Kai's Garage Kits

(as an owner of two of them you’d think i’d know what they look like by now)

As you guessed from the title, I have roughed out Yume-chan’s hands. To be honest, this is probably the part of the sculpt that I was least looking forward to. There’s a lot of detail to fit in at a small scale, but that doesn’t mean you can skimp out! Hands are an important part of the expressiveness and humanity of the character, and it’ll be easy to notice if you don’t quite get them right.

Most of the sculpting I’ve done on Yume-chan so far has been additive: creating a basic form and then layering additional clay on top of that to refine the details, making adjustments with minimal removal of material. For the hands, however, I worked in the opposite direction, starting with a larger piece and carving it down to reach the level of detail I wanted. I find adding clay to be frustrating at this scale; it’s hard to handle and it’s hard to attach pieces without causing them to deform. Some day I swear I’ll get good at it.

I always love a chance to break out the jeweler’s saw and start cutting things apart, in this case to remove the arms from the body. It’s a satisfying feeling when the blade cuts through the other side and all the cutting resistance suddenly releases.

Each hand started as a fist-shaped piece of clay that I squished into form and then attached to the wrist, replacing the placeholder that was there previously. Next, I started carving out the basic shape of the fist, treating the fingers as a solid block for now. I fully expected the fingers to cause problems for me and I wanted to minimize opportunities for breakage. Even though, given that they’re balled into fists, they’re pretty well supported and probably didn’t have much of a chance for breakage in the first place. I guess I’m not always sensible about these things.

When it came time to actually define the fingers, my process looked a little like this: scribe lines where I think the gaps between fingers should be, cut along them, realize that the fingers are all the wrong thickness relative to each other, press them together and re-cut, find that now they all look fine except for one that looks like a bratwurst, sigh, repeat 😫… Despite the fact that my lines looked even when I scribed them in, the actual cuts never seemed to match up perfectly with them. I went through several rounds of revision here.

When at last I was happy with the cut-out fingers, it was time to shape them, using a loop too to cylindrify (is that a word? Spellcheck isn’t flagging it 🤔) the straight parts while leaving the joints more-or-less square. I also realized that the knuckles looked flat and added some tiny pieces of clay to raise them up.

The great thing about carving hands is that you always have references available to you, and you don’t even need a mirror to see them. I’m saved from doing weird poses in the bathroom mirror! Instead I can simply look down and make a fist. Ah, so that’s how fingers look when they curl at this angle! That’s what happens to the palm! All these years with hands and I never knew… Seriously though, you think you know how these things look until you actually try to sculpt them, and you realize you don’t even know where to start.

I repeated the process with the right hand. The only major difference is that the thumb is sticking out on this one. It looks like it’s giving a thumbs up, but it’s actually supposed to be pinching on to something. Hard to tell without the something, though.

…And with some refinement:

While early on I was planning to have Yume-chan holding on to a billowing blanket, I’ve reconsidered because 1) I worry that it would make the figure unbalanced and cause stability issues, and 2) I don’t want it to dominate the scene and leave poor Yume-chan fighting for attention. Instead, I’ve decided to have her holding on to a couple of bird plushies. I actually think this will support the “dreaming” concept even better than the blanket would have. It’ll be like she’s imagining that she’s flying with her birds, even though in the real world they’re just sitting on the bed or something. I like to imagine that she’s had the plushies for years and that constant companionship has made them her dearest friends (in the dream).

These are just rough sculpts for now, but one of the birds is supposed be an owl and the other a duck. As an extra detail, I decided to make the owl look a little overstuffed and heavy. It’s drooping down rather than blowing in the wind, it’s being held at a lower height, and it’s being gripped tighter than the duck (well, that’s what it’s supposed to look like, at least). Now that I think about it, I don’t know if overstuffing the owl would really cause that much of a weight difference… maybe it’s a beanbag or something.

With that the entire rough sculpt’s done! Except for the base. I guess I should count that, too, but I’m ready to move on to refinement and detail work. Hopefully it doesn’t get tedious.

As a final note, I still haven’t started on the witch kit that I teased in a previous post, but it keeps staring me in the face every time I pass by. I’m itching to start it now that Yume-chan’s getting to a good place. One thing at a time…