Featured Model - 3/16/2019, Heroes of the West Harper

Hello and welcome to another edition of Featured Model, the weekly blog event where I pick a model from my collection, give some stats on it and provide commentary about it. This week's model is...the Harper from the Heroes of the West set!



IDYB has this model listed as a grulla, but she looks gray to me, so that's what I'm going to call her. The Heroes of the West set debuted in 2017 and is still being produced in the regular run line. It's item #61098 and this model was issued on the Harper mold sculpted by Sommer Prosser.

Interestingly enough, both adult horses in this set are mares, and the light gray is on the Amelia mold, which was the first mold used for the Classics Horse of the Year series back in 2014. The foal, on the other hand, is a mostly-black Hansel, which was a tad frustrating since he's appeared in black two other times. The Harper herself is quite attractive - she looks good in gray! (Or grulla, or whatever color she's supposed to be.) I wasn't that big of a fan of hers at first, but she grew on me pretty quickly.

Harper's been a relatively popular mold since her debut in 2016 - popular with Breyer, at least. She's gotten no shortage of use, including being used as 2017's Halloween Classic model, a Tractor Supply special run, multiple regular run releases and even a unicorn! I don't know where she'll turn up next, but maybe she'll get some kind of website special run this year.

Fiona and Rory are here!

Greetings, readers! My Fiona and Rory set arrived today, so I unboxed them and took some quick cell phone pics. Behold!

This is a really cute set!



The blue shimmer is more subtle than I'd hoped it would be, though it seemed a little more visible on the foal.

Quality-wise, they're excellent - I didn't see any flaws anywhere on them. I suppose it's hard to screw up two almost-solid-black paint jobs.

All in all, I'm glad I got this set - they'll go well with my other Hansels and Gretels (once I get them unpacked and put back on the shelf).

Here's a last pic of Rory and the almost-identical foal from this year's Heroes of the West set:



They're really, really similar to each other - you can see the blue shimmer on Rory here (and his socks are masked, he has two more socks than the other foal does, and his blaze/star is a little smaller), so I wish Breyer had done a little more to differentiate the two. I suspect from the Heroes of the West foal's gray tail tip that he's intended to actually be gray and would lighten with time, but in the meantime, I wish Rory had a bald face or a high stocking or something to set him off a little more - except then he'd look a lot like Tuari, from the 2015 America's Wild Mustangs set. I think Breyer may have painted themselves into a corner here?

Another solution to set them apart would have been to make Fiona and Rory glossy - that would have been awesome! Either way, I think it's probably safe to say Hansel won't be issued in black again anytime soon.