Would you ever consider??????

Probably not, because it would increase the potential of problems with rip-offs.

Or maybe you can make them the same sculpt but half the size? That would be neat for PYO’s 😀

Chess set is a neat idea. 😀

From how I understand, the problem that arises is that anything that looks like a current production piece- even scaled down- is asking for trouble. That’s why the ‘keeper’ dragon, that might be a PYO, looks different and has different scale textures, etc. There are a lot of copyright and trade dress issues at hand.

That’s part of why Windstone is not selling blank, unpainted pieces of their production line. The PYO needs to be maintained as a separate line.

If they sold production casts unpainted, this could lead to all sorts of problems:

1. Who painted it?? Is it a special OOAK factory piece or did a collecter paint it? Is it a rip off? See, Windstone keeps track of all their OOAK and artist’s editions of production pieces. If pieces started showing up with different paint jobs, it would create a lot of confusion. There would be no way to tell fake pieces (or rip offs) from real ones that are just painted differently. This is a legal nightmare for Windstone.

2. Copyrights/trade dress. Melody’s production and artist pieces need to stay a separate line from the PYOs. Once a piece is produced in production, it should not become a PYO. And vice verse, when a piece is a PYO you can bet it won’t become a production item.

As for making a sculpt as large as the SK for a PYO, I can foresee a few problems… Secret Keepers are hard to cast. They are heavy and take an eon to dry. They would not be cost effective enough to sell as a PYO. Yes, there are a few of us nutcases that would be crazy enough to pay several hundred dollars plus $50 to ship it to us just to paint… but I dare say that they probably wouldn’t sell enough of them to make it worth it.
Plus, Melody’d have to sculpt an all new piece, and at that size it’d take her years, I think (Melody? How long did the SK take you to make?).

Just some food for thought. 🙂

My assistant Dhey, and I worked on the SK pretty hard for two years, but it was set aside for awhile to work on other sculpture, so I don’t know the actual number of “man hours” in it. I should carefully keep track of how long a piece actually takes to finish one of these days, though I really don’t want to know!

A pyo chess set! That is a neat idea! What should the pieces be?

dragons against griffins?