Oryol Mare, Dark Grey (Horse Country by CollectA)

Review and images by Harecraft Horses; edited by bmathison1972

Much better known as the Orlov Trotter, named after their developer Count Alexei Orlov, this is a famous breed but not a common one outside its native homeland, and it’s fairly rare to see in model form, too. With nothing yet from Breyer, the market leader in the model horse world, we have to turn to the more toy-type brands : Mojo Fun have released their Orlov Trotter sculpt in two different shades of grey, and now CollectA bring us a brand new one.

Sculpted in, quite logically, a trotting pose – but it’s a rather relaxed-looking jog, rather than the high speed trot which the breed is capable of. This could be for stability reasons – a pose at full extension can cause the dreaded issues with model horses : wobbling, or warping of the limbs, both of which often end with tipping over entirely. This trot has enough movement to look energetic, without causing actual movement on your shelves 🙂

Grey horses start dark and gradually fade to white, with the majority going through a dappled stage in between. The dapples on this model aren’t quite so successful as those on the beautiful Hanoverian released earlier in the year, I think they come across more like messy paint-brush stipples compared to his neatly shaped and carefully arranged blobs of paler grey. But although they look hand-painted, they are definitely an applied transfer print, it hasn’t been left up to the factory artists to dot the speckles on individually. The mane and tail are given a bit of depth with a graduated fade to grey down the tail, and a blondeness sprayed on both so they don’t look starkly white but more realistic, like the horse is carrying a little bit of natural dirt in the hair.

The other side, where perhaps the dapples are a bit better, being more spread out and with less obvious gaps around them!

Here she is on a plain background…

All in all, it’s a nice enough model, of a breed I’m glad to see, slightly let down by the dappling design.