Doh! A deer! A broken deer!

As an artist, by necessity, I've learned to do some basic restorations---fixing broken eartips, touching up scratches and rubs, filling cracked legs, etc. In particular, I specialize in restoring Breyer woodgrains. Generally speaking, I try to buy mint pieces for my collection, but sometimes you find things you can't help but want to rescue. This poor Hagen-Renaker DW Patience had a bit of an accident (prior to my acquiring her). And as an avid collector of HRs, especially the wildlife, I had to try my hand at restoring her.

Happily, the breaks were pretty clean, and with a little gentle sanding of the edges (to make them fit back together again) and some water soluble glue, she was easy to restore to one piece.

 

With a little touch up of the edges, she's good as new.

Holy Grail achieved

I can hardly believe it, but I am now the proud owner of a Woodgrain Proud Arabian Mare! The PAM is the only mold I obsessively actively conga, and having been on the lookout for a woodgrain for a number of years, I didn't really expect to find one I could afford any time soon. As is often the case with rare Breyers, the market is either feast or famine. No woody PAMs show up for years on ebay, and then in the span of two weeks, two come up for sale.

I got lucky in that my PAM had been "improved" by a previous owner who gave her socks and a blaze to make her more realistic (one assumes anyway). Not that woodgrains are a plausible horse color in the first place... But anyway, I got her for a song, and she arrived in my hands ready for some much-needed TLC.



Up until I received this PAM, I had done some minor restoration work for myself and for friends, both on CMs and OFs. Most of it was touching up small rubs and dings, sometimes on rarer models like a friend's 4-Eyed Misty or my own test run 5-Gaiter. I had never tackled anything as major or as rare as this PAM, and I was definitely apprehensive about taking sandpaper, airbrush, and fixative to her. But once I got started, even with a few false starts mixing color, it all came together quite nicely, and I am thrilled with the results.

And now that her legs and face are properly restored, it really makes her sensational woodgrain coloring pop. High quality turquoise is said to have "zat" or great eye appeal, and I like to describe woodgrains with really attractive contrasting color as having "zat" as well. This mare's zat goes right off the scale.