Color Vs. Concept

In spite of my indifference towards the Silver mold, I really like the latest release in the Big Cats Series, Leandro:

The color and concept really suits the mold, and he is a good match for his predecessor, the 2011 Passage to the Pacific Hear Me Roar:

http://www.identifyyourbreyer.com/images/HearMeRoar.jpg

(Does this make the Hear Me Roar the Mini-Me, or the Leandro the Mighty-Me?)

Leandro got me to thinking about Decorators, in a general sense. While the earliest Decorators were basically one-to-one color swaps – substituting a realistic color with a non-realistic one – many of these newer Decorators are more about Concept than Color.

It is relatively easy to replicate a Color-based Decorator paint job on any mold in any scale, since these types of Decorators tend to have parameters that aren’t all that different from a realistic color. And sometimes are even more basic than that.

Want to replicate Charcoal? It is relatively simple: shaded Brown- or Blue-toned Black body color, masked white mane and tail, pink hooves, pink muzzle, four stockings, bald face, and maybe some eyewhites. Make a few minor tweaks for markings, decide between Matte and Gloss, and you are done.

But with Concept-based Decorators like the Big Cats Series, it’s not that simple.

In fact they are just more complicated in a technical sense: you have decals, diecut masks, and multicolored/multitonal paint jobs with odd little details (like footpads!) that are tailored specifically for the mold. Adapting it for another release on another mold would mean making adjustments to all of these components.

This is why you don’t see repeats of Conceptual Decorators very often, unless it’s something that was popular before (like the Stablemates Halloween Decos) or a seemingly perfect match of mold and concept (like Leandro here).

It would take almost as much time and effort to come up with a new concept, than recycle an older one.

I only have three Silvers in my herd – a Skullduggery, a Valentino, and the Volunteer Special Nottingham – and I wouldn’t mind adding Leandro as a fourth. But I’m not going to sweat it if I don’t, especially since my luck with Web-Specials-I-Want has not been so good, lately.