Kai's Garage Kits

(if every mistake is a lesson then give me a diploma)

You can’t paint a garage kit that hasn’t been sculpted yet. I’ve talked about the painting part, and now it’s time to talk about sculpting. Meet Yume-chan.

She’s not finished yet, obviously.

I’ve wanted to make my own garage kit pretty much since I learned they existed. I started simply enough, just some little figurines created with air-dry Sculpey, which were… uh.. not good. Since then I’ve gone through a few different sculpts, several rounds of despairing at my “results,” and (at least) one figure smashed rather impetuously to the floor in frustration. But I kept trying! I can proudly say that since I started, I’ve gone from having no experience in sculpting or resin casting to having almost no experience. 🥲

Below is a picture of my previous attempt. I ended up abandoning it because 1) it started cracking and I wanted to switch to a different medium, 2) I started worrying that the dress would present a challenge when it came time to mold and cast it, and 3) I just wasn’t happy with how it was turning out.

So you mess up and you move on. I switched to Monster Clay, which I’ve much preferred working with, and started again from scratch. I’m actually kind of okay with the current iteration of Yume-chan. I feel like there’s a decent figure waiting in the clay, and I just need to figure out how to set it free.

Let’s look at the process for this sculpt. It started with a bare aluminum wire armature attached to a stand, which provided a structure to build off of. I then applied some aluminum foil to form a rough character shape and glued it down to the armature. This filled in space and gave the clay a rougher surface to stick to. A basic clay character was was built on top of that form. Here’s the progression:

After that I started work on the clothes (which are still a work in progress). Here I’m applying little clay worms to the shirt, trying to find the flow of the fabric. Burne Hogarth’s book “Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery,” even though it’s intended for drawing, has been a great help with figuring out how the fabric should “move” and drape around the different surfaces of the body.

Next I blended the wrinkles into the shirt. Here are the results (for now):

I could still improve the sculpt a lot, but I feel like I’m finally starting to get the impression that there’s real fabric covering a real body here (as long as I don’t look too hard at it 😣). There’s much more left to add, of course. I swear she’ll have pants eventually! Just as soon as I can settle on the positioning of her legs… I can’t stop tweaking them…

My concept for the final figure is this: a girl wearing pajamas, a blanket billowing behind her, maybe she’s flying, maybe running, maybe ice skating. I’m not trying to be ambiguous, I just haven’t decided yet. The name Yume means “dream.” She’s not really flying (or skating) in pajamas, after all; it’s all in her head, and in reality she’s still tucked under the blanket, snoozing peacefully. The fact that the name is in Japanese is an important symbol, too: it symbolizes the fact that I’m a huge otaku and I just can’t help myself. Subscribe for more cringe.

Here are a few of the problems I’ve run into on this build. First of all, I didn’t tighten the armature down enough when I attached it to the stand, and now Yume-chan has loosened up so much that she dances around whenever I try to work on her. I also made the foil way too thick around the wrists and ankles. I didn’t realize this, however, until I had already done the rough sculpt of the limbs, and I ended up having to perform a foil-ectomy to extract the excess. I’ve made countless tweaks to the pose, too, most so minor that I look at it the next day and wonder if I even changed anything. The list will inevitably keep growing. Still, with every fix, I learn something new.

I don’t want to finish this without crediting a couple more of the resources I’ve been relying on. “Pop Sculpture” has been an absolute godsend of a book. It covers the whole process of crafting custom figures from the perspectives of a few professional toy and collectible statue sculptors, and it is an absolute wealth of information. Another recommended resource is The Crafsman on YouTube, who shows off his own toymaking journey from the hobbyist perspective. He has a voice made for ASMR, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I’d like to bring my kit to the inaugural US Wonder Festival at Momocon next year. I’ve been practicing some resin casting on the side, so I feel confident that I can have something ready by the time the event rolls around. We’ll see what happens, though…

And if you’ve read this far, thanks!