40–49cm Dolls Jadu - A DiM inspired-ish MSD head (COMPLETE)

Hi! This is the most rapidfire quick doll project I've ever done I think, and I definitely didn't expect it to be the first BJD head I actually finished but here we are.

Here's the background story under a spoiler so you can skip straight to the images if you want:

Spoiler: background

My first Doll In Mind doll was a Benetia, who I really love a lot - I couldn't really tell you exactly why, normally the style doesn't appeal. I prefer things to be either much more realistic or much more stylised, I'm less keen on middle-grounds. However, I love her, and that's great. At some point I decided I really wanted to get her a girlfriend, but DiM was already constantly sold out then (and would later shut down), so I looked to other companies. I went with a DollZone Doreen, because from company photos, I thought her aesthetic might match Benetia. After all, DiM dolls have signature short noses and low/small cheeks, I thought it'd work out.

Long story short, it didn't, and even after extensive modwork, changing and rebuilding Doreen's face, I really don't like it and it doesn't fit with Claris at all. I ended up with many frustrations with the doll, some of which you can read on her doll profile here (which I guess I'll either have to remove or leave out of date since she's about to become off-topic!). This week, I finally decided I was at my limit of being fed up with this doll. If I couldn't find any heads made by others that would go with my Benetia, I was going to have to make my own!

And so, here we are.

On to the progress!

Company pictures of Benetia on the left, with my sketches of how I wanted Jadu to match next to them. I wanted her to be different of course, there'd be all kinds of problems with copying DiM, but I did want her to proportionately match. That means using key proportional elements like the largeness of Benetia's head, her short nose, the squarish face.
First initial sculpt of the head on the right - already the eyes are too big, cheeks are too high, face is too narrow.


Second pass on the sculpt is much closer, the eyes are smaller and the cheeks have been lowered. In the end I couldn't get the dimples looking right so sadly they don't exist in the sculpt.


At this point I did a test print, and immediately noticed some issues. Somehow she was very cute digitally, but in print form looked completely different? More mature, less cute. Turns out I'd left orthographic view on all the time and never once checked it in perspective mode and that's what was throwing me off!


A few more sculpt tweaks, and then this test print. Now she was cute again! But somewhere along the line she had stopped matching Benetia.


So I went back to the sculpt, shortened that nose, flattened those cheeks and made the jaw more square. Here's the mock face-up I did on it, and that's when I knew I'd landed on the right look!


As a recap, here is everything so far. The two on the upper left are the DollZone Doreen that I am looking to replace. I think you can see why I thought she might match the DiM aesthetic from her face proportions, but IRL the result isn't satisfactory at all. The Jadu I have made, on the lower right, is a lot more what I was expecting/looking for when purchasing a doll to match the benetia.



And here is the final test print! She's ready to go into resin now, as you can see she sits pretty well with Benetia! Her eyes are maybe still a tad too big, but eyelashes will make them smaller and I'm reluctant to mess about with them too much because when I say "a tad", I really mean a tad, like 1mm.

I hope you enjoyed her progress so far. Next time I update, it'll be with the resin head!

 

Time for an update!
I had a lot of issues printing this head in resin, it's the first time I've done this and I'm learning as I go. There were about five failed prints before the first "successful" print (I'll get to that in a minute), and I'm pretty sure the issue every time was that the orientation and the supports weren't working together.

Here's the first print!

I'll be honest, the fact that it was super waxy looking even after washing and curing was my first indication there was a problem. Generally these things should come out matt smooth. But I sanded it down in case it was a strange outer layer and proceeded with my next step, which was dyeing.

I didn't take a picture of the next step, and I should have really to document the process, but the short story is the head didn't survive the heat. If something's gone wrong during the process, and the structural integrity of the resin is botched, you don't really know until you start trying to work with it and then bam; cracks and flakes.


You can see some of the damage here, as I tried to fill in her multitude of new cracks with primer, but shortly after this I just concluded forget it, I'll reprint her.

Sometimes you really do just get a bad print. In addition, I use eco resin, which is less documented and seems to have its own quirks and failures next to regular resin, so there's a lot of troubleshooting involved with even basic printing.


Here was her second successful print, and this time her shininess here is due to wet sanding, and not due to bad printing! I decided to follow some advice to sand before curing, whereas I normally sand after curing (I'm extra cautious, I want to cure EVERYTHING asap because I don't want even an atom of uncured resin going anywhere). I think the advice is more relevant to miniatures which will be primed tbh, but that's fine!


This time she survived her dye bath! She did get a very small amount of flaking around behind her ears, but I'd call that a big victory if I'm honest. It of course is a little extra blotchy due to her sanding, but that's totally fine, I'll be airbrushing the face anyway - the dye is mostly to make sure that there's a good strong base coat so that if paint chips off or needs renewing, it isn't just white underneath!

I hope you like her. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do her face-up straight away but I'll try to do it soon, and her new wig and eyes are both on the way too. So I guess my next and final update post will be the whole finished look! I think in the end, especially in printed form, she doesn't really look like a DiM doll, but she definitely still sits well enough next to Benetia. I'll be sure to take some pictures of them together!

 

@mincy Thank you, that’s great to hear! I actually... quickly roughed out a half-closed eyes version last night, so I guess I might be adding to this project!

 

Last update for a while!

I've got stuff coming up, so I decided just to go ahead and paint her so the project being unfinished wouldn't irk me whilst I was busy with higher priority stuff.


Just like the primer, painting really highlighted some of the nicks, pockmarks, and particularly a few heavy layer lines on the head. They were actually extremely difficult to photograph, but very noticeable IRL. I'm not 100% sold on my solution, but I decided to try a melodramatic scar to disguise the biggest one. I've never done scars before, so it's messy, but I suppose that's not unusual for a scar.


A fun collage of her progress!


Her final eyes and wig won't arrive for some time, but here she is next to the mock-up. I ended up giving her thicker eyeliner so she'd match my other dolls in this crew. They all have somewhat stylised face-ups.


Finally here she is all together! 3D printed resin is so much harder to work with than I ever expected. I mod my BJDs all the time, and the thing about casted resin is that it's so hardy, it puts up with me doing so much to it. I dye them multiple times, cut them up, sand them down, put milliput on them, take milliput back off, etc, and they stand up to all of it. The printed resin was so much fussier during every step of the way. Sometimes I found myself wishing I'd made the head out of traditional clay like I used to, or looked into casting it, so I definitely don't think 3D printing a head is the "quick and easy" way at all! I'm glad to have had the experience, but I don't think I'm going to be rushing to do it again haha.

I hope you like her all the same! I'm not sure if my next update will just be the totally-finalised head, or if I will go ahead and make the sleeping-eye version too, it probably depends on how much I want to subject myself to this process again!

 

@StellaMarigold Thank you! I suspect there will be for sure, but I don't want to switch to standard resin because it's far more toxic. I could try another brand of plant-based resin, and I may do that at some point.

 

I'm here with the final update now that her wig and eyes are here!
Here are some final photos of the full doll:



You'll be able to see more of her on my Instagram! Thank you for enjoying this thread!

 

@black.hole.entropy thanks so much! I am very happy with her for sure, she goes with my DiM msds very well!

 

@deadish thank you! Whilst 3D printing in resin has been around for some time, I don't think it's really taken off in BJD hobby outside of printing masters for finishing and casting until very recently. I'm really glad it's become affordable now though!

@celga Thanks so much! Haha honestly I would have been very very happy to purchase a head instead, the aspect I specifically enjoy about this hobby is my dolls not being something I've made, but I reached the end of my patience! At the time, there was some 300% inflation going on for DiM heads on the 2nd hand market. The frustration with that was enough to make me take matters into my own hands, and I'm glad I did in the end!