(tanuki-tan on the shop page!)
Announcement time: I’ve cast and packaged a few Tanuki-tan garage kits, and they’re now available on the shop page! I’ve listed her as Mochi Tanuki Daifuku Tanuki-tan Tanuki Daifuku, because I’m just so good at settling on names. 🙂
That indecision, incidentally, is actually why this site is called Kai’s Garage Kits instead of something more creative and artist-y. I cycled through several different name ideas, decided I didn’t like any of them, and just resorted to using my own name. It is what it is…
Back to the kit: I’m including a ribbon and a square of felt in each of the boxes. You can sit Tanuki-tan down on the felt and tie the ribbon around her neck as you please. They’ll be in a random color, but they’ll match each other reasonably closely. Of course, you can always sub these out with your own ribbons. Have fun with it! That’s the whole point of garage kits!
Now for a few comments about production. My efforts to reduce the parts count and simplify the casting process really paid off here, because reproducing these kits was the most straightforward production process I’ve had so far. Despite the added complications introduced by the hood sculpt, pouring and subsequently demolding all the components has turned out to be a piece of cake. I feel like I’ve learned or reinforced a lot of lessons here, first and foremost being KISS! Which everyone knows at this point but which I somehow needed another reminder of. In this case, Keeping It Simple means keeping the parts count as low as possible and avoiding splitting things up into multiple pieces if there’s no actual reason to do so. I’ve been underestimating the ability of silicone to handle complex shapes and undercuts, and it’s time to take advantage of that!
On another note related to kit-making but not to the resin parts themselves, I’ve gone ahead and invested in an ink tank printer (a Canon Pixma G620, to be precise). After burning through way too many ink cartridges (what a massive money hole those are!) printing off the labels and instructions for my previous kits, I finally decided enough is enough and I need a better way of doing bulk printing. Well, to be honest, it was half needing to get a better printer and half needing an excuse to get a better printer. And maybe it wasn’t exactly half-and-half…
Ok, so I just wanted to make a bunch of art prints from artists I follow on Pixiv, and make better prints of my own photos, and this created just the justification I needed. But my labels do look better now, and they certainly cost a lot less in ink.
I haven’t done a whole lot of sculpting over the past couple of weeks, but I’m feeling the itch to get back to it. I must admit, I have trouble staying focused on one sculpt at a time. I keep having new ideas that I want to put into clay, and they come a lot faster than I can actually make them! The only saving grace is that a lot of these ideas are beyond my current skill level, so I don’t have a choice but to focus on something else. It won’t stay that way forever, though. Not sure what I’m going to do then!
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