Occasional Need for Rearrangements
and Adjustments
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all rights reserved, Model Graphix magazine Japan ---
----I’d like to
dig a little deeper with our conversation about outlines just now, so how do
you yourself, Kiya-san, approach the aspects of the lines and surfaces you
draw?
Well… for the aspects I “sketch out the blueprints
rough” (laughs).
----Your strong
point I suppose, would be in the beauty of your outlines.
Well, if you’re talking about car models,
you could go as far as saying “That’s the most important thing”. Even when the blueprints I’ve drawn in two
dimensions don’t match up in three dimensions properly, and have a bit of
discrepancy, I’m thorough about having drawn them so that I’ve conveyed “This
is the kind of design I want”. And
actually, I told the Mold Manufacturing Department things like that too, and
chose people to work there who could understand it when I said things like “I
want lines and surfaces like this”.
----So in other
words, with the exquisite concavity and convexity of the Enfini RX-7 Type R
(sales date: April ’92) for example, you used spoken words, rather than doing
this and that in the blueprints…?
Yes, but of course I drew up the blueprints
properly too. But at the very end I’d
still lay up some putty on the wooden masters myself, and got caught up in
correcting the wooden masters until I had satisfied myself (chagrin).
You know… “surfaces” are the key after all,
rather than “lines”. If you don’t create
the surfaces properly, you wind up with a failed mold. That’s the heart of it, isn’t it?
----You’re the
kind of guy who really likes to play with the expressions surfaces take when
you design, and plunge into re-arrangements, aren’t you, Kiya-san?
Well, I know there are some people who go
by the re-arrangements-aren’t-necessary theory, and I can understand what
people like that are saying.
But, just as we were saying about “where to
put the wheel centers” before, if you just shrink down actual car blueprints and
transpose them onto a 1/24 or 1/20 model as-is, you don’t get that “realism”. So, there are times when you have to do some
re-arranging, to kind of emphasize realism.
But you know, with the Honda City R for example,
I made some adjustments by lowering the waistline and widening the window areas
a lot, but none of those no-adjustment-theory people even noticed. So I “get away with” things like that, but in
the end with models, and with car models especially, I think it has to be that
way.
That is to rephrase, models are sets of tridimensional
volumes, aren’t they? So I think that
feeling of volume, that comes from the lines and surfaces, is what’s most
important. So whether the cabin is big
or small, the window areas are wide or narrow, or the tires’ ellipticity mass
is large or small, of course I draw out those things with lines and attach my
surfaces to them, but it’s in the way the surfaces lie, I think. And that’s the fun part of designing.
----Yes, that’s
right. I’ve learned how to “tell a good
lie” from you, Kiya-san. And, the “importance
of caricature like expressionism over photo-realism” with models
sometimes. You know, making them “seemingly
more real than real”.
So, I don’t think the
re-arrangements and adjustments you do when designing are what you would call “exaggerations”.
Yes, that’s what I mean! I don’t think they (the actions he takes) are
exaggerations. A model is, after all, a
model, so I think it’s more important that it “looks like, and has the same
feeling of the actual car as a model” rather than being “absolutely faithful to
the actual car”. So a wee bit of lying
can be necessary, and I sometimes lower a car’s ride height, or lean the angle
of its A pillar back a bit. Taken to the
extreme, what I mean is “Cool is best, ain’t it!” (laughs).
----But the
fact is, there are people who don’t get such nuances. For people who don’t have artistic sense, or
can’t see it, accuracy is the only thing that’s right and proper.
But I think your
mindset, Kiya-san, through Sugiura-san, still carries on at Tamiya even though
Sugiura-san has retired from there. When
I look at Tamiya’s most recent automotive models, their details make me think “They
still have that Tamiya quality about them, even though the people in charge of
the outlines may have changed”.