Dino, a ~75 cm male sculpt

I'd like to use this thread to record my progress on an approximately 75 cm tall adult male doll of a character loosely modeled as a modern reincarnation of Dionysus. (And since I thought this character up in high school, he is very creatively named Dino, haha)

My goal is to kind of sculpt a realistically proportioned, sexy, fit doll in kind of the classical aesthetic. (Whether my very beginner sculpting skills...and patience... will live up to that will be seen........This will be the fourth doll I've ever made and I'm not very good at it!)

First, I sketched how this doll would ideally look. Aside from the lateral view being a little crooked, I am pretty satisfied with this sketch. He's probably going to have double jointed elbows and knees, but simple single joints on hips, shoulders, wrist. I would love to give him jointed fingers but I have nooo idea how I would get that to work. His torso might have 1 joint at the chest but it'll honestly depend on how pretty I can get his torso to look and whether I want to risk destroying the look by inserting a joint there. There's definitely not going to be a joint at the waist for aesthetic reasons.

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So far, I've gotten as far as making the base and applying the first layer of clay. For the base, I used wooden dowels and green floral foam wrapped up in paper towels, tape, and saran wrap.
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For clay, I'm using LaDoll clay. I decided to try sculpting the body as one piece as in the past, I have a really hard time keeping parts proportional to each other/symmetrical when they were sculpted as separate pieces. Although this might be a terrible ideal for something so big, I decided to try this method for the first time to see if I could control the asymmetry and proportions issue better this way. Though as you might be able to tell, it's already pretty asymmetrical, haha.

I am also not sculpting the head yet because in the past, once I finished sculpting the head the amount of effort I put into bodies have decreased dramatically (I get impatient to see the head on a body I guess!). So I figured this time, I'll sculpt the body first and then work on the head. I imagine I'm much less likely to end up with a headless body since sculpting heads is the fun part for me.

Right now I'm just waiting for this to dry so I can start carving and adding to it.

 

Thank you TheStripyCat! It's been a bit of a workout sculpting this guy for sure.

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Some updates on the progress (I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks!):

After covering up the base with the first layer, I started adding muscle definition.

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I started with the front torso, mostly because it was a large part I could work on. If I couldn't make the front torso look good, I knew this project would be doomed. So it was a good place to start to test if I had any skill at all! As you can see in the photo above, I sketched generally where the muscles should go (Forgot to take a picture of the "before" photo for the torso, but you can see it in the back and the arms, in the picture below). All in all, it turned out much better than expected! Then I moved on to the back:

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In the photo above, you can see that I started to fill out 1/2 of the back according to my sketch lines. The shoulder blades were the hardest part, and I had to use a lot of photo reference! I realized while we see a lot of images of toned abs, I don't think I've spent as long staring at people's backs!

Next, I channeled my inner Tina Belcher and began the butt.

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I had to carve into it quite a bit because it was basically a shapeless lump when I started. I'm especially particular about the depression that's seen on the lateral surface of the butt along the curve of the iliac blade of the pelvis, so I tried to carve that out, if that makes sense.

 

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I continued working on the back and butt, and while I was at it, I moved to the triceps muscles in the back of the arm. I am especially pleased that the triceps looks way more realistic than I thought it would. Next, I worked on the forearms- my least favorite part in previous sculpting projects. Luckily, it's not looking half bad. (Also, please excuse my messy room)

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Another view of the back and arms:

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I'm thinking this is a good start so far. Then I move on the the biceps on the front side of the body. Honestly, not as fun or as pretty as the back of the arm.




Here is another view




Looks ok, so I moved to the legs. Historically, legs have been easier for me to sculpt than arms. But it turns out, I have no idea how to sculpt muscle-y legs!! I had to do a lot of carving first to even get the leg shaped right, then I had to try to figure out how to add the proper muscle definition without it looking absolutely weird. I love legs and am very picky about how they should look, so I think I felt like it was especially hard.


Above: began the carving. Unfortunately some of the areas I wanted to thin thinned to the core--- so I couldn't carve as deep I wanted on the lateral sides of the knees, for example.


Above: struggling to get the quadriceps to look right. Started fleshing out the knee too. Looks terrible. Also made some shins.

At this stage I let this sucker dry, and several days later (today, infact) I attacked the legs with rough sandpaper.



Obviously there is some foreshortening here, but the legs are starting to take a better shape. (And I have been watching a lot of Detective Conan on Youtube while working on this this week)


Above, without foreshortening more or less. It might be a little hard in the photos, but these legs are still pretty asymmetrical. I think I won't be able to fix that completely until I chop them off for joint making.

And finally, another view of his backside as it is now:



I tried to make his back a little more symmetrical. His butt will need a major overhaul once the torso is separated form the limbs. I just can't quite refine everything right now.


So far, I'm pretty happy with the proportions of the body and the upper body overall. I'll probably be nitpicking details on the leg and symmetry is something to be worked on!

Obviously, he doesn't have his man bits... yet? I don't actually really like genitals on dolls but since I'm modeling him after a virile Greek god I feel bad not endowing him with any. I'm pretty sure he will end up with a "Mr. Wingus and the ping pong boys" (sorry favorite Futurama quote) in the future, but definitely not until I remove his legs.

In the immediate future, I guess I'll continue refining the symmetry of legs a bit more while they are attached to the torso and will start making the balls for the joints. Then I plan to remove the limbs and work on them separately before adding the joints. Eventually I'll start his hands and feet, and of course, his head (can't wait! Though it hasn't been as hard to not start the head as I thought it would, since the body has actually been kind of fun to sculpt.)

 

Thank you CyrilGrey! I'm surprised and glad it turned out better than I imagined it would, since I've never tried sculpting a realistic back before.

 

Thanks yiubum! I'm hoping to develop some strong arm muscles when I'm done with this sculpt!

 

After a 3-week hiatus where I was traveling for work and vacation, I have returned home to work on this doll.

Since I'm running low on clay (I just ordered a 8-package box of LaDoll directly from the Padico online shop since my local craft store is also out of it) I've decided I will start sculpting the head until more arrives and I can start messing with joint construction on the body.

To begin, I made a foam core of the head from green floral foam. I first traced the general outline of the frontal and lateral view of the head from my drawn out plan, then traced these papers onto the foam.I carved the foam along these guide shapes and ended up with a rough shape of the head.






In my previous experience sculpting heads, I've always sculpted the head first, then taken out the core, carved eyes, then "scooped" out and inserted eyes to fit from inside of the head (that is, I have never sculpted the head with eyes already in place)

I've found that my eyes never look that great using the methods I used before, so this time I decided to have the eyes roughly in place before I start adding clay:




I basically scooped out some eyeholes into the foam and then placed the eyes in the hole with a little bit of water-soluable white glue to hold them in place. (The eyes I have are a bit high-domed for my taste and I'm a little worried it might make the eyeshape a little odd? but I guess we'll see how they will look!) I also stuck a large-sized straw into the head where I want the neck hole to eventually be.

Then I wrapped some saran wrap on the head, since I think it would be a pain in the butt to remove green foam from clay if they directly touched.




I'm going to add clay to this base next!

 

As I was running low on LaDoll, I went ahead and purchased a pack of premier. I'd read here and in other places that premier is good for details, although not as strong as LaDoll so can be made stronger by mixing them together. So I decided to mix the rest of the LaDoll I have with the Premier.




Then I started adding clay to the foam base for the head




Once I covered the head with a layer of clay I decided to work on the eyes




For this sculpt, I'm trying to go for a sort of smiley eyed look. I'm ok with their shape right now so I'll start working on the rest of the face once this dries a bit and becomes less malleable.

 

Thank you, GlossReality! This is the first doll that I've started that looks like it might be good enough to cast, and I am seriously considering constructing it so that it can be cast. It's becoming apparent that my previous LaDoll constructed bjd's do not do well in the humidity of where I currrently live (the wires in the hands rust and break through to the surface! which looks badass but does not bode well for the longetivity of the poor dolls). So it will take even more forever time to finish this dude, I do dream of getting him professionally cast!

 

Continuing on with the head, I sculpted on the different features in parts...

First, I sculpted on the brow area:



Then I made some rough pyramidal nose-shape, and stuck it on



After a lot of fiddling with the nose, it's finally starting to look something like a nose... I don't really know how I eventually ended up with a structure that looks like a nose, it's still a part of the face that I have the most trouble with. I feel like it should be one of the easiest structures to sculpt because we look at people's noses all day, every day (unless you're a hermit, I guess). I blame my years of drawing in the manga style for my general lack of understanding of noses, haha. Lines were also drawn to kind of act as a guide for where the mouth would go... at this stage I have a mirror propped up and am starting to check whether the face is at least somewhat symmetrical. It is absolutely TRAGIC when I sculpt a good nose or mouth and it turns out one or the other needs to be shaved off because it's just not symmetrical!



I sculpted the upper lips next, although I had also added some clay to the cheek area to add definition to the face. I call this the Simpsons overbite stage:




I made the upper lips by sticking on a triangular piece of clay underneath the nose. Somehow the upper lips came out almost exactly how I wanted it to look basically on the first try. After spending forever on the nose, this was quite awesome!

I then started the lower lips... Added a roughly oval shaped clay underneath the upper lips, and tadah! completed lips.



At this stage I stepped back to have a look at this head. I mainly noted: 1) he's looking pretty effeminate (looking pretty good for a woman's head, yet unfortunately I'm trying to make a head for a very muscular man) 2) he's looking kind of Asian (again, awesome to know for when I want to sculpt an Asian head, but I'm trying to go for a more Caucasian look) and 3) the lips are too cute!

I'm thinking at this point that I need to fix the lips to be a little wider, add much more definition to the jawline, and do something about the eyes and brow, which is contributing to him looking pertty Asian.

After a lot of sculpting where I didn't photo the inbetween steps:



So my image of Dino's head is that he will be kind of a smiley-smug looking and I imagine him to have a kind of a crooked smirk on his face. I think I'm getting there! But ugh I can tell getting the smile to look right is going to be such a pain in the butt. (I actually hate most smiling sculpts because it really doesn't take much for it to just look wrong!) I don't know if I'm making my life easier or harder by purposefully making his smile asymmetrical. Will it just look like I half-assed the symmetry? haha

Anyway, this is how he's looking right now and I'm gonna let him dry overnight. I drew in some crappy eyebrows in paint, whenever I get to draw his face he's definitely going to have that half-raised eyebrow.



I like this up-nose view





Also!!! Any feedback on how I could make him look more handsome and less dopey would be appreciated! He has some serious symmetry issues to tackle next, sigh.

 

I think there are pros and cons to either method, and I guess it depends on what kind of look you're going for. With the method where I would carve out the eyes later (the first 3 heads I ever sculpted were made this way) I found it very difficult to make realistic eyelids because I guess I wasn't brave enough to thin out the eyelid parts with carving tools. So those heads all ended up with thick, mono-lidded eyelids that did not sit deep in the eye socket (because I had a hard time carving in the "crease" of the deep-set, double-lidded eyelids). (So this was ok because one of these heads I was going for Asian features anyway and the other one ended up stylized and cartoony.) The positive of this method was that I could sculpt a general shape of the head first, then draw on the structures (eyes, nose, lips) on the head, then sculpt according to that. This way, I felt that it was easier to keep track of the balance of the features. Also, you don't need to know exactly how big you want the eyes in relation to everything else before you start sculpting.

In the method I'm using with this Dino head, I feel that I had to plan more precisely what I wanted from the beginning, since I started with eyeballs then literally sculpted most of the features around them. I had to be pretty sure I was using the right eye size from the get-go, and that they were sufficiently spaced so that they were not too widely apart or too close apart. To be sure, I had to keep referring back to my planning drawing. Yet it was still kind of hard to keep all the features balanced when the jawline and such was changing because head shape had not come first. But! I was able to sculpt (more or less) realistic set of deep-set double-creased eyes for the first time! And the eyelids are waaaay thinner!

An alternate method I remember seeing explained on a some Japanese (?) BJD making website (that I can no longer find, blah) showed them getting the head/jaw shape pretty worked out then basically carving out a giant hole where the eye socket is (I can't remember if they had sculpted the nose and mouth before hand or not). But after carving out the area of the eye socket, they stuck the eyeballs in and then sculpted the eyelids and eye area around that. So that seems to combine flexibility in eyeball size/placement for the best balanced face with the ability of sculpting more realistic eye areas by additive, rather than subtractive, sculpting techniques.

So I can't really say which is easier for a beginner since this head feels like the easiest one I have done... but I can't tell if it's because it's my fourth head (my first one was hideous and probably would have remained hideous no matter which method I used). Honestly though, if you want your sculpt to have deep set eyes, I think it is easier to achieve that look by adding clay around the eyes than by carving away clay (unless you are super awesome and comfortable with carving tools! I am not, haha)

TL;DR- for realistic deep-set eyes, I would sculpt around eyes.

 

No problem, greymalkin. I'm glad that you find my rambling helpful I think first bjd's can turn out how you envision it with lots of patience to modify the pieces you are working on (which I did not have my first time, haha. Good learning experience!) I think studying how it's made to figure out which way seems the most successful is a great start!

 

Ok, so here's a dump post for my progress since my last update.

So after looking at that smirking face of my head in progress, I decided I didn't really like how he looked afterall. The smile was too unrealistic and while it looked good from some angles, I did not like how it looked from others. That is not a good head in my book!

So I chopped off his lips and shaved off some cheek, and I started resculpting the lips:



(I think I'm starting to get the hang of this lip sculpting thing)

By the end of that session (a few hrs), I ended up with a face that looked like this:



So a quick interlude-- these drawings are generally how I draw Dino in 2-D, the essence of which I've been trying to capture in this 3-D sculpting endeavor:




I was looking at the head sculpt I ended up with at the end of the day and all I could think was "He doesn't look right. Something looks off. This is not Dino's face."

I was really troubled. I liked the head enough that I knew it could be a good head with some work, but it just didn't look enough like Dino to me. I considered the possibility of having to start another head because I didn't want to entirely destroy the essence of this WIP... but darn, I really didn't want to go through the trouble of carving another foam block for the head base (<-- Lazy Doll Maker should be my name, not TenguCrow)

As I pondered this, I looked at this head in profile:



Then I opened up my sketchbook to a page where I had drawn another OC I think about a lot, named Adrian:



I thought, "Huh. This head looks more like Adrian."

Aaaaaaannnd that is how I abandoned trying to sculpt "Dino" onto this head that actually clearly belonged to "Adrian". Honestly, once I switched my mindset to "I'm sculpting Adrian now" the sculpting went way more smoothly and I had something I was happy with pretty much instantly the next day when I resumed sculpting.

 

So here is "Adrian":




I arrived at Adrian's face basically by modifying the eyes a bit to make them... I dunno, shadier? (Adrian is kind of a shady character, while Dino is more of a bright-eyed, fun kind of guy). I did this by closing the eyelids a bit more. Oh, and Adrian has a big nose with a bit of a bump at the bridge, which Dino does not have (I picture Dino to have a smaller, more effeminate nose as he's more androgynous looking in my head)

After first round of sanding:


I was pretty happy with how he was starting to look. Here is the head next to the body:



I am very happy with the size of the head (it's almost the exact size that I planned it to be) though I suspect it's smaller relative to body size compared to many commercially available BJD's. I specifically drew Dino's plans with real human proportions in mind, and adult human heads on a tall body are pretty small!

So I continued to improve the symmetry and once I was satisfied it was more or less symmetrical, I decided to start the ears:



The ears I drew on very carefully (using a measuring tape to measure distances!!) because the last doll I made ended up with assymetric ears that I was too lazy to fix! So her head ended up residually asymmetrical no matter what I tried. So I vowed not to repeat the mistake again and just draw out the damn ears more precisely first before sculpting.

Ear one sculpted



Ear two sculpted, front view & 3/4 view (the head is posing with the left arm, which is drying-- to be explained in a few posts where I describe my progress with the body):




So at this point I'm pretty happy with the head. The ears are honestly pretty simple but meh, they're going to be covered by hair for the most part and I have yet to see BJD owners who are obsessed with normal human, non-animal ears (doesn't mean there aren't any out there!) I consider this head mostly done except for addressing minor symmetry issues.

*****

Sidenote: So is this project still Dino, or is it Adrian!? ... I don't know. I had always intended to sculpt both Dino and Adrian heads to this one body (these characters share the same body type in my world). I'm almost thinking if I cast this sucker I could just use this Adrian head to shell "Dino" by changing the makeup... honestly Dino and Adrian's faces when I draw them aren't alllll that different. Like many people drawing in the vaguely manga-style, I feel like differences in hair and slightly different eyes/eyebrows are the only way to tell apart the OC's I draw anyway... haha.

Though if I stop being lazy I could always sculpt an entirely different head for the real Dino.

 

~* Interlude *~

I got clay! A couple of posts ago I wrote that I was running out of LaDoll and my local craft store is out of it since I bought the last two packs on clearance more than a month ago.

So I decided to order LaDoll online- but instead of paying a ton on Amazon or US-based art store websites, I ordered directly from Padico, the Japanese manufacturers of the clay.

The remainder of this post is going to be somewhat of a service/product review of the clays I've been using- skip to the next post for progress on Dino's body!

http://www.padicoshop.net/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1_14

The link above is where I went to order. I ordered the 8-pc box for zone 2, since I live in the USA. It came out to about ~$72 US dollars, and this price INCLUDED SHIPPING. So each pack cost about $9 a pack, which is less than the $12-14/per pack I could get online BEFORE shipping. I paid via paypal on June 5, my payment cleared on the 6th, and the package was at my doorstep by the 10th of June! I couldn't believe how fast it was.

And look at the picture below:


That pink sticky note! It's still stuck on the box with no extra tape, all the way from Japan. Like wow. That is good neat shipping. Good job post office.

Anyway I opened the package and it came with a receipt neatly folded into a plastic envelope:



And so I have 8 new packs of Ladoll. I'll probably only use 1 or 2 of these for the rest of my doll project, but it'll be good to use whatever is left over for future doll projects.

So I also mentioned that I'd like to give a short review- So far for this project I've used both LaDoll and Premier mixed with LaDoll on a 0.75 LaDoll : 1 Premier mixture.

The head was sculpted in the mixture and the body in pure LaDoll. There are seriously pros and cons to both.

1) LaDoll is tougher to knead because it's not as fluffy as premier.

2) Premier is more malleable than LaDoll when it is drying- which can be good or bad. If you want a feature to set more quickly so you don't squash it, the LaDoll holds shape faster. The premier/ladoll mix is still kind of squishy for longer than pure LaDoll, but it also means it is malleable longer for you to be able to subtly change structures after it starts drying.

3) But once it dries, the premier/ladoll mix is just as hard and carve-able as pure ladoll and it sands BEAUTIFULLY. This is probably
because the particle size of premier is smaller than ladoll. I was very pleased at the smoothness I achieved with minimal sanding.

4) Premier/ladoll mix was a little hard to get used to for sculpting because the clay stayed squishier for longer. But once I got used to it and learned how not to constantly squash structures like the nose or lips, I found that it was indeed easier to sculpt in details because the clay particles did seem smaller with premix mixed in.

I agree with the general opinion floating around the net that Premier is indeed good for sculpting more detailed parts! That's all haha

 

Ok... so now I had a shipment of clay, it was time to resume work on the body. My cat helped me get started:



I knew it was bound to happen, but yep, my cat knocked Dino over. Goodbye left arm. But not a big deal, it was easily mended by wetting the broken edges and wedging very soft, wet clay in between and sticking them together.




Once I chopped the arms off, I started on the legs:



And... ta-da!



I split open the torso and took out the core




Then I "glued" the pieces togehter with wet clay and bound the two sides in rubber bands to hold to together:



So that's about it for now for the body, though I did also fill some cracks in the inside of parts and reinforce some very thin walls...

Oh! and I started smoothing out the balls for the joints using a method I found on a Japanese doll making site

http://patinadoll.com/キレイな間接球の作り方/

I dunked the balls in water then rolled them around the mouth of a bottle. It worked pretty well! They are smoother than any other attempts I've made to make nice, smooth balls.

 

Thanks ChocoDecadence I hope I can get back to working on him soon, but I've been so busy!