darkSpyro

My wife was looking at our Lightcore Shroomboom and mused that it must have been hand-painted by a Chinese worker due to all of the detail on it. I found this curious, so I figured I'd ask the community: are Skylanders painted by hand, or are there automated manufacturing processes that can provide the level of detail they have?

A lot of you seem to be very hardcore, so I figured you might know!

Eeyup. It was mentioned before SA's launch, and in one of the Swap Force interviews.

No wonder we get factory errors for paint.

I would love to see the process for this in action, but I'm afraid I might feel guilty only paying $10 for the figure.

for real they are all hand painted?

most toys get painted in like a press or almost like the paints printed on layer by layer and then at the end a worker adds whatever extra detail work. so i think thats common with all toys.

I find it impossible to find a skylander that doesn't have "splatter" or "drips" where there not suppose to be.
I don't know how some pass inspection, if they even bother to inspect them at all.

The vast majority of factories in China do everything by hand. It is cheaper there to use humans than many machines. These are most definitely hand painted.

Heh, I see a ton of fingerprints on my L-LightCore Chill.

That is both mind-boggling and depressing to think that all skylanders are hand-painted.

For $10-$15, it covers the initial R&D, character modeling development, cost of materials (which is admittedly minimal), machine/mold overhead, labor including QA/QC, packaging, shipping, and profit. Granted it is spread out over hundreds of thousands of characters and games, but still, its hard to fathom how little the labor must get paid for the amount of work they do...