Toys, toys, toys...

Mojo Tinker mare and foal

The last few months, whole summer actually, was very busy time for me. I had several toy designs to accomplish. Most of them are ready and sent last week, what makes me quite happy and now I wait to see how will they look when painted and produced in plastic. 

Meanwhile, I also received a very nice package from the toy company for which I design animal models (Mojo Fun aka Animal Planet). In the package, I found the toy versions of animals I designed in the last 2 years and it is very nice feeling to see how the final product looks and feels like! That's exciting for me every time :) 
They were mostly cattle and horses but also the sitting baby rhino. I also got some extras from Mojo, including a gift for my son - the golden dragon model and two lovely models for my own collection: the new lion male and the dalmatian dog. 

Few comments about them. Mojo now produces their models from new kind of plastic, which is nice quality and in my opinion is an improvement compared to the old one. It's more durable, a bit softer and it doesn't break easily. Also, many models are painted using some new (for this company) techniques and I like the effect, especially on spotted models!

I'm especially pleased with Dalmatian dog model, it is in scale 1:12 so it will work perfectly as a friend for Willem (resin Comtois horse in Classic scale).
My husband likes the sitting rhino best and he even took one to his workplace, haha. 
The favourite of my son is, of course, the golden dragon. Golden is his favourite colour and  dragons generally are inspiring. Dragon became a best friend of the King Without The Castle from my son's collection ;)

Another news in a toy theme for me is a special kinetic sand. This kind of sand is meant mostly for little kids as a home version of normal sand. Contrary to normal sand it doesn't make much mess because it doesn't scatter (it is more like wet sand but not exactly), it sticks to itself but not to other materials and it doesn't dry out. It is also perfect for simple diorama-like setup for photos. It is already known in the model horse hobby from some time as a good base for miniature show scenes. 
I had fun using it to make a small diorama scenes for my horse models and other figures and then photographing it. I used old calendar photos as a background for these scenes. I know it is rather popular practice in the hobby but I didn't try it before. You can see photo of the setup and  some of the effects here:

My conclusion is it is really nice to play with the models this way and I probably need more fences and/or other diorama elements for future sessions. 
Thank you for looking here!