Restored Paintjob of My Old Schleich Maia & Borges Sperm Whale

[callmejoe3]

I am about to do a review of this figure for the Animal Toy Blog. This figure was released by Schleich in 2000 and retired in 2012. The sculpt was owned by Maia and Borges and was re-used for Papo in 2016 and Mojo in 2018.

I owned the original for a long time in addition to the latter two models. However, before I took the photos for the review, I wanted to try and restore the paint job in areas where it has been chipped. I owned this figure for almost a decade and it showed. The following pictures are the incomplete restoration, where I only managed to replace the paintjob on the top of the head and the back ridges, compared with the complete restoration. The portion circled in blue were the portions that were still in progress. I wish I took better pictures of before I even started the restoration. The task was a bit intimidating because the original paint job was accomplished using an air-brush, and I was attempting to patch it up using small paint-brushes and acrylic paint. However, with some good mixing to get some of the grays right and a light application, I was able to pull off the diffused portions well enough.



Behind the portion circled in blue was even more chipped portions of the snout.









Here are some pictures of figures sold on Ebay that represent how my figure looked originally.



Here's a variant of the same kind of paintjob where there's less light gray on the blowhole. That's basically how my figure looks now.



And here's a completely different version where it looks very close to the Papo version, even with the yellow/orange keel. And yes, this is a different official paintjob of the Schleich version, not Papo, as you can see the logo print. I've seen this alternate paintjob floating around for a bit and this is the best picture I have of it.




The lighting isn't doing the restoration too many favors. The light gray I added looks a lot more subtle in-person.

[sirenia]

Good job, nicely touched up.

[Friesian]

The whale looks nice! Restoration, in a way, is so much harder than customizing as there is not as much room for little mistakes. You did a great job making it have clean strokes with using a brush!

[callmejoe3]

The whale looks nice! Restoration, in a way, is so much harder than customizing as there is not as much room for little mistakes. You did a great job making it have clean strokes with using a brush!

Yeah, this was definitely a learning experience, especially because I never attempted such a thing before.The most important thing that I learned is to be very conservative with how much paint you're applying at once. It's not 1:1 with how it looked before, but it blends in well enough with the level of variation different figures had in their paintjob. As some of the closeups show, the forehead is has several different shades of gray, but that's mostly the camera's flash exacerbating it. Under normal conditions, it's harder to spot. I decided top play it safe and not try to mimick the gray accents surrounding the blowhole and just focus on recreating the one on the forehead. The only notable details missing are the 7x2 grid of light-gray dots that used to be on the bottom of the jaw, as shown in the one of the eBay photos. I didn't want to play with fate since I was already doing such a good job so far and they were still faintly visible.

This is easily one of if not my favorite figures in this collection, I am glad I did such a good job in the end.

[Cachalot]

The softer vinyl can make restoration tricky too.  I have a humpback that is the soft vinyl and restoring her is going to be tricky.

I ordered the Mojo figure.  I don't know what type of vinyl it is yet.