~20cm Dolls 1/12 Humanoids [VERY Picture Heavy]

Okay, I've procrastinated long enough on this.

So early last year I made the decision to start building the maquettes I want to use for an overly ambitious animation project. Originally I was going to stick to my traditional mediums of wire, sculpey and a bit of fluff.


However, I kept having a nagging worry about the wire. Wire has a tendancy to break, especially with repeated posing, something that these dolls were going to go through a lot of. I'd had limbs snap off simply posing armature for rigid sculptures before. I'd been interested in and done some research on action figures, and while in a lot of ways their articulation was ideal, it was simply just too complicated and involved on such an intricate scale, I wasn't sure I had all the tools I would require to engineer action figures on such a small scale. So I started researching dolls.

Years ago, I'd first come in contact with BJDs through the Anime Fandom, at around the same time I was losing interest in it. I was friends with both Adara and Rosslyn at this time and witnessed their entrance to the hobby, but I still didn't feel a real appeal for BJDs yet.

And then my dilemma really started, because of all the options I had, BJDs, although immensely more complicated than I wanted to commit to, were quite simply the most sensible model for what I wanted. In resignation, I started studying all I could on their creation, searching out as many tutorials as I could find. Eventually, I felt I had enough working knowledge to begin. I hoarded some straws and cereal boxes, managed to procure some Premiere clay, and took the plunge.

In retrospect, I should have spent more time engineering the joints and retooling my layouts to the medium.

Initial Design Sketches



Finalized Design



Rescaled Design


First steps



First Clay layer



And from here the journey gets a little more interesting in context, as I became homeless for the first time.

First details


Hands, Talons, Horns


My very first "pose"


The secret to my ability to work on these as a homeless person


An update of the Hands Talons and horns

 

Disarticulated


Temporary Eye blanks


First Victory


Life went weird for a little bit after that, no longer utterly homeless, I moved about three times in rapid succession and started working on other projects (coming soon to their own threads) in the interim.

Here's Tanya when I realized she could wear barbie clothes(Also, with her proper eyes).


I decided that I wanted to change their functional single joints into double joints(bonus peek of one of my other projects).

In hindsight this was a mistake (if it ain't broke don't fix it).

I decided Tanya's torso had gotten out of proportion, so I made some pretty major adjustments


Another Bonus Pic


Tanya posing to the best of her newly floppy joints.


A picture of all my BJD WIPs side by side


Messy work space


A closeup of Tanya's Face!


The closest thing to standing Tanya was capable of with double joints


And, today's pic Tanya's Wig Cap in process.

It's a scrap of a white t-shirt saturated with watered down acrylic. When that dries I'm going to give it a thin few layers of mod podge to make sure it holds it's shape, then I'll apply the hair, and after that get back to work on her face. I cut off her horn and ears to refine the symmetry more, as well as making the wig fitting process easier.

It's been about a year and a half since I started, and if I'm lucky, I'll finish before the end of this year. OTL I knew I was getting into trouble with all this, but it's been worth it, and has been a very valuable experience. These two are my proofs of concept, they will probably never be casted, much less marketed. I made them to prove to myself that I could, as well as to test how well I liked the process. I'll let you guess how the latter turned out.

 

Wig cap trimmed, as well as the various types of hair I might use.



This is Nylon hair, from customizing My Little Ponies, I was going to use some of my large hank, as it's rather straight for the kind of hairstyle I want, but as I had an almost identical color already in shorter lengths, and decided to go with that, despite it being more wavy. I also considered using the slightly pinker color, but I'm not sure I have enough of that to fully cover the (admittedly) wig, and I don't want to have to make another if I run out halfway. I may use it to make an alternate wig later, but we'll see how it looks when she's finished. In the meantime, I'll need to rewrap her head in plastic, and start preparing little wefts for gluing.

 

I was really discouraged that this thread never got any replies, and I suppose that's part of the reason I haven't posted any updates. The rest I blame on ArcheAge. Text and photos are reposted from my tumblr.

I finished the wig not long after the last post here.

I’m still so annoyed that I didn’t notice her little booger until after I’d snapped the photo.

Oh well, looks pretty nice for now, need to focus on getting her joints working, finish fiddling with her right ear, and finish those lips.

It’s so frustrating being so close to finished, but still so far. Because on one hand, this is at the stage where it’s really just a question of how patient I am, but on the other hand, I can’t over look it when little things are off.

So frustrating.

Also, the anxiety over what the layers of paint and sealant might do to the tiniest details.


So, I’ve been looking at a lot of pictures of horses, and I realized that cute as Tanya’s old ears looked, the new ones are even cuter. Apologies for the radio silence but I’ve been too addicted to ArcheAge for the last few months to acknowledge reality. Been working on Kanty too, but he’s not as presentable yet. He took some weird turns because I was using some test eyes that were way too big so I had to rescale the size of his head twice.