Sugarmaple and Calavera are here!

After a long wait, and then two days of being held hostage at the post office, my Sugarmaple and Calavera models are finally here! Woohoo! I'll start with Sugarmaple!

I've been seeing a lot of variation in this run in online photos of him; some of them seem to be a lot more red or green than others. Mine seems to be in the middle, with more of the brown/gold rather than red or green. Which is fine, though I somewhat hoped I'd get one of the greener ones. Oh well!

Quality-wise, he's a little...odd. I don't think the leaves are decals - they look more like stencils. But some of them look a little weird around the edges. Not sure if they'll show up very well in photos or not.

Maybe it's a side effect of using gold paint on a translucent model, but it almost looks like the gold started to (or just threatened to) flake off when the stencils were removed.

But, in the grand scheme of things, it's a fairly minor issue and I didn't see anything else wrong with him. Here's a shot of his handsome head!

I'm excited to get this guy lined up with the rest of his brethren! Sugarmaple is definitely here to stay.

Now, on to Calavera - I'm so happy with this model! I've been hearing a lot online about how flawed this run was, with horrible wrinkled decals, poor paint jobs and the like. But mine is almost flawless!

With the amount of decals on this model, I'd have expected to find something wrong with at least one of them, but to my amazement, NONE of these decals are wrinkled or otherwise have anything wrong with them other than the visible borders (which is inevitable when the model isn't glossed).

As for other flaws, he's got a few small dings here and there, and his mane could have been painted a little more neatly. I'd have liked to see less stark black and more purple on the tendon areas of his legs, but that's more personal preference than anything else. I'm very, very happy with this model and so glad I got a good one!

Have I mentioned how much I like the colors used on this model? I love his white face, and the orange-red mane and tail, and the purple legs. The flowers look great too! I think this was an excellent design, and a nice departure from the usual Halloween model.



I don't think I've seen decals this good since I got my also-flawless Luna back in 2012. Though, now that I think about it, my Marigold from this year's Breyerfest has pretty good decals too, and he was designed by the same person that designed Calavera (Lauren Hoeffer). Coincidence? Probably, but I'm happy anyway!

All in all, I'm really happy with this model! At least for now...we'll have to see how well these models age. I'll be curious (and probably disappointed) to see what happens to these decals in 20 years or so. But that's a question for another time! Until next time, readers!