Modification Christmas in July: Luts Juri '06 x tan Dollfie Dream hybrid

I was but an impoverished underage lurker when Luts released their holiday order customer-gift heads. Trends in sculpting have changed, but I remain charmed by the leaf-shaped eyes that cycled through in the 2000s. I picked up a Juri head in early 2021 and then moved internationally and didn't work on dolls for most of a year, but with the power of Wanting To Procrastinate On Other Things, I have gotten back to doing projects. I'll add photos as I dig them out of my phone-clutter.

✔Modification removal. The previous owner had done extensive (but incomplete) eye mods with epoxy, both reducing the size and carving new tearducts into the lower lid to readjust the placement of the inner eye corners.

I removed the old epoxy by brushing on a thin coat of 40vol peroxide hair developer and then letting it oxidize the material overnight. This made it softer than the resin and easy to scrape away.
I also filled the piercing holes in the ears.


✔Head size reduction. I'm a monster, I'm literally not capable of not doing this mod. If the head's getting sanded, it's getting at least a centimeter taken off the circumference and crown height.

✔Neck adapter. Old Delfs came with a quickchange mechanism for the head, meaning that the socket to accomodate the neck wasn't rounded. I assumed I'd be getting an resin body for this head, so I got a 3d printed version of the necessary part. It has ended up getting epoxied into place as a socket, for reasons as will soon become apparent--

✔Finding a body. This took over a year! I couldn't decide! Should I get an old Delf body and risk the Nostalgia Premium for a potentially bad color match? Did I want something more androgynous or stylized for an elfin character, like a Doll Chateau body? Should I order a custom match from Resinsoul even though I'd have to do tons of mods to get the aesthetics I wanted? Should I just keep going to Mandarake every week to check the Box O' Bodies?
I went on a day trip to Osaka for a brief respite in a real urban environment (never thought I'd be homesick for the New York City smell palette but there you go...) and stopped by the Osaka Grandchaos store. In one of the doll cases, under colored LEDs that made it impossible to judge the color, was a steeply discounted Dollfie Dream II body in seemingly fine condition with a handwritten explanation indicating it was hybridized with a DDIII frame. Huh, I thought, frying my brain out trying to remember what 褐色 could mean. That's weird. I didn't think you could do that.
The next morning I woke up and realized a) I had somehow passed over a *cheap* tan Dollfie Dream b) I could airbrush the Juri head to match the tan body and kill two birds with one stone. The repairs would be painted over, and I'd have a cheap easy-to-pose body in a size I already have plenty of clothes for. W h o o p s! Thankfully we were able to call Grandchaos and order by phone.

The first BJD I ever handled extensively was my sister's Delf Sleeping Soony x DDI hybrid, so I have a soft spot for this part-match.

✔Wig and eyes. The eyes had to be modified for best fit, I made a little tutorial thread here. I am increasingly fond of close color-schemes, so I got a strawberry blonde wig that matches the warm tones in the eyes. I'm thinking of going in with alcohol inks to give the wig darker roots.

✔ Paint mixing. There's so much paint here omg @__@ There's a model kit line called Frame Arms Girl that's like a cross between 1/12 dolls and Gundam, and they make a range of skintone solvent-based paints to suit them that sticks very well to resin and plastic. I used one of their flesh tones as a base and added brown and white to get a close-as-possible match for the resin head. It dries lighter, and Mr. Super Clear will also make it a little lighter and ashier.

Paint application. I have to paint the head, but also parts of the Dollfie Dream's interior frame where they show at the joints: the torso, thigh, and knee internals are all Semi-White (bet you they were junked from a stained KOS-MOS). Waiting for good weather. I also had to replace my airbrush compressor with a 100V equivalent and then figure out how all the metric settings correspond to imperial (I know the required settings in PSI, not MPa). Also, joke's on me but Iwata is... not actually a common hobbyist airbrush brand in Japan??? Nobody around here stocks parts.

See the non-matching frame parts? This is the backs of the knees.

High-heeled feet. I ordered some Wersaze high-heel parts because I don't have any high-heeled dolls and I thought it'd be interesting. They'll be painted to match when they get here. Juri gives me fox vibes, so I'm after more of a digitgrade stance than a fashion doll stance, but I think it'll work out.

Faceup. Not looking forward to faceup based on previous experience trying to paint eyelashes on a sprayed substrate x___x I did get some 1000-grit polishing paste to try and make the paint surface extra-smooth before faceup.

 

Tomorrow's going to rain again, so I'm trying to beat the weather.

I partially disassembled her for painting. Frame parts were scuff-sanded with 400 grit before airbrushing the parts that show when the doll is assembled. The hands shown are a new pair of large-size Dollfie Dream hands in tan, but they turned out to be a bad color match for the old DDII body. They had cool pink undertones--think the default Dollfie Dream color but intensified. So I airbrushed those too.


These are the paints I used, they're all solvent-based acrylic. Frame Arms Girl Color FG-11, Gaia Notes CB-23, and Mr. Color white. I made lots of test swatches to get the color right, and checked them under various lighting conditions.


I left the headcap unpainted. You can see the spray texture in the crevices of the ear, I think I had the air pressure set too high. I'll let it cure completely before I start polishing it.

 

@Rosslyn In terms of tutorial-making, I think the technique is too variable based on what kind of head closure they have and how thick the resin is?
On this head, because the resin was thick and the twist-off headcap mechanism more complicated than I wanted to mess with, I just went over the headcap and around the crown with a Dremel cutting bit (I think it's #561, looks like a drill), checking it by holding it up to the light to make sure I didn't make any excessively thin spots.
On heads where the headcap just has a simple latch plus magnets, like Volks, I use a fine handsaw to cut a slice off the head side for height reduction and then sand as necessary to get the head and cap to match. The cut will usually remove the notch that the headcap would latch into and the hole the magnet/washer sits in, so that has to get re-carved.
Migidoll caps have a sort of scalp-shaped contour though, right? They're not just like a straight-across lid? I think you'd have to measure carefully and subtract from the head side following the original curve, and then replace the magnets + carve new slots for the cap to latch into.