First Full SD- Mighty Mighty Aphrodite

So I've been fiddling around with Super Sculpey Firm and made a few clusmy parts for some tinies I'm sort of messing with, but I hadn't yet taken the plunge and gotten serious with the dollmaking. I got some paperclay and styrofoam, and got to work last night.

This is the plan, so far:

I have nicknamed this attempt Mighty Aphrodite. Volks SD16 she ain't. She'll be between 61-63 cm tall, too.

I desperately want to make a big curvy woman with killer thighs and all those graceful shapes that are seriously lacking in commercially available BJDs. (Sacral dimples, here we come!) I'm counting on a lifetime of art and three or four years of classical art training to back me up here, and I like what I've got so far. I realize this will be a long, long, LONG term project.
I am using Creative Paperclay and a styrofoam core.




Then, a lot of work later:



I've got to find a better way to shoot this, though, because this setting on my camera distorts shapes a bit.

In person her butt is much MUCH more even. I have no idea how this distortion happens but it does it to things besides sculpture. I need to figure out how to use the camera better.

That's it so far. I'm waiting for the paperclay to dry more before I add anything else, and she needs symmetry work like woah.

 

Thank you very much!

 

Yay, thank you! My health has been preventing much more but soon... muahaha.

Admittedly they should have a little more weighty give to them, but I am giving her a bit of a boost by depicting her as if she were wearing some sort of bra or support, so that the clothed doll will have that look. They may change a bit as I go on. My model for her bust is myself, and most of one side of my family. We all look like this! My hips are not so magnificent, but my chest is a lot like this, and I've given her my bit of a tummy too.
Thanks very much!

 

So it's been a long time since I've had a studio organized enough to sculpt in, but I've finally got one now so I can finally get back to paperclay doll sculpting.

Materials: I've been doing my rough filling in and blocking basic shapes with Crayola Air Dry, which turns out to be a cheapish paperclay you can buy in small bucket-loads. it sometimes cracks a bit when it dries, but it's great for a cheaper filler, and a nicer material than DAS. I've been falling in love with the smooth texture and consistency of La Doll, which is actually available at stores in my new home area, so I'll be using that for the main substance of this particular doll.

Work: I am sticking to my plan of having her be a plus sized goddess, and I have been doing a lot of symmetry work. Getting the subtleties of the curves in flesh has been a real challenge. She's looking better, but she's not there yet.

Methods: I spent today making various ball joints and molds, and some cores. I glue some newsprint paper (blank and un-inked!) around a dowel, then cover that with paperclay. When it's hard enough I slide the resulting tube off the dowel, and I have nice cores I can sculpt limbs around.



Here's some progress with smoothing her out, getting her fleshy-looking, and after this was taken I got a start on rearranging her whole collarbone area.


This is the general plan for limb vs body proportions. ( I know the details of the body don't match- it's a sketch to show me how big to make the major parts.)

More later.

 

Thanks very much!
I plan to give her a rib level joint, but it should be nice and smooth. I don't want to do an underbust joint and interrupt the space between her breasts- I'm really starting to like the shapes there and how they interact, and I don't want to put a line through that.

My other reason for the decision is that the bottom of the ribs or Natural Waist is a natural place to bend- the human ribcage itself flexes slightly but it doesn't bend where an underbust joint gets put, it only appears to because of shoulder motion. I'm going to try to get her overall body shapes to be as fluid and natural as possible when posing. Every body type has a sculptural grace if it moves in the right ways, and hopefully I can get this one to be able to do the poses it looks best in.
Glad you like my scribbly sketches, hehe.

Thanks! I've been working some more on her.

Heheh, I'll bet she would be! I wanted to make this body type because I haven't seen hardly any sculpts done like this, under claims about joint problems making it "impossible for a doll with a heavy body to stand". My Iplehouse EID man has joints the size of my clenched fist, weighs 7 lbs, and he stands just fine, so I think it is simply that it's not something many sculptors have wanted to do.

Updates, 7/24


Done some more symmetry work on her torso piece today. It's hardly visible but here's another shot of how she looks. I also did some work on her hips, and fiddled subtly with the area around her arm sockets so she'll have better range of motion for her arms.


Here's the basic rough layout of the arms. Tubes, with ball joints on top. Ugly right now, but we'll see. I'm sculpting the limbs in full, then cutting them to put in the elbows and knees.


The legs started out as tubes today too, but I've added a ton of sculpting material. Doing them both at once, step by step, helped them be a lot more symmetrical. I'll have to do that with the arms, too. The thighs be much wider than this pic, but I have to buy more Crayola Air-Dry. I am using that stuff for the major bulking of things since it's much cheaper than La Doll, which goes seamlessly over it, since they're both paperclays, and they seem to be inter-working well.
They're slid onto dowels, which makes them easier to work on, and then later I can slip them back off.


It can't be seen very well here, but I've managed to get a Left and Right going, based on general muscle shapes. My real big challenge is going to be finding something the right size and shape to base my hip ball joints off of. I used wooden beads for the right shape on the shoulder ball joints.

 

Well, since this comment got posted,
Adara's been to my studio and chatted with me about this piece, and we've decided the round shape that fits best for the hip socket is the curve of these cheap cat-toy balls I picked up! They're larger than a ping pong ball but smaller than a pinky rubber toy ball or cue ball. I'm going to be collecting small hemispherical objects for the next few months, methinks, in order to make many molds of nice round shapes for joints! Keep your eyes open and you never know where you'll find something you can use! Schatzi, my dachshund bjd, has joint cups modeled on measuring spoons- the right kind are handy perfect hemispheres in decreasing sizes. Terribly convenient.

Thank you very much! I am working out her shoulder joints currently, and I'll probably get her limbs into roughed-in shape before I come back to joint the torso. I'm planning a rib level joint similar to the joint on my Aoi Tuki Tukihime doll.

 

Yeah, there will be some challenges engineering her so that her body masses move properly around each other, and like the bulky EIDs, there will be some poses she just won't do, but I think she'll make up for that with the poses she'll do that slender figures wouldn't look as good in. Every body type, if healthy, has motions and natural rhythms that let it be beautiful, and the trick here will be to sculpt this doll so she has those rhythms of line and motion best suited to her shapes.

It's so cool you're doing something similar; now I gotta go look at it!

 

Okay re-found this project and the pic links here are dead too, I shall fix them.