New 2024 Fjord Mare

Well, here she is.
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I'll admit, there are some flaws that I can't oversee. Her front leg(lifted one) sticks out a bit from her body when looking a her from certain angles. The hearts in her mane don't have any texture at all. There're just smooth plastic. She is made of the more rubbery material, as opposed to the heavier plastic that Schleich is known for. That being said, she is still cute, and I do appreciate that they gave her a dorsal stripe. I don't know if I would recommend her though. I also got the Friesian stallion in the same package, but it was getting too dark to photograph anything, so I'll post him another time.

Thank you for sharing these pics!

She looks very cute. I'm positively surprised that she has some decent shading and I just love the structure of her tail. It's somewhat funny that her dorsal stripe looks a little bit like a "chocolate" line that is dripping down her tail and ends in chocolate icing. Can't wait to see all the new releases in stores!

Thanks for sharing and giving your opinion. I'm convinced Schleich used this kind of rubbery material for the first time with the Shire stallion, husband of Princess if you know what I mean. Schleich horses were usually sculpted in relatively static poses which did not require a softer material. I suppose that's the reason they used it in this figure too although I'm not sure the pose is that extreme. I hope it is not a dicrease of quality or a way to Schleich make their models suitable for children 10 months +.
I'm glad Fjords are still popular as horse figures, I think a range of horse figures is more interesting if composed by a good number of distinctive breeds.

I think this is one of the best horse figures Schleich have made for years - the sculpt style is so much more mature and accurate, like it's aiming at knowledgeable kids who actually know and like horses and horse breeds, rather than being happy with any old horse-shaped thing being offered to them.
As with some of the other recent horses (the Haflingers and Noriker from last year spring to mind, this year's Friesian too), the anatomy is a vast improvement! You can see it actually has a chest and shoulders, the head is a good wedge-shape with the eyes and ears in the right place, the joints in the legs aligned right, and the pose is a realistic gait, the hair's falling naturally. All these sound like damning with faint praise, like I'm crediting it with the bare minimum, but when Schleich horses had become practically unbuyable to anyone with a deeper anatomical and physiological knowledge of the species, it's a massive, massive change to see they're now offering actually horse-shaped horses again. I'm not the biggest fan of the hearts, but they're something which some owners DO do to their fjords for the sake of cuteness, so it's not like the brand's weird obsession with covering everything in unrealistically complex braided hair with ribbons and bows, this is the sort of hair style which is fine for the breed.

And thank you for these in-person photos, having seen how well it's painted I will be buying one! I was put off last year's otherwise appealing Haflinger when the 'real' photos showed the poor shading (at least on the example I saw), but this one looks very nicely done.
The first Schleich I'll have bought new since 2015

Yeah, her shading is definitely an improvement over previous models. I do like the hearts in her mane despite the odd texture, and I'm sure Schleich had to change the original sculpt in order to make production easier.

Decided to try some tack on her. I have to admit, she looks quite nice in western tack.
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She looks way better in real tho!

One of the models I'm most looking forward to! Thanks for the walkaround. The bad thing with the rubbery material (as I found out when I got the hippocampus foal) is that it's impossible to fix with the hot water trick if anything is warped.

Now I've seen her irl I... don't know what to think. It's a nice sculpt, but at some point during the molding process something must have gone wrong - because this mare is is FLAT. Her sides look like someone's taken a rolling pin to them. She obviously wasn't sculpted that way, because an artist that skilled certainly knows what shape a horse's torso is! Either way it's disappointing, because it's such a hard flaw to fix.

Sumo wrote:

Now I've seen her irl I... don't know what to think. It's a nice sculpt, but at some point during the molding process something must have gone wrong - because this mare is is FLAT. Her sides look like someone's taken a rolling pin to them. She obviously wasn't sculpted that way, because an artist that skilled certainly knows what shape a horse's torso is! Either way it's disappointing, because it's such a hard flaw to fix.

I agree. I know from listening to Da Vinci Creation's videos that Schleich will change artist's sculptures in the factory, but I doubt that even they would intentionally produce a horse with flat sides(although you never know with modern Schleich tbh). The Fjord gelding isn't flat like the mare, so I have to agree with you that something happened on Schleich's end. I'm sure that a customizer could resculpt her sides and make her look more realistic. But yeah, she is a cute mold(not sickly cute like a lot of Schleich horses, but a good cute, cause Fjords are cute in real life), and is surprisingly nice compared to what Schleich has been putting out recently.