Kai's Garage Kits

(they say the devil’s in the details and i believe them because who else would compel me to do this)

Wonder Festival 2026 Winter happened in Japan over the weekend, and I had to enjoy it vicariously through streams. Even though I’ll be at Wonder Festival US in Atlanta in a few months, I’d still love to attend (and sell at) the Japanese one someday. Stretch goals! If you’re not familiar with WonFes, here’s your glimpse into the wider world of garage kits. Not my video, obviously.

(NSFW warning: nothing here is explicit, but a few of these sculpts certainly toe the line!)

Yep, that’s a good 45 minutes of people being better than me at sculpting. The skill on display makes for good motivation, I must say. Visit these timestamps for a few of my favorite sculpts:

• 3:36 – Kaworu from Neon Genesis Evangelion
• 3:57 – Lain from Serial Experiments Lain
• 5:34 – Konata from Lucky Star
• 6:12 – Yuki from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
• 8:22 – Hikaru from Medalist
• 21:12 – Alice/The Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland
• 22:53 – Nagi Hisakawa from The Idolm@ster
• 23:10 – Yuuko from xxxHolic

Now for an information dump about WonFes: there are two Japanese events per year, one in the summer and one in winter. There are spinoffs in other countries as well, but the Japanese ones are the originals. WonFes is, as far as I’m aware, the largest event for GK makers to come together and sell their kits to the public, and is also one of the few events where licensed IPs are made available for independent sculptors to use. Sometimes these GKs are based off of existing illustrations and character art, and sometimes they’re original sculpts. A few of them are prototyped in clay, but these days most of them are sculpted digitally using a program like ZBrush.

There is a separate section of WonFes hosting the companies that manufacture official figures, which you can see here:

The corporate booths are interesting enough to look at. For me, though, the independent sculptors are the heart of the show. A lot of sculptors don’t make much (if any) profit off of their sales and just do it out of passion for the hobby. I find a lot of joy in seeing everyone’s creative concepts and ideas, especially when a sculptor has their own distinct style that you can recognize before you even read their name. I also love seeing wholly original sculpts and sculpts of obscure characters from lesser-known IPs, as you can sense that the creator is doing it out of passion instead of just chasing the popularity of whatever anime or game is big this season.

Ok, enough about WonFes. I’ve been working on adding the final details to Yume-chan. It’s still a work in progress, but I have at least a few things to share.

I smoothed out the arms with the rakes that I made in my last post, working from coarse to fine and then burnishing the surface with the tips of my fingers:

I also removed the body from its stand, which left a hole at the mounting point. I patched up the hole, as well as the ends of the sleeves and the pant legs where the arms and feet were cut off:

I separated the legs from the torso with my jeweler’s saw to make detailing and casting them easier. The destruction was fun, as always!

To the torso, I added a breast pocket and some extra wrinkles around where the buttons would be. I blended these in and smoothed everything down with the rakes:

Using a scrap piece of brass tubing, I cookie-cuttered some buttons out of a small sheet of clay. I then applied these to the shirt and carved in some lines to represent the seams:

It’s coming together, isn’t it? I still have a lot of detailing to do, but I’m making progress. I can’t deny that I find all the raking and smoothing to be a bit tedious, though. You do what you gotta do…