40–49cm Dolls Chubby Mallow! My first sculpting attempt.

Hello! It just occurred to me that I've been working on this guy for so long, but I've never really posted about him... So I figured I should make a thread here!

As a bit of a disclaimer, I am not a sculptor. I sculpted a little bit in my ceramics class in high school, but my overall experience working with 3D mediums is little to none. Admittedly a lot of the time I spent creating Mallow has been struggling against the materials and trying to learn techniques, so as a result he's not the prettiest doll around.

He's made of Sculpey and he's roughly MSD/Big Baby size!



I thought I'd include some of my many (many, many, MANY) sketches just to show my process- almost everything in the first image ended up not working out, but I find it helpful to brainstorm. The second shows what Mallow's face was supposed to end up like. I wanted to make a really cartoony face, and I went with the one with sort of a pouty expression. I want to make a spooky grinning face someday too, though.



Some early Mallows! Left is right after one of the first bakes. I pried his head open, cut out his eyeholes... aaaaand figured out why I don't see dolls with stylized vertical eyeholes. He would have required specially made oval eyes. Seemed obvious in hindsight...

Right is Mallow a little farther along, alongside his yet-unnamed brother.



Mallow really didn't go through many changes from first bake to now. I changed the shape of his eyeholes pretty drastically to fit eyes better and smoothed him out, but he's still the same old Mallow. I wish I'd taken more photos during the initial sculpting process.



I'm planning to try some junk casts on him soon, even if he may not be quite ready. I just really want to do a proper faceup on him.

As for his body...

 

Mallow's body is much more of a work in progress than his head.

I wanted to make a chubby boy body! I figured it was probably unlikely that someone else would make one for me, so I might as well try my own. Unfortunately (fortunately?) he ended up quite thick and large... I had intended for him to be in scale with my slim MSDs, but he ended up more in the big baby/small SD range.



Here's his body still at a very early stage, just laid out... at this point I was just making the pieces, and I figured I'd make it all flow together once everything was there and worked, engineering-wise. As you can probably tell, the legs were already giving me trouble at this point.




here are a couple partially strung, just to see how he flows and if his arms can hold poses.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) I think I'm going to want to re-sculpt his forearms and entire legs... he's got a lot of work ahead.

 

@Honnie Thank you! And yes, he's my first doll that I sculpted myself.

 

Thank you all for the kind words! I was a little nervous about posting him here, so I'm glad people like him!

@celga you hit the nail on the head, I think I was inspired a lot by Island Doll's sort of cartoony style- Particularly Windfish, but No. 1 too!