garage kit pre-dump & art references

Next post will be covering my process on my first garage kit. This one is more background and sources for story posts etc.

First off, here’s a list of everything I hauled from 3 book-offs in California (Westminster, Costa Mesa, and Torrance). If you’re not familiar, they’re a Japanese franchise that sells second hand books, DVDs, manga, anime, electronics, etc. There is one in New York midtown. All the figures were $10 or less each and the books were roughly $15 each.

Figures:

Kite from .hack (gachapon), Monster Hunter (gachapon), Nia from Gurren Lagann super deformed figure (banpresto prize item), Nurse Witch Kogumi, Perona chibi figure from One Piece, Doraemon gachapon I have no idea about, Heart Queen from JAKQ (gachapon)

Books:

Virtual Beauty 5 - Another in the series I’ve shown here in the past but another awesome book featuring artists in the early days of 3D imaging. There are tutorials using old software for both 3D art and 2D illustrations. Some of these art styles I recognize from previous issues but I was more interested in this image.

Y’s art works - A random purchase but it was $15 and full of really awesome colored pencil illustrations. Most of the art is super fantasy but my favorite are the 2-5 pages that feature this more sci-fi look.

Boogiepop and others - The art of Kouji Ogata. Most of the book focuses on Boogiepop and are images I’ve seen already online but there’s a back section that includes more artwork by the artist beyond the show and this image is probably the best one.

I’d go further into details with the books but I need another post at this rate…

ANYWAY onto the garage kit stuff:

I remember being in high school and drooling over figure releases. These tiny pieces of PVC plastic so delicately painted had me by the balls. I would beg my mom and she'd see the price tags (around $100) and scream at me for obsessing over glorified plastic toys. I started collecting second hand figures at cons (the flea market at Fanime-con was my gateway drug). Whenever I would see the new photo releases or displays of figures at anime cons, there would be a special shiny glass box where they kept the garage kits. They were these exceptionally awesome figures that were usually 3x the price and they felt completely out of reach for regular poor weebs like me. That is, until I got into the hobby myself this past week. 

I got this Evanglion x Pinky Street garage kit from eBay... all 3 for $50!

Garage kits started out when fans would make their own anime figures and create limited kits (in their garages) to sell to other fans. Now I'm not a garage kit historian but Leona has a video on its history, I'm here to summarize. **I highly recommend her channel because she's been my guiding light throughout this.** The hobby got so popular that soon, manufacturers like Kaiyodo, Kotobukiya, and Volks jumped in to manufacture them from the original sculptor's work and this is often referred to as a resin cast kit. Either way it's produced, the hobby can get really expensive given that these kits are limited in number. The hobby is so popular that it developed a strong following and generated multiple hobby magazines to document the community.

Replicant is one of these magazines. I've been slowly collecting Replicant magazines for years with the hope that one day, I could have one of these figures that require skill to build. After a lot of digging, I found the names of the characters for this page (Replicant Works 2 1999-2000). It's from an old eroge game called Virtua Call, the characters are Precia and Windy and it was released in 2001. Here's the MyFigureCollection link.

This one is from Wandaba Style!, an older anime about a pop idol group that wants to... perform on the moon. It's a 1/7 scale model of Kiku No.8 from issue 15 of Replicant. 

You don't have to use an airbrush or spray paint to finish a kit and a great example is this guy's work on a Vispo Rei Ayanami kit (I posted a picture of the kit to my story). I'll cover the BTS and process stuff in the next post since its lengthy. I also got a few more cool things coming in the mail so I'll do another art reference dump before the end of the month.

side note: I discovered the term anime-core during my hunt for names, details. etc on vintage anime figures and... I'm still processing this title HAHA apparently it's... 90's to early 2000's moe/magical girl/vocaloid type beat (I discovered the title through popular figures that show up on Pinterest). I think my entire collection or idk lifestyle is anime core by that definition so the title had me a bit shocked like how did I not hear of this sooner... I live under a rock. Anyway while I'm excited there's a funny -core title for this aesthetic, I hope it doesn't make people feel boxed in or hierarchical. Everyone should feel flexible and comfortable with enjoying multiple aesthetics because we're all capable of going through many phases.