Two Copies Are Never Identical

If you order a character and the one that arrives differs a little from the photo, that’s the process rather than a mistake. It’s worth being specific about how much difference is normal, because “handmade variation” can be used to excuse sloppy work and we don’t want to hide behind it.

Where variation comes from

The airbrush. Paint goes on in thin layers by hand. A gradient that’s sprayed twice is never laid down in exactly the same place twice, and where two colours blend there’s a soft boundary that moves by a few millimetres from piece to piece.

The batch. We mix colour in batches, and batches are finite. Two pieces painted a month apart can sit a shade apart, most often in the mixed tones rather than the pure ones. We keep reference swatches for this reason and check against them.

The shell. Hand-finished surfaces are not machine-flat. Under a raking light, one piece may show a very slightly different texture in a large flat area than another. Usually invisible in a room.

How much is acceptable

A few per cent of tone shift in a blended area: normal. A colour boundary landing two or three millimetres off from the reference: normal, and honestly part of the appeal. A visible difference in a flat single-colour area: that’s a mixing problem, not variation, and it shouldn’t leave the studio.

Registration is the hard limit. If the eye on the left is where the eye should be and the pattern lines up where the pattern should line up, the piece is correct regardless of small tone differences. If registration is off, it isn’t.

What it means if you own two

Put them apart, not together. Side by side, any two hand-painted objects look like a mismatch, and it’s an unflattering comparison neither piece deserves. Across a room from each other they look like the same character, which is what they are.

We’ve written separately about why nothing sits in stock waiting to be bought, which is the other half of this. See Why Everything We Sell Is Made to Order.

Complex colourways vary more than simple ones. Twin Headed Rock Guitarist Panda has two heads and a guitar, which is a lot of separate painted areas that all have to agree with each other.