What's the deal with Eggs?

And here’s me thinking they were only a pain in the bum for the poor mamma dragon XD
Does that mean no more new hatching sculptures or no more painting of the existing hatchers ?

I am campaigning hard to retire the little hatching dragons. The larger hatching dragons could be made as special peices, but I don’t ever want to do them in production again!
We will keep doing the hatching pegasus though, he isn’t too terrible to cast.
I do want to do hatching llamas thought.. so, we’ll still be making a few more hatchers. Then there’s the hatching phoenix…oy.

The very perfect round eggs like the royal dragons are the hardest. Every tiny defect shows, from casting to finish coat. They are hard to cast because of the shape of the egg. Picture the egg mold made of soft, floppy rubber trying to stay put, upside-down inside a plaster case as it gets filled with liquid gypsum. The opening ( which would be the bottom of the finished piece) of the round egg mold tends to collapse into the case. This causes the egg shape to “belly out” on the lower curve of the right-side-up egg casting. This is less of a problem when the rubber molds are new, because they haven’t yet shrunk, and so fit the cases better. So, in order to get perfect eggs, we have to always make new molds for them.
They are also very difficult to paint. They take allot of fussing with and touching up to keep the edge between the dragon and egg colors neat. We use stencils to cover the egg while we airbrush the dragon, but these stencils don’t always fit perfectly, so there is invariably over spray on the eggshell that needs fixing, and then the stencil can leave marks and scratches on the eggshell. Even getting the solid white eggshell painted evenly is difficult. The little hatching dragon is ok to cast, but terrible to paint because it is so little and has so much paint “edge” area. It needs to be almost entirely hand painted. Hatchers are a real pain.
We have struggled along with the hatchers for years! It takes us forever to give up on something.Sometimes I pull the plug on pieces before they get to production though. I do that allot. Way too much.
The eggs and the Sun dragon are the hardest to cast I think. I am not a caster so I really am not sure which are the very worst, but those were the ones I got the most complaints about.
Any of the pieces where there are sharp color changes are very hard to paint, things such as: Kirins, Mermaids, hatchers and Wizards. The Flions and flapcats with the white wings are tough too. Surprisingly, the other pieces that I find very difficult to paint are the solid colored gargoyles! Getting that stone color on evenly is incredibly tricky!

Ah, the hatching royalty are some of my favorite pieces; it’s a shame they are so hard to paint. I’d love to see them in Red Fire.