pale chestnut, and as two breeds which people very often get mixed up or confused in their minds anyway, I'd have made an effort to make them look as different as possible!



Again, and perhaps most noticeable here out of all the figures I'm sharing today, the legs are huge and thick, which really does detract from the overall look of the horse. If you take a look at a real example of the breed, you can see the impression is of a chunky horse on very fine legs.



If you ignore the thickness of the legs, their pose is actually nicely done, capturing one of the distinctive gaits of the breed, which can best be described as a sort of running walk on fast forward, they move very quickly with tiny short steps.



The tail is also a distinctive trait of the breed, curling into a J shape naturally in many horses. Sadly some have it emphasised or created artificially with surgery by people value the look, and the prizes, over the welfare of the horse (you get a small percentage of awful people involved with most showring breeds), but that's a minority and in general if you see a paso horse gaiting with a kinked out tail, it's because he holds it that way himself.



The other side, with the nice flowing mane on display. CollectA don't have quite the action and airy volume in the sculpting of the manes and tails these days, but they're still very smooth, elegant, and realistically done.



Finally, Konik ponies! I've been looking forward to this one since they were first announced, as a herd of semi-feral Konik ponies live on a conservation project near me, and I've been lucky enough to visit and photograph them a few times.



This brighter light shows the sculpt better, but washes her colour out a bit - the first shot is the better match for the paintwork. She reminds me a lot of CollectA's earlier Camargue pony sculpt, which makes sense as they're a similar type with a similar outdoors natural lifestyle, though the more primitive Konik is much heavier in the head and less well-built in the shoulder - which is correct conformation for their breeds, rather than an insult!



I love the way they've done her mane, instead of plain black there's streaks of brown in there too, and the windswept look suits her very much. And look at the fluff inside those ears!



I bought the Konik foal in my previous CollectA order, but saved him up til I'd got the mare as well, so now he gets to join the photoshoot.



His colour looks very watered down at first glance, but the real Konik babies are born very pale, and gradually come into their dark points as they shed their baby fur at the end of their first summer, so it's perfectly accurate that they gave the foal a much lighter colouration than his matching mum.



They make a really nice pair together, I'm not sure how they decide which models get a foal and which don't, but I'm glad they decided to go for it this time. It isn't as simple as releasing babies if their adult example of the breed is a mare, because we have single stallions (Friesian, Fjord, Tennessee Walking Horse, and Quarter Horse) who've had matching foals made, and plenty of mares (Akhal-Teke, Arabian, Missouri Fox Trotter, Russian Don, Belgian and Dutch drafters, British Spotted Pony, and Percheron) who haven't. Who knows!

Here's a couple more shots of them together to end with...

Nice additions George and wonderful pics