#Character BJD

[the-bjd-community-confess]

I love custom character dolls. I love when someone cares about a little fictional dude (or dudette) so much they gotta recreate them as a doll. I love seeing how they approach the sculpt, wig, outfit. I love seeing the photos. And I love the idea of having a 3D blorbo I give IRL headpats to.

I like official character dolls too, of course, but there’s just something about the necessity of effort for custom dolls that is very charming to me.

~Anonymous

[thirea]

Witchtember 20. Doll

[swollenbabyfat]

Intentionality

[damaged-dollie]

[aisforapathy]

[karkkidoesartsandcrafts]

I made a doll

After making historical doll clothing, I got this idea that what if I made a doll myself. I was coveting a doll I could sew clothes for and then pose them for the clothing, but I don't really like that much of any of the design of commercial posable dolls and I'm broke so I can't in good conscience buy an artisan ball jointed doll (and I anyway don't like how thin most of them are). So I did the reasonable thing - I bought very cheep air dry clay (I do have "normal" clay but I don't have access to ceramic oven and it takes much longer to dry it and burn it etc, and I was literally just trying this out) and just started making it myself. I didn't plan ahead because it felt very overwhelming since I have never customized dolls beyond making them clothing and repainting their faces nor have I ever even owned a ball jointed doll. I went with the learning through mistakes rather than theory. The route I most often take. So just bear with me (real doll makers I'm sorry for the cringe).

Without further ado, here's Aune, my vampire OC (from my wip Be All My Sins).

I wanted to make her look like a porcelain doll, because I love their aesthetics. I did lean towards more realism than they were historically like though. Here's all her body parts before painting. (Some of the pieces in the picture are not actually fully smoothed and sanded, but it is right before I started painting the face. My brain just works in a way, where I jump around between the working stages. I'm very much incapable of doing anything organized and straight forwardly.) I have been wanting to do clay sculpting for a long time (it was so fun, when I was a kid in afternoon art school), and this was small scale enough to be manageable so it was so much fun. I will be definitely making more.

Here's her face before and after the paint. I'm quite happy on how the face sculpt turned out, but the paint job was a bit messy. As I mentioned I have done couple of repaints of doll faces, but I'm still not very good at it. When I paint traditionally I'm not often this detail oriented and painting on a 3D surface feels very different.

Here she is before and after getting her hair. I made her hair from wool yarn just by unraveling the yarn. It's the first time I made doll hair and I didn't want to buy proper doll hair for this or learn to curl it (I don't even have any curling irons or literally any other hair shaping appliances than a hair dryer, which I don't even use for my hair but for painting with water colors). It doesn't fall down nicely, but it has roughly the look I was going for.

Because I didn't plan at all ahead, the proportions are a little wonky (her arms especially are too thin imo and he legs could have a little more shape too) and the joints are not great. Worst of the joints was the hips, which attach to the torso in a weird way. The biggest issue that I had was not taking into account how much the varnish would add to the size. It's not a visible amount, but enough to make fit of the joints very poor and basically making it very hard for her to stand. (Her index fingers already broke of when she fell from my desk after I had made her stand there djfkjds. I was able to glue them back.)

Here's couple more picture of her!

It's not perfect at all, but I do still love her if only because it's such a cool feeling to be able to just have a lump of clay and two weeks later have a posable doll. It somehow feels magical to be just able to make a real physical thing from scratch.

[creepy-dolls]

Still a WIP but I’m happy with how my Kaniboom Unhappy is turning out 😖

[grailfigure]

Loli Poppin You Shake From Pastel // Original

Byul, Pullip (1/6) by Groove

[mazovshanka]

Yesterday I took Caspar for a quick photo shoot. I wanted to portray him as the desert prince but since there's no sandy area in my neighbourhood, let's pretend he stayed in an oasis or a garden close to the palace. This outfit may seem a bit odd but that's the style in Kardea, the desert country he comes from. I'm really satisfied with what he looks like now. That's how I've always imagined him as the desert prince. The sash belt, pendant and circlet headpiece was made by me.

[carniekisses]

Here's a long post that I really hope Tumblr will not flag as NSFW (please don't flag this), I remember back when I showed off the needlefelt Gomer sculpture I had made, someone asked if I had like a work process to show off for it. And I did not, because I had kept it all confined to a private account. I thought it'd be fun to have something to show for it for this one.

So I've been wanting to make a BJD for at least the past 15 years, back when I was a kid with no money to buy supplies with and also with a worry for symmetry, and also also I wasn't very skilled. It's 2024, and I vaguely know how to use Blender now

I've started this project on April 6th, as I've been documenting this on the above mentioned private account.

Of said model I (much) later ended up only being able to salvage the physical sculpts of the chest and torso parts as I messed up somewhat badly, see down below. I also ended up dropping the 'magnets in hands & feet' concept as it was just redundant, one can simply unhook them off the elastic if they are to swap them out.

At any rate, I 3D printed it all and got to sanding, and painting.

So far so good I guess, really not a fan of how the knee and elbow bean slots were just holes (I fixed that later don't worry)

So This was Not looking good lmao. I used acrylic paint, which was not necessarily the problem, the problem was that I'd applied it with a sponge brush which caused the surface to feel really sandpapery once dry. So don't do that I suppose, bad idea

On top of this, I realized that given the thickness of this doll I absolutely needed double joints in the legs, in order to have decent articulation. You can see in the above pics I *had* sculpted those, but I later fused the knee beans with the shins with apoxy resin, for some reason? I think it was because as I posed the legs the knee beans kept falling *into* the hollowed out shins/thighs, and I got tired of it.

The final blows for this model were me applying some 3D finish resin in a last ditch effort to smooth out the horrible texture, which rendered the pieces extremely shiny and smooth (disgusting), WHICH then prompted me to apply matte varnish to fix that bullshit. It absolutely did not work lmfao, and I have no pictures of that disaster because I became pretty discouraged about having to go back to like square two or three.

Some time passed (months really because I kept getting distracted for many a reason [sanding is so fucking boring, Blender was a mistake, I was feeling overwhelmed, I was too sad/tired to work that day, etc.]), I buckled down and finally retooled the pieces that needed it: everything But the chest and torso parts, off of which I managed to sand the varnish and smooth resin. I had fixed all the double joints too to actually be decently functional this time. The head was completely resculpted to better reflect the character's latest design iteration.

bean slots: Fixed

So after sanding (which was the part I was dreading the entire time, because it's so tedious and also it hurts after a while), I caved and got myself an airbrush to, hopefully, lay paint down good this time.

Very glad I did because the difference is kinda crazy. Please ignore my dirty ass desk, it's what happens when you craft. These pictures are from last week btw.

The blue base and the blush were airsprayed, the finer details like the dark shading and the pinker parts were done with both chalk and just acrylic paint. I miiight remake the eyeballs, or at least add more of a smooth finish. The shine to them is really nice

Here's she with lashes, wearing a shitty little scrap of fabric I cut in 10 minutes for fun (please DON'T flag th), and posing to test out the double joints too, they definitely could be better but they work Fine and I'm okay with that.

As of today I'm waiting for the fibres to deliver, for the wig, I already have the cap done. I guess I can update this when it happens, thanks for reading so far, I hope it was interesting, see you next time.......

[0inkcat0]

Fullbody drawing of my oc Musette <3

[the-bjd-community-confess]

Absolutely BEGGING for just a crumb of DD Chimikko info. I'm eagerly awaiting Anya's release just in the hopes of the bodies coming on sale around the same time! I want a Chimikko so bad!!

~Anonymous

[zal-cryptid]

So two questions, one why does our wind up girl hate the material she's made of and two has elenore ever tried to patch up her eye?

And as for Eleanor...

[voidedjuice]

Broken doll

[binarycafe]

Robot Neoanthropinae Polynian: Shamrock - Girl's Bikini Figure

[aisforapathy]