Kai's Garage Kits

(aren’t you glad you don’t have to sculpt your own pants?)

I had hoped to get started this week with preparing Yume-chan for molding and casting, putting the parts on sprues and getting the molds set up and whatnot, but I spent too long refining the sculpt and I couldn’t quite get around to it. Serving eviction notices to all the little bits of jankiness is an annoyingly tedious process, but nothing looks finished until I do it. Oh well.

I did, at least, finish the pants this week. Same process that I followed for the shirt: smooth the clay with coarse rakes, refine with fine rakes, add seams and hems and other details. For how subtle these changes are, they take an awful lot of time. Or maybe (read: probably), I’m just a slow sculptor. When all’s said and done, though, it is immensely satisfying to stand back and look everything over. There’s some switch in my brain that clicks over from “I can picture the figure buried in this clay” to “wow, that actually almost looks like a real figure!”

After a few hours of nonstop work, I took a break and spent the next few minutes genuinely cross-eyed. I guess after a while my eyes just can’t take it anymore. I’ve found this to be the biggest limiting factor in how much work I can put into a piece in one sitting. I do sometimes wonder if I would benefit from using a magnifier or a jeweler’s loupe or something similar, rather than just holding things up to my eyes to see the details. I keep telling myself I should buy one just to try. However, as this is a highly logical, sensible idea that I would probably benefit from greatly, I will probably never get around to it. So it goes.🙃

As an apology for this crappy post, I will leave you with the following photo (that I grabbed off Wikipedia… it’s the thought that counts, right?). May it bring you more viewing enjoyment than whatever I have made:

Wow! This is, in my opinion, the finest work of the finest sculptor of all time, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. It’s titled “Apollo and Daphne” and is based on the ancient Greek myth featuring those characters. It depicts a scene where Daphne, sick of Apollo chasing after her beauty, turns into a tree to escape his lust. I don’t think tree-ification was a particularly healthy way of dealing with this situation, but I definitely get where she’s coming from. Anyways, it’s absolutely incredible to me to that this is carved out of solid marble, with hand tools, in true-to-life scale! The deeper I get into sculpting, the more this statue in particular astounds me. Look at the rendering of all the different textures: the skin, the rocks, the wood. Look at the detail in those leaves! Maybe I’ll do a write-up about Bernini at some point. Nothing motivates me more than his works. Seriously, it’s time to hit the clay again!