Kai's Garage Kits

(i’m done with hair, i’m done, i swear)

When the wind whips through someone’s hair in a movie, it creates drama. When it happens in real life, it creates a mess. I don’t know about you, but at the end of a windy day I look like I’m wearing a bird’s nest as a hat. Perhaps I need to find some Hollywood stylists to follow me around everywhere.

Yume-chan, luckily, does have a stylist following her around: me! I’m here to balance the mess and the drama, whether or not I’m qualified to. All that is to say that I’ve made a bunch of revisions and finalized Yume-chan’s hair. In the most long-winded way possible…

In the spirit of wind-blown hair, here’s a song/animation to listen to/watch:

If you don’t speak Japanese and couldn’t figure it out from the video, the song is about strong wind sweeping your hair all back. The character/”singer” is Kaai Yuki (歌愛ユキ) from Vocaloid, by the way. Genuinely tempted to do a sculpt of her just so i can call it Kaai by Kai.

I had previously taken the effort to separate Yume-chan’s head and hair into separate pieces for ease of painting, but after mulling over it a while I came to the conclusion that this separation was compromising the appearance of the hairline. Splitting things up works well when the hair comes down to cover the seamline, but when the hairline is exposed, the gap looks really obvious. The good news is that swept-back hair does not obscure the face, so there’s not really a need to paint the two parts separately.

Here, the bulk of the hair is attached and blended in, which to me looks much more natural and less like a hair-shaped helmet. I reduced the size of the hair as well, again in the interest of avoiding helmet-ish-ness.

I ditched the separate piece for the bangs and swept them back with the rest of the hair. I wasn’t happy with the previous bangs sculpt, as it felt disconnected from the rest of the hair (especially when I looked at it from the back). I’m sure with more practice I could make the two pieces look like one, but I’m not there yet, so you get what you get. Besides, I feel like the new sculpt is a more natural, blended look, and having everything swept back helps to emphasize the strength of the wind. Perhaps the biggest factor in this decision, though, was that I had that damn song stuck in my head and the ALL-BACK! refrain was really steering the vibes. That do be how it is sometimes.

I felt like the hair was looking a little flat after this, so I added some depth by forming strips of clay into little ridges and waves. I had a surprisingly hard time making it look irregular. Somehow my natural tendency was to keep forming the peaks and valleys into a grid pattern. If only this natural organization applied to my workspace as well…

I then carved lines into the hair with a loop tool. Definitely helps to sell the impression of hair.

And that’s it! I’m ready to consider this the final head sculpt, outside of a little cleanup and smoothing-over of blemishes. I could keep going indefinitely, but I’ve gotta finish this at some point.

On the topic of cleaning up and refining the sculpt, I made myself some rakes out of guitar strings and some brass tubes that I had leftover from another project. The strings are just crimped into the ends of the tubes. The ridges of the strings are great for raking away imperfections, much like you rake the leaves off your lawn (well, not my lawn, I live in an apartment). Of course, they can also be used to create texture like you see below:

I guess this makes for a pretty minor update overall. Wow, just a bunch of talking about hair. Now that I’m happy with the head, though, I imagine that the final detail-up of all the other parts will go a lot faster. The head, after all, is the most crucial part to get right.

I’m gonna go listen to 強風オールバック again now. If you haven’t heard that song before, hope you enjoyed it! And if you’re not familiar with Vocaloid, then welcome to the rabbit hole!