~20cm Dolls 1/12 Doll, Concept to Production

Hi Everyone!

I've decided to embark on a huge project... in a small package!

I will be designing, sculpting, creating a mold for, and producing a 1/12th doll in resin.

Please enjoy this adventure with me.

(My goal is to complete project by the end of January - wish me luck!)

Maxa
___________

Description of Project:
Mature 1/12th doll, meeting all criteria for ball jointed doll including removable eyes, head cap, wig cap, joints in wrists and ankles, as well as all other expected joints

General goals:
Full pose-ability, wide range of motion (attempting double joints in hips, knees, elbows), detailed face, hands, feet, gendered doll

___________

Jan 11, 2021

Concept and technical sketch.

First order of business was taking out my ruler and coming to terms with the fact that 16cm is NOT a lot of height to work with. Especially with creating a mature doll, the limbs will be thin, and there will not be a ton of room inside of the head to work with for placing eyes and tying off the elastic.

For comparison, 1/6th baby dolls can hang around 26cm in height, and even then the inside of the limbs is starting to get pretty fiddly.

Thinking and researching a lot around the BJD making topic has led me to highly consider using pins for wrist and ankle joints, and pinning rods to keep cavities clear as part of the molds. I think that the less I can be personally responsible for maintaining negative space, the better. Hopefully I can think of some creative ways to help myself along in handling such tiny pieces, but for now, I press forward.


Here is my concept sketch.
I'm trying to create a young female figure that has engaging eyes without becoming too stylized, a slim yet rounded figure, and a head size that retains her essence of "young adult"...





I think it was worthwhile to sit down and sketch the character in my head. Once I finally stepped back I noticed that my inclination was to give her a larger head than I think I would like. Overall I'm happy with the feel of the character, and I think scaling down her head ever-so-slightly might just give me an eye-to-face width ratio that I'm happy with.

Also, the chest and hips in this drawing are definitely my "style of drawing." I feel like I tend to prefer a bit flatter design for dolls ...I know I said slim but rounded above, so I'm going to have to reach inward to figure out what that actually means to me.

Overall, sketch taught me a lot about what was bubbling inside me so far





....Now onto the Technical Drawing.

I wanted to map out what 16 cm really meant. So I drew a grid, and broke down the height into portions agreeable to "mature" character design.

It was hard to stay within the lines ... lol. Glad I'm drawing before trying to sculpt. I think this exercise has really helped me wrap my mind around the size I'm actually working with. I wasn't going for an exact design here, as I don't have specifics around the joints yet (for example), but just more of a "get a sense" of the pieces & sizes I'm trying to accomplish from a high level.





The top and bottom horizontal lines mark out a 16cm height, as shown by the ruler. This drawing came in at about exactly 17cm.

Her head/face has ended up rounder/shorter than the concept sketch, and yet I am still running into the "larger head than I want" scenario. .... I'd love to hear what anyone's initial impression of this head size is though.... do you think it makes the doll seem too young? Is it desirable to have her be a "cute adult?" Any other thoughts an impressions are VERY welcome.

The big circles at knees and elbows will be double joints.

Two decisions I need to make are
- whether the thighs will also have joints ... how far should the leg be able to bend upwards? Is sitting with knees up feasible and desirable?
- whether the torso should be two pieces ... this seems to be such a popular thing to do with a lot of doll sizes, but I'm not sure whether it will add value to a doll this small.



Stay tuned for next update!
I'll probably jump straight into sculpting something, so I can literally "feel it out" and figure out if some of my current assumptions or ideas make sense. I prefer to do that before iterating too many times on the technical drawings, since I already have a sense of what I'd like to change.

See ya'll soon.

 

@cleverLC Thank you! I am already having a lot of fun working on this. I haven't been able to find many 1/12th adults - a few, but definitely *few*! That's why it's especially important to me to hit all the marks on making it meet all the criteria for BJDs, including the removable eyes and wig.

@Lillith Optimism is my middle name I like to set deadlines for things, because at least it keeps me moving! .... I am sculpting in Apoxie. It's a very pleasant experience (thus far, as of starting to work with it yesterday) ... I have sculpted a lot with Sculpey over the years, and I feel like Apoxie is similar in feel, albeit a little more sturdy. That being said, I have not used Apoxie ever before, so I'll be learning if it's got quirks along the way as well.

 

Alright!
Time for the first update... I'm excited to say that things are moving along swimmingly. I did jump straight into sculpting, so I'll capture my thoughts and learnings in this post.
________

Lucky for me, my husband had purchased some Apoxie a while ago for his figurine modifications, and it didn't quite jive with him. As recommended by the manufacturer, he placed it all in the freezer for safekeeping. Here as I wanted to use it, four months later, it was still in great shape!

I took a finger to the wind guess at how much volume of the Apoxie I would need for sculpting, took about half that from one container, half that from the other, and started mixing. As you might guess, I ended up with a nice large ball of wonderful sculpting material.... that I then realized I had to use all of in 1-3 hours or it would cure and be unusable! Cue the work!

In retrospect, I would definitely mix small amounts at a time. I was TIRED after about 45 minutes of sculpting, and looking at the big ball of material + my drawing to see how far I had to go was intimidating. But I made it through. After a good 3 hours of sculpting (right up until the very end of the workability of the clay), I had all my pieces. (Plus I made a few extra random pieces at the end of the 3 hours to later test for machining and sanding capability - I am curious to find out whether the harder the clay is to work with, if it affects the later integrity at all.)

So here are all the pieces I made:



The guidance I have read on sculpting with Apoxie is that it's fine to go ahead and essentially block in your shapes. Of course you want to get the general form as best as you can, but the cured product is very "machinable" and can be sanded. Evidently a product called "green stuff" also sticks to it, so you can fill gaps and add details.

I used plastic q-tips as placeholders for the inside of the limb pieces, and kind of wish I had done something similar for the joints (all those tiny ball pieces)... the pieces are so tiny, it's going to be a real trip to add holes in any of them. Oh well!

The limbs just kiiiiiinda look like tubes right now, but I promise there's some rhyme and reason to the slightly different forms. Giving a tiny bit rounder part here and there and removing material here and there, I hope to have them look much better than just tubes. It's just that the curves have to be ever so slight, because even a fraction of a millimeter can give a different shape when working so small!

I tried for too long to sculpt a face into the head and got very frustrated, as I was doing this while the material was in it's final moments of workability. So my tactic turned to making a basic head shape, and hoping that I can sand it to have a more face-like form, then finally add details with "green stuff" putty. I've got two different options for "head" pieces in the top left corner of the photo.

Once it all cured, I started sanding!
Not picture here are the limbs, which I removed from all their tube holders, and sanded down to be mirrored lengths.






The feet were not even close to the same size before, so I'm pretty proud of how far I've gotten with them so far, but they'll need more work on definition and cuteness for sure.

The main body is a lot more even now than it used to be, but I'm going to wait to even out any more until I get holes drilled into it. I did realize last night that drilling holes before sanding is probably better practice, so I'll remember that going forward.

(And honestly, I'm already pre-empting a need to sit down and redo the head, in a single long work session of it's own. I definitely hit a wall with it, but I'll at least look forward to using it as a test piece to see what I can achieve with "green stuff.")




Next up, hands and head, more foot work, some hole drilling, and then down and dirty on trying to get all the limbs to be "mirrored" and well shapen!

Also, a note - I LOVE the feel of Apoxie. Once the pieces cured they had the most satisfying clink when tapped on each other, and they just feel solid and wonderful to handle. I'm a huge fan. I don't think I can ever go back to Sculpey clay



Bonus workspace photo because I think it's fun:

 

Update number 2!

So just after I posted the last update a week ago, I got down to it on the head I had made, and tried to see if I could get the head cap to "fit" on the head. I was getting pretty excited at that point, so right at the time you see immediately below, I also marked out eye holes and drilled through the head (not shown).






And upon drilling those pilot holes through where I wanted the eyes... I realized... my goodness, was the head THICK.

If I was going to get eyes shaped into it and the rest of the face shaping done by sanding... I was looking at days and days of work. And frustration.

So I took a step back, made a nice sphere out of more Apoxie to serve as a head inner mold, and built a new head around that. I also created inner support materials for two body pieces out of cork (cuts relatively easily with a blade).






Andddddd, with that I already started over!

There's a happy medium between leaving enough material to carve into and achieve final shapes, versus having too much material to work with and sanding till the cows come home. With that in mind, here are the current body pieces:




The perspective there is a little unkind to the lower piece, making it seem ungodly larger than it should be, when it's not quite that bad... but it definitely does need some sanding down.

The upper torso piece doesn't show the bust particularly well, and will require a LOT of work on the waist to get the shape I want, but I'm a lot happier with the inside since the first try. Sanding out the inside is way harder than sanding and shaping the outside.

Here are a couple demos of what they will look like when they are inserted into each other as intended. Thought it's not ready for that yet... just images giving the general look











And finally, I jumped so quickly from my general head shape to getting straight to working on it, that I forgot to take photos of the initial head blob I sculpted


In a way, I've kind of spared you all, haha. It was initially really lopsided. Like, REALLY. But at least the thickness of the face part was such that I actually had a chance of achieving the eyelid/eye-area thickness that is necessary.

She's not done yet, and I'm going to have to repair the lips significantly, but I feel like achieving the look I'm hoping for is becoming less of a pipe dream as the work sessions go by!

Check her out....







Here's matching her to the technical drawing:






Comparing to the inspiration photo.....






And a couple other views just because:












For posterity of anyone attempting to do the same thing in the future... I found it absolutely crucial at a certain point to start penning in a stand-in faceup, and re-doing it as I went. It really helps to figure out if your features are actually in the right place or not. My mind was constantly blurring the neutral color of the Apoxie and it was just hard to see if I was getting things even close to being even. 10/10 would draw a face on again


Takeaways:

• Thick walls esp in the face will make life really hard.
• Make a main body first and work outwards.
• Figure out *something* to use as inner support materials. Cork worked for me with this size doll in the main body so far. I made a sphere of Apoxie to use inside the head, but could've used something else to be a sphere.
• Sanding fine details is a LOT. LOT LOT LOT. of work. From a general formed face to what I have here so far has been at least 10 hours of sanding. I'm doing it all by hand so far very much on purpose, but intend to use a Dremel for the insides of the body.

Okay friends, my arms are sore!!! I will see you all with another update sometime after the weekend

Stay classy.

 

Alright, time for check-in number 3.

First, the tactical...

Updated Project Timeline:
To be completed by end of February. @Lillith gets awarded a point for "calling it" on the optimistic timeline
This will include all sculpting, creating a mold, and creating the first resin doll.

Reason for Change:
Sanding takes a lot longer than I thought it would


My arms were dead by my last update on Thursday last week, so there was no way I was going to be doing any more sanding. I think that "sanding makes me tired" is going to become a theme in my life... do you? LMAO

Turned out to be fortuitous, because I started looking into ways to get the details on the face that I really wanted.

Without further ado, I'll show you the face with sculpted details from "green stuff" (I think some people call it kneaditite). It allowed me to build up the details on the lips I wanted, but obviously it adds another layer, so I'll have to go back and clean up the nose and smooth out the checks and forehead. It also allowed me to fill in a little spot on one of her eyes that I was less of a fan of.

I also "made" eyes by drawing with a pen onto the end of some q-tips, so you can kind of see what I'm visualizing as her total face.






Two main things that need to be fixed are a little bit of an indent on her left cheek, and the fact that the inside of her head is still too thick. I'll be sanding the inside to ensure eyes can set up close enough to the front of her face to look good.


It also just occurred to me that now that I've redone the body, I actually do have pieces I could technically mix and match to my liking. I honestly don't know which pieces I like better yet. I think the smaller chested one looks cleaner, and will take in the waist/add definition to the bust on that one to achieve the aesthetic I want with a smaller chest... but I do think the larger chest could be cleaned up to look nice too.... hmmm.









And then I did some additive work on the hands and feet I remade. Again, still WIPs.

The feet are going to hopefully be large enough to let her stand. So they won't be super dainty or anything. I'm excited to get in and clean up the toes cause I honestly think they're gonna be pretty cute.

The hands are bugging me a little bit because I envisioned them as more delicate, but I sculpted them to kind of "match" the nature of the feet and head. They might need one more re-try. I'm not sure.











And bonus! Some tiny eyes I ordered to test out came in this weekend!! They are actually too small for this sculpt and a little hard to get placed just right...! But I think it's nice to see them in the head anyway!







Next up, clean up of the head, fitting of the bodies... and limb work!!

 

Check in 4...

Woo-hoo!

I went with the mix and match body pieces strategy and got a set to fit together!

Now it's only a matter of sanding them a bit more to get the pieces to "flow" into each other nicely around the waist. Soooo that's cool!

It also meant I could do an overall "sizing" fit test, and see that, indeed, the head is the size I wanted in comparison to the body. That technical reference drawing has been a BIG help.




Woo it fits!





Separated pieces for reference.





Side view.





Head looks ever so slightly larger in comparison to the body in this photo than IRL.





A cute angle with eyes so we can get an overall sense of what she's like!....





One more full shot.



Her name is gonna be Mira

 

Update number 5.

I am about at the end of week 4 of this project... I feel like I've come pretty far, and it's starting to feel exciting!

After my fit test of the main body, it was time to begin the process of coating pieces in primer and sanding, still focusing on the main body pieces. I wanted to start to really see those come to life before sculpting limbs... juuuuuust in case I needed to make some major changes or re-sculpt a main piece again.

This is what the pieces look like with a first coat of primer, drying. It's SO much easier to see details and figure out what to do when the whole thing is gray.





So then I redrew my 16cm guide on a piece of paper, placed the pieces on that I have so far, and drew the limbs. It was kind of a nice exercise to be able to "see" the current vision of what I'm working on, and set myself up for success during the next sculpting session. Also helped me decide I do want a ball in the neck, so that got put on the list of to-dos.





She's like 17 cm... bah. But I'm not going to let that stop me now.


Made some joints (test joints... I have no idea what I'm doing with those yet) and a head cap and a neck ball thing which fits pretty well, but will have to be fitted properly soon ....





You may be able to tell that between the "no joints" photo and the "joints" photo I did a sanding session and re-primered the face and main body parts. They're a bit smoother now, and the body pieces are starting to look more like they fit together than looking like a shirt. haha.

SO! With that being the case, I really wanted to see her face again this morning. I find it really inspiring to give myself the ability to see some of the extra or "draft" end details here and there and bring her closer to my vision for a moment before I get back to the hard work of sanding. Definitely motivating!

So here it goes... another temp faceup, and some comparisons to the original character design


Just the head:






With eyes that are WAY too small at this point (don't worry, a new size is on order now):





Comparison to character design (gotta keep checking in before next sanding sessions to make sure I'm getting close to the final desired result!)...





Anddddddd finally I got tired of looking at her with eyes that are too small, so for the heck of it I "made" some eyes by drawing circles on Q-Tips... I think it kind of helps her to look less creepy now I can't wait until her *properly* sized eyes arrive!!






I'm starting to really love her

Primer is my angel.



Okay, next up is going to be limb sculpting and seeing what happens when I attempt to do something with TINY joints! Maybe we can see a strung doll draft soon?!?!... and then more primer and sanding and primer and sanding and primer and sanding!!

Tally-ho!

 

@Lillith Thank you! Your compliment means a lot - I'm really happy about her right now!

And yeah, I definitely am having to like... get into a "mode" to handle the sanding processes... but now that I've built up a little bit of muscle for it, I'm trying to think of it as a great way to achieve some of the "going to the gym" I've told myself I always wanted to do. It's a real workout! But it actually feels kind of nice now that I am doing it regularly..?! So that's cool

 

Hellloooooooo dear friends, I am back again with update number 6!
Beginning of week 5 of this project... time flies!

In my previous post I laid out all the pieces I had so far on a piece of paper (head, body, feet, hands & potential joints), and I drew in the limb shapes I wanted to achieve. I got right to work, and sculpted the limbs as shown below.

For visual reference between the drawing plan from before and the limbs:





And here are the limbs up close:






I started to label the pieces with sharpie to keep track of what is what, which was a fantastic idea.


I did a little bit of cleanup on the limbs and decided I wanted to try a test stringing of her, so away we went!!
Keep in mind, this is TOTALLY a test only, with the intent to let me see clearly if she seems like she's actually on the right path.


All the pieces in a pile, and the first moment where I put elastic in a piece....!!





Cosplaying the Dad from "Onwards" the movie (anybody know that one? ):





And she lives!!!!





There's a long way to go, but this moment felt really special. I held her for a bit and just kind of played with her to try to get an overall sense of all the work I want to do on her. But for now, she'll stay strung for a bit. She feels like magic to me.


Below are some images of me just handling her and "posing" her. Kind of making a vision for myself to go off off for all the next steps of fitting work.... also just spent some time considering what is necessary to make the joints work.... like where I want to put curves in the limb pieces, and in what orientations I want to slot the joints. Eventually I'll also need to slot the wrists and ankles so they can have pins with little hooks, but that operation is going to be so delicate (or just require a sand-down and rebuild) so I just haven't been ready to try it yet.














And of course, after all that joyful contemplation, I sat down and made a list of to-dos.... so of course I gotta share the next "planning paper" with y'all so you can see what all has got to be done!!!





The big thing here is that until I start deepening the meeting points for the limb ends and joints, she's extra long because that means that none of the pieces "set into" each other yet ... There may have to be a couple iterations of reaming out those joint to limb spots, and seeing if it shortens her enough, and then shortening the limb pieces, and reaming them to fit all over again. I'm confident I can get her to about fit in the required height shown on the planning paper, but that means the work must continue in earnest

But for now, I party.

 

@Lillith Thank you!!! Yes, it feels SO special. I could have never imagined.

I'm just enjoying her for a while. There's a real "je ne sais quois" to how wonderful she feels to have existing, even in such an imperfect state. It's true - I really can "see" her now, and it's amazing how much it changes my perception of what I've created so far and where I'm going!

 

Update number 7.

A lot of sanding... and sanding... and sanding happened.

I actually sanded her for quite a while while strung, which was very helpful to keeping a better idea of what I was doing in total. Eventually I sanded through a string though .. haha. So I took her apart and did some deeper reaming into the limbs to let the joints sit in them a bit better.

Slow, slow progress... but progress!

I haven't re-primed her, so please bear with her cool style for the moment but I wanted to show you all the second stringing test! She's starting to gain some actual ability to hold a pose, so here are a good few of them!!

~~~~


Hello!! Look at me, I can sit up!








This arm wrapping around her legs is kinda fun, but I wanted to shorten her arms a bit so I'm not sure how well I'll be able to retain this ability, unless I can get her knee joints to really let her bend. Some re-engineering may be in order.





With just a little bit of support..... she stands! And her arms can take multiple positions while doing so.







Chillin.
And just look at those cute feet!





Sits with a nice little lean forward if desired.....






Same idea, different angle. Head pose-ability very apparent here and fun to experience for a photoshoot!





Crossing her legs! And clasping her hands. Designing a set of hands that could kind of clasp in this way was one of my goals.






Look at just how small she is!!!






And a couple dreamy side shots to show her face shape off a little bit from an angle I haven't photographed much.







What's next? More sanding!
And trying to actually get technical about the joints.

But I'm feeling super optimistic about her potential

 

Update number 8!

Just a quick one today.

As I promised, mostly I did more sanding.. worked on joints a bit. Some more general shaping of the limbs and main body.

She's getting really close to the right height!


So please forgive my jenky way of trying to line up the height lines here on the comparison photos... left side is what she used to look like a couple updates ago, and right side image is today!




Still got plenty more to-dos to do! But it's fun to mark off progress




Next up - some more shaping of her legs and bust/body in particular!

 

Update 9. Making progress every day.

I've been thinking a lot about posability this week. I realized that one of my unwritten criteria as I've been making Mira is that I wanted her to be really posable. Over the course of working on her, I've purchased a couple dolls in particular that I've been surprised are *not* particularly posable, and it's sent me into some deep thoughts about what is "good enough" for a dolls posing capability.

I wanted Mira to be able to bend her arms full 90 degrees, head tilt and spin, rotate at wrists and ankles, sit with hips at 90 and knees at 90, and as a stretch goal I wanted her to be able to pull her knees up to her chest. ... There definitely is a bunch of fine detail work to do around the joints to achieve those things, but I think I am starting to see that I may be able to get close to my goals.

So yeah... the below images don't *look* incredibly different from the ones posted in the 7th update, but the smoothing and shaping has been non-trivial.

I'm going to share some of my thoughts that I had while putting her into these few poses below, if it's at all interesting to you all. Otherwise, the below thoughts are first and foremost for my own personal reflection here at the end of week 6.

~~~


Arms are getting really solid. The point at which upper and lower meet the elbow joint need to have some more material removed from the articulation point, which will help them be able to bend more. The joints could use a little more rounding so they look more like two balls smooshed together versus how flat they are now.

I'm very happy with how the upper arms are fitting into the shoulder sockets. Although her left arm hole (our right on this picture) is set slightly more inwards than the other side, which is affecting symmetry in both her arm resting positions, as well as her holistic chest "evenness." I intend to add a liiiiittle more material to that of her chest to get her evened up.

As is pretty obvious in this photo, her knees are popping backward. I think I can fix this with some additive material on the knee joints and more shaping of those joints. Another thing going on with the legs is that the pieces get flipped around a lot; I think I may need to even up the inside cavities of her legs to engineer a path of least resistance for the elastic that encourages the leg pieces to stay facing forward. Right now the inside cavities are not well-centered inside the leg pieces themselves.





After struggling and struggling to get her chest as even as possible before doing additive material on her left shoulder, I finally Macgyvered a creative way of drawing a centerline down her front (challenging because of overlaying curves in different directions) by using a piece of the elastic I had, draping it over her from center neck to center belly, and pulling it *just* slightly taught so I could draw the line it made with a pen.

Still more shaping work to do on the chest, but now at least the "valley" in the middle of her chest is actually in the middle.

I had to give her foot some support to demonstrate this, clearly, but the hip joints are actually really working out. That hip bend you see stays on it's own when the knee is unbent right now. Super thumbs up.

And the knee in this photo shows how the meeting points of both upper and lower legs to the knee need to have some material removed at the back to create a curve allowing the joint to set in when bent.

I lost some of the previous solid-ness of the ankles setting together when I shortened the legs so that needs some cleanup to get the feet to be sturdy again.








Still still sturdy enough to stand with the help of the cup though, so feeling good.

I honestly love this pose. It feels really dynamic and it makes me think she will be very, very fun to pose and photograph when complete. So awesome.






More upper arm hold testing.
Cute.







Both arms up, supported lightly instead of me holding her.

I'm a fan of how the upper leg and hip meeting point is shaping up, especially as shown here.

This picture makes it really obvious that the back of her shoulders need to be brought forward more now.




And finally, no technical commentary on this one - I just thought it was funny.
She's doing her best to try to be the "creepy doll" a few people have called her.
"I'm allliiiiiiive! I'm alliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!!!"
Hahahhahah.







Enjoy your weekend, everyone.

 

@Lillith, thanks!! I'm honestly having a grand time. I just love making stuff so much
Having a place to write and reflect is so helpful to me - and I'm glad you also feel that sharing the details of this project is also a great reminder to people about all the blood, sweat and tears that go into making the dolls. I've done a lot of involved art projects over my life, and this is by far the biggest combination of physically involved and technically challenging.

I was talking yesterday with someone about how when I started, the number of hours I was trying to sculpt and sand in a day were wiping me out... what's super cool though is that I've definitely built some real solid arm and core muscles over the last few weeks. I feel like I inadvertently opted into a physical training regimen, and just haven't quit at it ... hahaha .. nice when that happens unplanned .. I've not yet ever been able to get a workout habit going otherwise!

What you noticed about there being no slits on the joints is spot on. I have been leaving the slits for a couple reasons - mostly that I didn't have a tool yet in-house that I thought would be small and sturdy enough to make the slit size I would need ... and following that, I was like, okay it's probably okay to wait to see if I can actually envision which directions I want those slits once I get her shape about right.
..... On a real lucky break, I was talking to my husband about the issue of all my files being far too large to create those slits, and it turns out he *just* ordered a hobby saw, so I'll have to test how it works on the Apoxie soon.

But yeah, big thanks for calling that out - Now that you've mentioned it in particular, I realize I don't have it written on any of my to-do lists, so I really appreciate you noticing and saying something!!


Also, for funsies, here's a photo from me playing around and getting real silly/procrastinating cleaning my workspace on Friday afternoon ....

"So much sanding happening we might as well be at the beach!"

 

Alright friends, update 10.

Kinda feeling like "two steps forward, two steps back" this past couple days, but we press on.



Alright so here's where I was a few days ago. I had spent quite a bit of time evening out her thighs and calves, as well as trying to figure out what was bugging me about her bust. I drew in some new lines to bring the bust line upwards.







Getting a good view of the shape of her legs here.

Basically my intent was to shape everything up as much as I could before doing a new additive layer of Apoxie.







Here's a picture of all the pieces I added Apoxie to. After slotting the knee joints, they needed a rebuild. The hobby saw I have now does it's job, but my little joints are so fiddly that I had to completely cut along the back of them and then add material to the middle of the joint again in order to make long enough slots. Now they're like big blobs... lol

I changed the internal structure of the bottom main body to allow her legs to be strung one at a time and upwards through the body, giving a little more "specific" guide hole that I hope will keep the legs straighter.

I slotted the ankles, and broke a piece when I did that. I'm a little nervous that we're getting to the point of things being too small. The pieces have been breaking easily, and while Apoxie does stick to itself well, whatever points I rebuild are definitely potential points of fatigue. I bulked up the ankle I had to rebuild a lot in hope that the apoxie holds, but now I have to sand it all back down again, and hope I don't hit that slotted ankle part the wrong way in the process.

I rebuilt small areas on the hip joints, and in doing so realized one of the internal holes is like wayyyy off center on the part. I later tried to center it but broke a part of that joint as well. Again, probably getting to the point where some of this stuff is going to have to be re-sculpted. At least I have my pieces for reference of course.








Here's all the pieces after Apoxie addition, and all my notes for next steps.








After the above picture, I sanded leg pieces down again, and did some serious matching work on thighs and calves, as well as the upper arm pieces. Upper arms have much more spherical parts where they go in the arm sockets now.

I realized I forgot to slot the wrists, so I went to do that.... and broke one of her wrists. Luckily it still had a thread-able hole so I just let it be and didn't touch the other hand. Not gonna lie, not suuuuuuper happy about that one. I really don't want to have to resculpt the hands. We will see.

I made pins for the ankles out of paperclip pieces and threaded the elastic around those.

And here's a photo where you can kind of get an idea of my new elastic scheme.









Here she is strung again.

I tried slotting the elbow joints by just sawing, but as I experienced with the knee joints, the saw is just too big to get in and do the tiny grooves halfway on those joints. I'll have to remove all the material along the front of the elbow channels and then fill in the center part, just like I did for the knee joints too. For now there's "essence of slots" there ... hahaha


Her legs kind of look okay, but those hip joints are really causing me a big sad face due to the offset hole in one of them I mentioned above. I've got the shapes such that she can hold a straight leg, and bend her leg all the way upwards when sitting, but when I let her "relax" into her own standing position, the leg with the offset hole in the hip joint goes wonky. Makes sense.

Also now that I spent a bunch of effort to match the hip joints to each other, a lot of the work I did to match the thighs to the hips is no longer lining up again, so you can see some big offsets at those points at the tops of the thighs.

Lastly my change to the internal part of the lower body has undone some of my work to make the tops of the thigh joints set into the lower body. So I gotta think about whether I just want to re-engineer and re-sculpt those thigh joints now... it's probably the best answer to be honest. I just feel stubborn right now.... lol.







I'm happy with how the shoulders are shaping up. I worked on sanding them a lot, then rebuilt the neck a bit and added some material to the bust and arm holes to let me get all those parts much more even than they used to be. That upper neck/shoulder/bust area hasn't been sanded since I added apoxie, so that's coming up soon. But I'm really a lot happier with how the upper arms set into the armholes now too. It definitely helped A LOT for me to round out the upper arms and match them to each other.

You can also see in these photos the weird knee-bend thing she does due to the offset hole inside the RH hip joint.














I'm also happy with the shape of her bust and height of it now, as well as her back. Her butt needs a little help, but it used to be a *really* weird shape hahahhahha... so her body side profile is getting there.

One thing I can't help but feel lately is that her chin needs to come a little more forward. I'm nervous to try to fix that, not gonna lie. Not sure what I'm gonna do yet there.








And finally we get to the knee joints.

So technically the knees bend now. But for one, I haven't removed much of the excess material I added when developing the slots, and also, the leg pieces definitely need some help to allow the joints to set into them better. So yeah... honestly I just wanted to string her back together again to see what happened, it's way easier to visualize what to do next this way.

I think what's kind of rough right now is that it doesn't look like much has changed, but I really am having to do a ton of detail work all day every day, and so the rate of getting things to fit feels so slow, it's a little like banging my head against a wall the past couple of work days now. And especially with the hobby saw... gosh it's a good answer to making small slots, but the fact that pieces are breaking now is just tough to figure out what's the next best course of action (try to repair, or remake pieces).

Maybe I'm starting to understand why this isn't a popular size of doll to sculpt

But I love her, so it's okay. I'm gonna figure out how to deal with these knee joints next.... I just really wanted to design my own joints from the beginning of this, so I'm at peace with the trial and error part of it. Just having to do a looooootttt of problem solving right now so my brain kinda hurts.









One more angle, the legs sit steady at 90 degrees.. obviously same commentary on the joints from above.

But Mira's in good spirits like usual. So we press on!

 

Update 11.

Quick turnaround on this update today ...


So after puffing around my house a bit feeling stubborn and a bit frustrated, my lovely husband came home and said to me, "I'm about to go DM a Dungeons and Dragons game in the workshop! Wanna hang out in there with me?"

And in my head I'm like, Exactly what I want to do is go back "to work" this evening!

But I followed him, and went ahead and re-sculpted some joints. I'm glad I did. I had a couple thoughts while I was doing this...


I realized that the previous joint pieces were just starting to get so small that I was removing material over and over trying to get them to "function," this was leading so a lot of very strange shapes and points and stuff that just aren't great to be using for movement ....so here was an opportunity to start over with way more material and think through the functional aspects *during* the sculpt, and implement some ideas and learnings.

One of the main kind of moments of clarity I had was around those weird shapes I was filing the joints into... I sat there thinking about the fact that these are literally BALL jointed dolls. Maybe instead of the point ends I ended up with on the elbows and knees, I could get them to be a lot rounder. Upon looking around at my collection a bit, I felt like that was kind of an obvious thought in retrospect.... but hey! I've never sculpted a BJD before, so ... I think things are starting to make some real sense to me now.


So! Here's some blobs of joints. I did a very different thing for the hip joints than before. I'm gonna have to modify the leg holes on the lower body a lot to accommodate them, but I think they'll be a lot more solid than before, and I was able to add channels proactively into these (the channels are facing down for most pieces - except elbows - in the below photo).






Here she is, one more time with all her old pieces.. a moment to behold: a real redo of a bunch of pieces!!





So then I took all those new pieces and spent this morning getting them sanded down to the shapes I intended, as well as getting them as initially even as I could. Hips came out well. So did the knees. One of the elbow pieces ended up far too short/small, so I'll have to redo one or both of those again.





But yeah, the grooves in the elbows now let her arms bend, so that's optimistic for my redesign intent on those.

It's hard to see but the knees are actually in a pretty good situation here. They almost set into the leg pieces. A little modification to those past what I sanded and shaped this morning might just tidy them up enough to work.

And finally the hips...





So you can see there that I added the butt shape into the hip joint pieces, which allows for a lot nicer round upper and a real clean straight line up through the joint. As you can see though, now the top of that joint extends a lot farther back than I ever had originally planned for, so I have to go and see how much material to remove from her lower body back to accommodate that shape now. Just briefly glancing at that second photo of the hip joint side in particular leads me to think this overall shape around that area is going to turn out a lot better this way.

Gosh, it's only Wednesday

 

Update 12.


55 hours into active work on Mira.
TLDR; this one is a big milestone post.

_____


SOOO last we checked in I had created new joint piece with the slots shaped in before curing, and sanded them down a bit. I made the hip pieces a lot bigger too so that I had more material to work with.

I'll start quickly with the elbows, just for discussion's sake. I think they'll need a redo again. The opposite side from photos shown straight up like, isn't the right shape, so please ignore that one in photos later

Before any sanding, adding the slots on the elbow joints allows for a nice full bend of the arm, so that's good. Generally moving in the right direction design-wise for those.






I sanded down the sides of this joint to fit inside the arm pieces, and, I mean, it's fine but it's nothing elegant. Still feeling proof-of-concept-y to me. In any case, was able to see that the movement I want is coming along. And generally the arm holds poses fine when properly tensioned, so I really just need to make joints that fit in nicely... and look nice.






Bend holds with arm coming forward from the body, and parallel to the ground, so weight and balancing in the arm pieces is good.










Here are the slotted knee joints. Obviously will need to be evened up somehow, but again, coming along nicely. There's a bit of a tilt that I'm having trouble with, but I think I may be able to ream out the leg pieces a little more to fix that.







And here are the legs strung. The left thigh piece really likes to flip inward. It is moody.








So a few days ago, I was at this point, generally alright... the thigh pieces are enormous at this point in comparison to what they're going to need to look like. So the main plan by this point is to deal with their shape, size, and figure out how I want the interface with the lower body to look.








A full-knee bend when everything is strung so far, for reference:








Andddddd, a full sit is possible still, and starting to look a little cleaner than before:







OKAY SO....
Skipped here are some real ugly pictures where I got really down and dirty and took out a whole bunch of material on the lower body leg holes. I opened them up toward the back to allow her thigh joints to set backward, and then I started shaving down those thigh pieces ...millimeter.. by.. half.. millimeter.

There's a way to go still to make them fit really well... but after getting them to set "back" in the body far enough by removing material from the lower body, it was time for a new test stringing.

Enjoy.







"Hey! Stringing was a chore, let's take a lounge break!"

"Okay, it wasn't that bad - you didn't even have to do the work, get up!"








AND THEN THIS HAPPENED!!!!












So that means that her general overall balance from a parts perspective has turned out as intended. Awesome.
AWESOME.

I was able to move her feet around a bit....

And I was able to move her feet near to each other!! That's crazy!!








Her left thigh is still flipping inwards, so I gotta figure out what's going on there, and there's some cleanup to do on evenness of this and that before really getting down to detailing, but the main work now is going to soon be detailing and trying to figure out if I can really hone in on great joints.

And her hips will be made into much more aesthetically pleasing shapes too.






YAY!

 

Update 13.

So I'll preface this one with a request for feedback if any of you feel so inclined. I took the terrifying plunge of lightly modifying Mira's face sculpt. So that's the focus of this post, and after this, the work I do on her face is going to be with the intent of getting details just "right."

____

A night or so ago, I took a few deep breaths, and I filed down Mira's chin to give a good surface to re-add material.
I sculpted on an ever-so-thin layer of apoxie, and pulled her chin forward, shaped it down to be a tiny TINY bit more pointy, and filled in some of the cheek on the LH side of this photo. An ever so tiny amount of material now needs to be removed from the RH side to be totally even, but I'm very pleased with the jaw area from the front now.

So here's current state, straight-on:






Taking a quick glance with my reference photo in the same direction, indeed, I am really pleased with the jawline now in particular.






Okay, so let's zoom in....
Here's a more "front-oriented" view of the sculpt next to comparison photo. I feel like this image lets me get the best sense of whether I'm accomplishing my goals.

Being the artist, of course I notice all the issues. But I'd really like to ask a couple things if people are willing to give feedback in particular:

• Do you like the size of the eyes on the sculpt as-is, or do you happen to have a preference that they be larger like the drawing?
• With the knowledge that the nose will be smoothed out, do you like the flatness at all on the front? I have dolls that have like a 50/50 split with that flatter nose bridge, so I'm finding myself kind of torn on whether I think it's the best option for her.
• Any other thoughts/things that stand out to you (negative or positive, I am impervious to constructive criticism ). Like I said, there's a TON of stuff I can see, but I would love to know what other people notice.

For reference as well, here's a head tilt to help gauge level of evenness so far.....






And here's the side. For completeness' sake, everything on the sides of the face clearly needs to be cleaned up and smoothed out and she'll get ears at some point, so this reference is mainly for profile silhouette reference right now.





You all rule for following me in this journey. It's a really cool one.
Working this small is heeeeeelllllaaaaa hard though. My goodness.

 

Thanks, @Lillith .... this was suuuuuuuper helpful.
I'm so glad I asked the open-ended question... because honestly I did not see that proportional issue and it really gives me some specific things to think about.... So, I really appreciate your detailed look at her. It's great to have an extra set of eyes on my work here


I sketched over a photo of her face today to really see what's going on with those proportions overlayed. Following that, I think I'm going to meditate on what I think is the correct course of action over the weekend.

Here's a quick image with the proportions drawn on a random sketch from google demonstrating specific eye placement, etc. for reference:



The below first picture is a quick mockup overlaying the aforementioned proportions on my doll's head, using her current head-top and chin as the outer bounds. If basing where the features should be on the above guide, yes - most definitely the eyes are too high. The rest of the features technically could use a little shift as well... but I'm not sure they bother me too much as-is. I'll have to think about it. Second picture is a check as to whether the eye widths match from the head centerline, mostly just for future reference.





Here in the next first image is a quick sketch of the case where if I planned from the "opposite" direction: putting the center horizontal where the eyes are, and determining how much taller the head would have to be for the eye placement to make sense. Kinda don't know how I feel about it, but clearly my sketch program on my phone isn't *that* great for what I'm trying to visualize... haha.

Second photo is just drawing in some hair to see if that helps "add enough material" on the top of the head to visually fix the problem, assuming the eyes are the centerline. Once I get her wigs, there will be a layer of sticky something plus wig-cap... so it'll be important to not overcorrect either.





So yeah! I will ponder this a bit Good rest activity for the weekend.

And as usual, any other thoughts and feedback are very welcome! This exercise was IMMENSELY helpful to me!

 

Update 14.

I'm making some serious headway that I wanted to capture again.



Okay so first of all I got some eyes that in theory could fit in her head. When I tried to put them in, I found out that the inside of the head was just too thick, and the eye opening depth was too deep. Commence a lot of delicate sanding inside the head and creative removal of material from behind the eye openings in order to simply even allow the eyes to set in at all.

I think it's pretty good so far. Could use some work still though.
I unintentionally knocked off some material on the right-pictured eye when doing this delicate procedure, which actually evened up the bottom of the eyes, but do note - I haven't done any actual on-purpse "shift" as discussed above yet.

LH comparison picture is current, RH is old.




Below, I'm trying to show the thickness of material in the sides of the eye openings that kind of keep the eyes set back still. It doesn't need much more change, but it's just enough in there still to look a little strange from certain angles.

This is also a great photo to demonstrate how nicely the cheek/jawlines are shaping up when view from an angle.





Another view of the current eye inset. The thicknesses I'm working with are just so small that it's hard to know when to leave well-enough alone. I think I'll maybe take one more pass at the eye opening edges here and hope it looks good. Otherwise I think I start to get into risky territory of causing breakage on delicate areas.








Next!
I'll admit that last time I got her to stand, I had to fiddle with her a lot to get her to "stay."
This time I was able to pretty much set her up and have her assume the pose without much risk of falling.

Basically the "what I did" here is that I just kinda worked on fitting her leg pieces a lot last week.
I'm really happy with how the legs are shaping up overall. There are a few small details that I think I could make just a tad more aesthetically pleasing, but overall I'm quite proud of the legs and I think the "flow" of the outer edges of them looks pretty nice and smooth.

The hip joints are super functional, and I've spent a lot of time shaping them down to better fitting pieces to mate with the lower body, but they're definitely still a little big (as you can very clearly see the line between lower body and hip joint is not actually .. like... designed in yet! haha) so with those I am considering one of two options.... I either just need to spend some more time shaping the hip joints to ensure a smoother transition between lower body and joints OR I might add some material to the lower body piece around that hip edge to give her a little cuter form in that area. Actually leaning toward the latter because the width of the hip joints feels pretty stable and more realistic to me.

I didn't work on the arms at all last week














Ankles are still a little bit WIP.






I'm also really starting to like how she looks in my hand. And she feels very nice to hold. This size is really pleasing and quite "friendly," in my opinion, in that she just fits well in my hand but feels solid.

I really like the shape of her upper legs both in look and feel in my hand as well.







Completely holding her own knee bend.






A lot of pose variability comes out when I play with her.





When I kind of push the limits of her posing, the RH-pictured knee is popping out of the upper leg a little bit. I am pretty sure I can fix this pretty easily at this point, but it's a consistent issue when doing this posing last night so I'll have to focus on that a bit specifically.






Andddddd here's the grail of poses!
Would ya look at that.







I wanted to achieve this pose for no reason other than the fact that when I had drawn this picture a long time ago, I was like... "It would be so cool if I could actually make it do the pose in the character concept drawing."







So I think now it's gonna be mostly a focus on aesthetic work. I'm really proud of what I've achieved from an engineering perspective.

I may end up switching out those elbow joints for spheres or simple peanuts in the end to keep things clean because I don't know that the shaping I'm trying to do on what I have here is actually *adding* anything. Knowing what I know so far, I don't think my shapes increase an ability to lock into place, especially with a doll this small, the arms dont weigh much, so I think the resin version should hold arm poses just fine with a simpler design. And also, I'm just getting tired of trying to shape elbow joints that are *SO* small.

Oh.. and I think I gotta remove the wrists from the hands and somehow add a real "sphere" on those as well. The shapes I made as the wrists are way too delicate and I broke the RH wrist *again* last night, so giving them a little more heft or a stronger shape should benefit both my sanity and the final design.

So awesome.

Also it's my birthday today.... and when I came back into the workshop this morning and found that Mira was still sitting in the last pose pictured above, right where I left her, I just felt like that was the best gift ever. I'm really proud. There's something really, REALLY cool about setting her in a position like that and finding she's held it overnight.

 

@Lillith
Thank you!!
I really am loving her. This is SO rewarding. I'm starting to get excited about dressing her too ... I commissioned a couple tiny wigs to test on her recently and am getting quite antsy for their arrival

 

Update 15.

Okay! Let's get right to it.



_____


So upon finding myself happy with the engineering in general of Mira, I took a stab at a couple particular things, namely starting on aesthetic improvements and working on some of my pesky joint issues.

Patience is something I struggle with, so this has been a big challenge for me to take things a piece at a time, but I'm doing alright with it so far. Things are just starting to feel so close and YET so far away


I masked off her upper torso and legs with some wax paper and tape so that I could still see the "flow" through the outer edges of the body as I worked on her lower body. Finding a way to let her cure was... a challenge in it's own way. Fortunately we had no earthquakes here in sunny CA overnight while she was chillin. Haha.
So far, so good.




I set aside a couple hour block to really *work with* the Apoxie on it's own timing, so I was able to create some joint balls that have a lot more uniformity and better sculpted slots in them this time. You can't really see what I did here on the little joint balls themselves, but you can see a lot of engineering/planning work ahead of time and through the work & curing process.

(I haven't added any of these yet for the sake of the rest of the photos in this update, just FYI).






I'm loving the lower body. I had to sand it quite a bit to get everything lined up again after the over-sculpting, but I think it turned out really well. Can't wait to get a fine grit going on her to smooth her out once I work on the other pieces!

I just remembered too that I had some barbies stored away, so I pulled them out to help me figure out what scale Mira "really" is. Doing a few calculations that take into account her stylized/oversized head, she turns out to be almost perfectly 1/10th scale. Cool!






And then I played with her a little bit, these barbie shoes fit her... although now I'm not totally sure if this doll I had was a real barbie doll or where it came from, because I know typical barbie feet are sooooooo tiny. So I need to figure out what the plastic doll actually is so that I can track down more Mira-sized shoes!

Also, the clothes I had for those dolls look so silly/cute on her. This is how I look in most normal length dresses and coats because I'm really short, so it made me laugh.






Anddddd then I set aside some time to really plan out how I wanted to approach the face proportion issue from previous updates. I decided I wasn't worried about making it exactly perfect, but I definitely did want to both bring the eyes down as far as I could without causing a problem, as well as make them a bit larger to match the character design.

Ah, and I wanted to make the bottom lip a bit smaller too, but it's kind of hard to see my blocking in on the gray plan photo in the image below.

DOLL PARTS EVERYWHERE






Sketching on her face made me feel worried, but I persevered. I felt like the lower lines for her eyes looked ever so slightly too low on her actual face, so I didn't quite open them up that far. Glad I drew all over everything because it was really helpful for making judgments.





And here's where we are now. I can still see some little details I can get at to perfect her, but I'm really pretty happy with this. I snapped these pretty quickly to document, but did some smoothing out directly following & evened up her nose bridge width to be a little better mirrored. Her eyes fit really well inside her head now too, though I would like an eyeball with a bigger pupil + colored part (I forget what it's called off the top of my head but there's a word for it).

Those files you see in the images now are new and they are my hero tools. It was called a riffler file set... I had never heard of them before but found them in the hobby store over the weekend... and I'm so glad I had waited to work on her eyes until I found some tools that looked more promising.

So between her earlier face and now, I changed the following things:

• Opened her eyes mostly in the downward direction
• Mirrored the "directionality" of the inner edges of her eyes (the angles at which they recede into the head) so that the eyelids upper and lower look as similar as possible from different angles
• Worked on getting the nose mirrored across the vertical centerline
• Got the inner corner of the eyes into the same mirrored position (it's hard to see here in this picture because I fat-thumbed her eyeliner trying to work pretty late in the day haha)
• Brought in the corners of the mouth (omg so challenging, and still needs a little help on the LH as pictured)
• AND worked to make the top lip more mirrored as well... from the bottom view her lips were severely lopsided... my goodness that was challenging, too.

Even though I was suuuuuuper tired after all the face work, I couldn't NOT string her back together.
I think her eye size looks way better with the proportions of her body now, not gonna lie.

Also, I can't wait until I get around to working on her wrists again, because at this point I just have to laugh at the broken one. It's fine, but it definitely is a good reminder of just how many details I have to be paying attention to. At least it's stayed in a usable enough piece that I've been able to focus where I want and still let her have her hands

Her legs are getting better and better, but I think I'm running into an issue where one or two of the pieces like to flip around based on where the vertical through-hole is located inside them. I didn't manage to get those channels exactly centered, so I think it's causing some pain. I think my strategy may be to sand out the thigh channels to be larger, then fill back in with apoxie and dead-center a new hole with a skewer. I don't want to simply sand them out, because I think larger channels in the limbs allow for too much play in the elastic location, and I think I need to be kind of specific about the elastic path to get her to stand with total ease.





One last picture with the character comparison.
I LOVE HER.

 

@SereneBeautyBJDs Thank you so much!! I am much happier with her face now that I've increased the size of her eyes, for sure! I'm really looking forward to getting her much more smoothed out in coming days

 

@animalboything Thank you so much! I'm glad you find it interesting! I certainly do as well, and it's so nice to be able to have a place to share my thoughts and reflect

There's so much learning along the way, so I'm very happy to show!

 

Update 16.

I'm sure glad I've been keeping track of my hours because it's crazy to realize how much work this little lady is! I'm at ~93 hours of active sculpting/sanding work on her at this point.

I'm feeling really great about her, but certainly some of the tedium is starting to wear on me a bit. Constantly going back and forth on what could be better, designing, sanding things down, fitting, adjusting things to fit *better*.. resculpting... it's a LOT of problem solving and processing to do!

A really important part of the process has definitely been the documentation and photography, because I think it would be pretty easy to lose track of the progress if I wasn't taking pictures pretty often - it's the little changes that slowly add up over time!

~~~~


Okay!
So last I updated was about a week ago. At that point I decided I wanted to have a little fun with her and see if I couldn't manage to sew a tiny outfit while I took a short mental break from working directly on her.


She is SO (sew?) cute on my sewing machine, while I work on her little skirt!






I managed to make something that turned out alright! I've never sewn this small before so I'd say it's a win.







The real kicker here (and part of the reason I'm glad I went off to sew for her), is that once I got her dressed, making her stand became REALLY challenging. No longer being able to see her thigh joints and get them into the positions I "know" work caused a ton of frustration.

It really hit me at this point that I needed to deal with the thigh joint design, as well as the offset holes inside the thigh pieces that kept causing the pieces to flip around in ways I didn't want them to.

Also, the elbows (that I knew I was going to change) and the broken wrist piece just... were visually wearing on me as well.

I let her hang out overnight in her cute little outfit then decided it was time to get back into the reworking.







So for the sake of reference, here's an image from "current" LH (as of 1 week ago) and probably about a month ago RH.

Note on her LH-pictured leg in the "current" photo that her upper thigh and thigh joint are kind of meticulously positioned to lock and let her stand. This was a quirk of her for the moment and obviously not something that's ideal long term.

In any case, I love these comparison pictures to be able to see how far I've come! Especially when I've got a lot of complicated design thinking ahead of me.






So then I took her all apart! And I did some resculpting of joints plus some aesthetic sculpting for the body.

From the above picture, she had the nicer lower body, so adding the better looking upper body looked great!
It's hard to see in this photo, so you can see in some later images, but her collarbone is something I am particularly proud of.







During that sculpting session, I added material back to the insides of the leg pieces, and made the mating points on joints and legs match by pressing them into each other. Then I drove sticks through the leg pieces in dead-center, so no more funky offsets to cause the pieces to flip around a bunch!

Here's a test before I did any more sanding... still leaves something to be desired, but it's better here.

Another thing to note is that the way the elastic was pulling from the hip joint into the lower body was causing the legs to bow out... so I needed to open up the lower body holes as well as add a little creativity to the top of the hip joint to give a smoother path for the elastic to follow.







The new elbow joints are probably the hardest thing to work on from a size perspective. I sculpted this piece as some balls with a ring thing in the center (you can still see the ring thing), but they couldn't fit the way I wanted them to, so I decided to shave the ball parts down super small again. I'm keeping that ring as a way to hold the pieces as I work, but eventually will shape that to look as best as possible as an elbow.... The dust is where the grooves are haha.






I also got pretty creative with the thigh joint shape to allow for some locking into place. I like it a lot. It's working pretty well now.







And I think the fit with the lower body is pretty from the front for sure.






From the back looks good in a "standing position" but I'm gonna have to decide if I want to actually keep the butt piece on the thigh joint, because when she sits, it looks a little funky. We will see.

I kind of want to bring her butt down as part of her lower body, but I think this current design does help her stand more solidly.







One other thing on the worktable is that I'm trying to make the hands and feet more sturdy now.
I sculpted wrist joint balls for the hands, cut the wrists off the hands, and re-added the ball joints.

I made new feet that I'm hoping to shave down to having sturdier ankle pieces than before. One is so smooshed looking right now, hahah.... I promise I'll sand them so they'll be even and the ankle will be much smaller balls.







Andddddd I apologize for flipping the order of old vs, new... but here's another comparison photo!

LH is very old, and RH is now with a lot of fitting/sanding work following all my sculpting after this week! Her legs stand straight and kind of pop into place for the first time! And I think her elbows have a lot more potential here as well than they ever did before.







Anyyyyyyyway! That's all for now.
A lot happens in a week!

Be back again soon!

 

@SereneBeautyBJDs Thank you so much! Gotta keep that energy flowing!

I tried making a few more hand options recently - so I'm thinking of maybe trying out some test casts with those soon ... Maybe that'll keep my excitement going as well

 

@SereneBeautyBJDs Thank you for the idea! I had not heard of doing that... I will look into it!

 

@GammaVector Thanks so much!! I'm glad you enjoy it!
And also I'm SUPER glad that's your perception of her now - it's *really* a good description of the kind of vibe I've had in mind, so that makes me so optimistic about her final form!!

 

Update 17.

So I got a small Dremel that I can hold easily in one hand like a pen. And my whole life has changed.

I had been pretty afraid of doing some of the small detailing, because I felt like a lot of the time when I was getting in corners and trying to do small bits with my hand tools, I was really risking some edges. So I had hesitated for a while to do the real cleanup work and try to get Mira even.

Thank goodness because the small Dremel is the RIGHT tool for the job.

While progress is maybe a little less... obvious? .. than back when I was doing all the body engineering, the small details are clearly the difference between a doll that's a little messy and one that looks clean and complete.

But, between all of you and me: I am getting to the point where I'm having a hard time deciding what is the point I'm going to be totally happy with her body shape. Looking at a piece of work every day definitely makes it easy to see all the "flaws"... but I do think she's getting pretty close to a visual aesthetic I'm happy with. It's making me nervous to be close enough to be evaluating the point where I may need to leave "well-enough" alone!

Anyway, here are this past week's progress photos.
_______


Okay so right here first thing is a photo of her after I started to get in and work on her eyelids. I started to add a bit of a crease and I love it. Also started to really clean up and even out her neck area. I am so happy I added that detailing because I think it really elevates her look.

With the Dremel, I was easily able to get inside her eye area and remove material as well so that her eyelids and the space where her eyes set in could be thin enough. I may take one more pass at it, but she can utilize an eye size that I found easy to track down now... so that's a win.






Here's a comparison photo, with upper LH being the oldest, and lower RH being the newest (current).
I accentuated the eye crease in the last photo so you can really see it there.
Also the current now has wayyyyy better shaping around the nose, both around the nostrils (a little hard to see) and the bridge is actually more of a rounded triangle instead of flat like it was for so long.
Also the top of her head is MUCH rounder/more even.

I need to put a little filler on the far edge of her mouth to finalize where I shifted it inwards, but for the most part her lips have been brought inwards and given a little nicer shape as intended.






I've created a way of stringing her that lets me use wires for her hands. She'll need a little smaller wires (which will effectively become s-hooks.


Her face did not photograph well here.. but I wanted to include this photo in particular because I think it shows her bust well... and I'm really not loving *something* about them, but I am not quite sure what.

I keep trying to remove material from the top and top-sides of them, but somehow I feel like they're just staying rounded in a kind of unnatural way. I'm gonna need to stare deeply at some model photos again soon, because my brain is not putting two and two together on this part of her.





Even though Apoxie is a pretty smooth material, she sits really well on and against random surfaces.
As per the usual, I've been kinda leaving knee and elbow joints in a semi-unfinished state so that I can see how the other pieces turn out when I'm working them visually/cleaning them up, before I do fitting effort and detailing on *such* tiny pieces. But I think they're looking okay/promising in any case.





I just liked this pose and wanted to share. She is leaning against the back wall, but her lifted knee is fully supported by her joint. The surface she is sitting on is pretty smooth.




Her knee joints are pretty simple, but they do a good job with her leg design. I felt like this picture was a really nice example of how nice her legs look from the "front." I have a little more work on want to do on feet and ankles to clean up some of the visual through-lines.

If you glance to the RH side of the photo, you can see I've put a little definition into her upper arm .. given her a little muscle She's an active girl!






Okay last one: playing with some filters lets you see some of the face detail a little better I think.







Anyway!
I'll leave it at that for now.

I still have a lot of work to do on her before she's clean and even, so on we go.

 

Ah, thanks! That would be SUPER helpful!

Whatever it is about the dolls I own/am referencing doesn't quite seem to be translating for me

 

@SereneBeautyBJDs Thank you for sharing ... yeah, your bust sculpts look great! A helpful reference... much appreciated!

 

@Lillith ....YES! Hahha. Suddenly I can't believe I've done everything I have so far by hand.

Though I will say that I think having a lot of that super tactile time with sculpting and sanding her was very beneficial to my understanding of the process. So, no regrets. But I am so grateful for this small, amazing feat of engineering that is a rotary sander that fits SO well in my hand!

 

Update 18.

I feel like I've been MIA for a bit! Haha.

Turns out that evening up joints/slots and the rest of the body tiny bit by tiny bit is not super exciting/photographable... and also I have been taking it really slowly because it's simultaneously very cognitively intense, slow to see progress and (probably obviously) a certain level of frustrating!

So I've been taking the doll-specific work real slow, and balancing that with reading up on how to make a mold properly and cast my doll. I was lucky to find a pretty academic writeup on how to cast, so I feel optimistic about those next major steps. My background is in engineering, so none of it was particularly new to me, but definitely helps to have specifics around how to choose materials and the such.

_____

So let's go back to a few weeks ago!

I'll walk you through a few of the many photos I took of Mira's current state a couple weeks ago, where I made some notes about what I needed to continue to iterate on. Here were some of my thoughts.



Generally I was happy with the silhouette of her lower back half. Her bootie could use some rounding out and a little bit of evening up. From this photo I'd like to make the flow of her bootie a little more flattened as it meets her thigh joints. And I think the top of the upper thigh pieces could flow ever so slightly better toward the thigh joint as well. Slots in the knee joints need to be straighter - so tough on such small pieces.




Essentially same comments as before.. I'm generally happy with the leg silhouette from the side. Fixing the upper part of the upper leg where it meets the thigh joint will help here too.

This is also a great picture of the WIP elbow joints. They need to be shaped-down at the inner part, and material needs to be added to the outer elbow to create maybe a diamond or triangle shape that feels a bit more intentional. The material that is currently there is a good anchoring piece for that work.






I like the shape of the feet. They're cute in a lot of the photos I've taken. I keep trying to decide if I should really do much more with them since they're not super detailed ... but again, she's just so small... And honestly I don't really want to mess up whether she's capable of standing by making them any smaller, for example. The back of her heels can be evened up a little bit though as one is slightly larger.





I'd like to shape the back of her ankles a little bit. By the time I took this photo I was pretty set on adding material back to make her ankles a real ball, and then working them from there to add some definition, all the while keeping a real ball on the top part. There's some real engineering flimsiness that was causing me to not be able to do much more aesthetic shaping in the state shown in this photo.







I think her midsection has turned out nice here. There's not too much more I'd change. From the front her bust will still need a tiny bit more work, but this 3/4 view is alllllllllmost looking good to me. Her belly was intended to be flat as though she works out pretty hardcore, but I wanted a little pooch on her lower abdomen and I think I achieved that in a not-in-your-face, but still is there if you look for it.

The spot where the hip meets the thigh joint is not totally rounded out. That won't be too hard to tidy.




Again, another view where I'm pretty happy with the bust. The edge of her upper body meeting her lower body has to be worked on. It's kinda lumpy even though it sits relatively flat






The purpose of this image is to see how even her back looks from centerline down.
It's okay-ish, one shoulder blade is definitely protruding a bit more. I'd like to fix that. Her bootie is pretty obviously not quite even from this angle view as well. Again, I wanna at least touch that up a bit, but I don't think it's a show stopper.





Her front honestly looks pretty alright by this point. The bust area really feels like I could work on it forever and not quite be happy with it. I think I'll continue for a while though.
The back of her shoulders should be brought in a little bit more to meet her arms, or the armholes moved backwards ever so slightly. And there's a chip in her neck that needs fixing.






Anddd the bootie shot! Hahah. It's exceptionally obvious in this photo that her RH-pictured shoulder blade is higher than the other one. And the back just needs to be sanded down more in the center to get the back to look clean. The back has never gotten the bulk of my attention .. hah.

Also even though it's blurry you can see here that the top of the thigh joints (esp the slots) need to be reworked so they're straighter and more even. They had kinda turned into weirdly shaped holes.








Here goes some material re-adding on knees, ankles, thighs and hands...her hands had been different lengths from the base of the fingers back to the elbows, so I had to saw one apart and rebuild it a bit.
I also added shaping to the elbows and some material to the inside of the upper body to make the inner part a cleaner surface even though they aren't in this photo.

Ah yes! And she got ears....!!!




Here she is with ears!!!
At the same I added them, I also added a little more material back to her face one more time so I could even up her cheeks. So you see here a little bit of excess material on her LH-pictured side, but that'll be gone in a little bit,







Andddddd finally, the mold supplies have arrived for the most part. FANCY.







~~~~

So the actual current state of her right now is that a lot of the detailing I listed out above has actually been done, and I think it would actually be more helpful to primer her with a layer before photographing again and trying to figure out next steps. But I've been dragging my feet on doing a primer layer.... I'm not sure why.. or if just too much focus has been going to learning the mold/casting stuff so I haven't wanted to over extend myself and make some mistakes with these steps that are so close to the end on her.

In any case, it's all still moving along right and well!!


The engineer in me is very excited for next steps with the molds, so I've been doing a lot of research and asking around about best practices.... I can definitely understand why [most?] people don't cast their dolls themselves

But I love trying new things, so it'll be fun no matter what.

 

Yay! Thanks you both

I think I'm going to space out a few more clean up sessions to make sure I have some time to kind of think and process between each one, but we're getting clooooose.

I'll definitely share the mold making process as well! It's going to be quite interesting it seems! Both engineering and artistry involved in that part of the process, too!

 

Update 19!

Alright my dear friends, this will probably be the last real deal physical progress share when it comes to doll form! How exciting!
Any updates after this are going to probably be just the finalizing of my sanding and smoothing efforts & then the casting process... so I won't disappear or anything just yet, but we're about at a new (and kinda intimidating!) phase

_______

Starting with a little bit of a backtrack, I received a wig I commissioned for Mira a couple weeks ago and tried it on her It's a little big so I'll have to alter it a smidge, but I LOVE the colors and style! Makes her feel really close to the end game now, so I wanted to share....






At that point I also tried her in some Blythe / Pullip clothing... but they'll need to be taken in a good bit to fit her. She's a tiny lady!




~~

So, to begin on the development portion for today, a couple things of note in this photo. I finally was able to shape up the knees such that the kneecaps both fit into the lower leg top/front, and are relatively even/mirrored. The leg aesthetic has been important to me this whole time and I'm pretty pleased with how they've turned out.

The wrist you see in this photo still felt a little too bulbous for my taste, so I've since reduced the size of the ball of the wrist. There was certainly a balance between size and physical integrity.

I think one of the major learnings of this project for me has been that there's definitely a balance between artistry and engineering ... both in integrity and capability of posing for example.

Finally, I updated the stringing method to allow for some "S-Hook" style anchors for the feet. I'll end up doing this for the wrists as well in the end. I've created other hands that I want to be able to change out, so that's a "must."






Here's her arm. The elbow is actually a triangle shape from the outside view. This is the silhouette I'm particularly happy with though so I wanted to show it off. With the final way I designed the elbow joints, the arm pieces lock straight, and fold really neatly. I'm SO glad I stuck with engineering my own joints versus making them into simple spheres because at this point I just think they're neat.







Then, I attached her feet again finally!







I'm pretty sure resin is more "grippy" than Apoxie.. I sure hope.. because the more I smooth her out, the longer it takes her to want to stand on her own anymore

It makes physical sense but it's a little disconcerting to suddenly have it take a lot longer to get her into balance than before even though the pieces are all more aligned. So yeah, I just took these photos holding her for now.





Andddd.. here's a throwback to the first pieces I ever strung together! That was such an amazing day - but it's also just totally crazy to see how far she's come!






And here's a comparison photo between now and the first time she ever was able to stand. I'm especially proud of the changes and additions I decided to make on her main body.






And without further ado, she's all primed up as of now and ready for smoothing work, priming, sanding more... etc. I'm not sure exactly the level of smoothing I'm going for, but I'm hoping I'll know it when I get there.






~~~

Today I'm off to the hardware store to pick up a vacuum pump and hose, which will allow me to start making molds very very soon.

Mold material is here, resin is here, resin dye is here... I basically don't have any more excuses now to not get her smoothed up and completed


Stay tuned! While phases may be shifting, I think the best is yet to come

Cheers!

 

Thank you for your compliments @GammaVector ! I'm glad you like her tummy I really do too.... One constant thread I'd like to keep in all my doll-making will be trying to incorporate small things that make people feel included or represented. I knew that with this first doll, I'd probably be learning so much that getting her to be as small as I wanted her was going to be the biggest challenge, so I thought for a long time about ways I could have her be "thin" but still realistic and relatable. So I decided that she could be athletic but not sucking in like a supermodel It really was something I thought a lot about and narrowed down to a choice about one kind of small detail, then tried my best to make it work aesthetically with the rest of her torso!

Also just for kicks to share & considering how long this doll has taken, I think it's a while off.... but the next body type I'd like to try is female with defined muscles. If you've ever seen Legend of Korra, her body type is my next inspiration!

Thank you for the wishes of luck as well! I fortunately found a lot of great detailed information on how to approach the process, so I'm feeling confident. Can't wait to share the next steps!

 

Update 20.

Hello friends! It's been a little while - and I've been BUSY! I'm excited to show you all how casting is progressing

I've had a LOT of learning to do... but by taking my time, asking lots of questions and doing a lot of research, I'm feeling very confident, and feel that I've had some major success so far!

So without further ado... here's an update!
~~~~



Alright to start us off, the doll-fun stuff...
I finally had the correct sized eyes arrive and I'm so happy with Mira's face now that she's got these eyes
Also some more barbie sized wigs arrived, and I think they look real nice on her. I'll need to take them in a little bit if I want them to fit totally snug, but so far so good.
I also made clothing patterns and some dresses for her, so here's a little peek at all that.





Another one of the colors of barbie wigs. Just thought she was too cute here with her arm on my hand.






Alright, now onto the engineering!
I began by grabbing one of my test pieces from my work bench. This piece isn't particularly cleaned up or anything, so you'll see some of the artifacts of that in my test mold - but it was a plenty good choice to find out if all my materials were going to work.
In order to make a mold, I took non-drying clay, laid a flat layer, pressed the test piece in, and created a large sprue (the big half-funnel shape) for pouring resin, as well as some air vents from the piece (to let resin bubble up and for air to escape).

In order to create the first half of the mold, I then needed to mix silicone and pour over this design.






So after a good number of trips to the hardware store, I managed to get my vacuum pump (for pulling air) hooked up to my desiccator (a sturdy airtight contraption, where I can place silicone and pull all the air out of it).






Once I mixed the silicone together, I placed it inside the desiccator and turned on the vacuum pump. As the air gets pulled out of the silicone it bubbles and expands, then collapses in on itself. It's pretty exciting!!

After all the setup, running the vacuum pump was a little exciting and intimidating, but in the end the experience was pretty cool.






Once the silicone collapses in on itself, most of the bubbles are gone. There's almost no air in here, so when I poured it, nearly no more bubbles were in the mixture.






I skipped the photo of pouring the silicone on top of the clay setup, because it just looked like a flat blue layer by the time I could take my gloves off. So here's just a photo of the cured silicone of the first side of the mold. In this photo I've rebuilt the parts again that I need to be negative space in the mold. The clay continues to ensure anything I don't want to have silicone stays clear when I pour the second side. The two blob areas are to help match the sides together when using the mold. I'd love for those to be cleaner circles if I find I need them on future molds so I gotta find some little spheres to use instead of blocking them in with clay.






And there they are!
You can see how my clay pieces kept some nice large open channels free.
I went in and cleaned up a few parts with a scalpel, but for the most part the mold was ready to go. This particular silicone is really great, and picked up all the details of the piece. I was really impressed with both how bendable the silicone is, and how well it holds all the forms.





So I'll spare you the details of me mixing a bit of resin and pouring it, but here's the mold filled with resin after it's cured. I had poured resin in the RH side opening, which worked it's way down and around the mold, up through the piece, and came back out the top on the other side through the air vents. Worked exactly as intended.






Here's the piece!
Look at all that tasty flash (all the flat stuff - that's what happens when a mold isn't clamped together quite well enough)... time to find some better clamps than rubber bands I guess.. but no harm done.
As you can see, one of the fingers is missing - again, no harm done in this test piece - I chose to not put this in my pressure pot on purpose so I could see if it worked without that big contraption. But nah, the resin does need some forcing to get into tiny spaces, so next round of casting I will use my pressure pot. Easy fix.






This particular resin can be de-molded in about an hour .. so speedy! And it's a little malleable still at that point, so cleanup is super easy.
I peeled off all the flash, and the small vent lines as well, then used wire cutters to trim the rest of the piece.

In the below photo you'll see some weirdness around the wrist. That was me doing a test of whether I could "carve" into the mold to add more shaping with the scalpel. The answer was a pretty big "nope" ... whatever pieces I'm casting need to be complete before making the mold because altering the mold really doesn't work very well.

But the cleanup looks pretty nice with minimal work! I think I may have spent a whole minute pulling off the excess and doing a little sanding. So I'm optimistic about how well all this will clean up when I take a little more time and give any necessary attention to detail! The V shape on the back of the hand is due to me not having done any cleanup work on the apoxie hand piece before making this test mold - so it's not fault of the process.

In total I'm very pleased.






So here are all the pieces in their boxes, waiting for me to design in the clay portions and pour in the first layer of silicone!




~~~

I'm pretty excited. And nervous.
I am really enjoying the mold making and resin part of all of this! It's a lot of hard work and lots of deep thinking / problem solving to get the molds right, but it's SO satisfying.

Only a few more days until we have real dolls parts....

 

Yay! I can hear the cheering

Thanks a ton

 

Update 21!!!


Forgive me if anything is redundant from the "test piece" update above. I wanted to post a full process for this update as best I could.


So here I made boxes in which I could lay clay to "block out" one side of a mold, then pressed my pieces into that clay.
These blocked out pieces include channels designs for optimized resin pour/flow through the molds, as well as air release vents.
I poured high quality silicone over what you see here to create "side 1" for each mold.





Once silicone was poured, I flipped the molds and removed most of the clay.
I left the doll pieces in, as well as keeping some clay to block out any areas I needed to remain open like filling channels and vents.
Then I poured silicone over these first halves, in order to create all the "side 2" pieces.





Here are the final pieces for the head mold!
They look bumpy everywhere around the impression of the piece itself mostly just because it's *really* hard and probably unnecessary to lay the clay in flat, and I wasn't about to go on perfecting something that doesn't change the engineering situation nor final aesthetic of the parts.
So yeah, just a residual effect of how I pressed in a bunch of pieces of clay to block out side 1.





Putting two sides together, setting on their sides and pouring resin for the first time..... It went EVERYWHERE.
Now I use a syringe instead of trying to pour with a cup.
Luckily this was done outside and what you see here was cured before being brought indoors ... so no harm no foul





Molds here are separated in pairs.
The design was such that resin is poured into a large channel which actually curves down around the piece and fills from the bottom.
Vents are placed at the top of the piece, so air can get pushed upwards and out, and help minimize or eliminate bubbles.
So if you look at what happened here you can see my resin didn't even hardly fill the pieces in the first round.
And some of the top vents are filled just because my resin pouring got so messy!





Here's a nice example of a failed part up close. Oxymoron? Hahha.. but illustrative.
Turns out my resin was curing SUPER fast in 85 degree weather (3 minutes!!?), so it didn't even have enough time to move through the mold before it was a solid.
... California, dudes.
I moved my work time to early in the morning and now store my resin components in a mini fridge.
The fluid time on the resin seems to have increased significantly with those changes. Maybe 10 minutes of work time now. Thank goodness!!





These are still from the bad batches, but a couple pieces did come out good, so at least you can see what it comes out like before any post processing or anything else is done!!
Everything will require sanding, etc., even when they finally come out right.





And that's about it!
Thanks for reading
I'm actually literally just about to be able to go get today's test pieces... so, fingers crossed!