Hello all! As you can probably tell from my work below, I'm very, very new to the world of doll-making and sculpting in general. I'm having so much fun learning, though! View attachment 52 This is a portion of my current WIP; a skinny little alien man. He still has a lot of work to be done, but so far I'm honestly pretty happy with how it's working. The biggest problem I'm having, though, is the knee joints. Everything else I'm fairly confident I can get to work, but the double-jointed knees are giving me a terrible time. I've been trying to follow Batchix's wonderful tutorial, but I'm pretty certain I've done something wrong. Firstly, I clearly didn't make a big enough notch at the back of the knee, because after I baked it the joint couldn't bend. I tried carving them down just a little bit, but the Super Sculpey I'm using was too thin (he's a pretty small doll) and ended up breaking off far closer to the knee than I intended. Here's what's left (please excuse the horrible grainy photos. I wasn't able to snap a picture before it got dark ) View attachment 53 View attachment 54 Other than the broken sides, I still feel like something's wrong with his knee. Other folks seem to get the middle piece to sit nicely at the top of the joint, instead of having such jagged pieces of the upper and lower leg sticking off like that. Maybe I'm just being overly critical. What do you think?
It looks like maybe the peanut doesn't sit close enough to the front of knee. Super Sculpey is hard to work with sometimes because the thinner it gets the more likely it is to crack. I don't build dolls out of it any more for that reason... i like the knee to be thinner. It's fine once it's cast, but it's pretty delicate when it's super sculpey. One tiny dolls like that it's sometimes better to just do a single joint so that the doll isn't so delicate and fiddly.
Do you have a different medium you've had more success with at the smaller size? I've since tried to re-sculpt the knees twice more, and I keep having problems with the Super Sculpey cracking or breaking. It's very frustrating. Your tutorials have been an enormous help, though. Thank you so much for posting them.
I'm currently working on a doll of this size in carving wax which I find is a really useful material to rapid prototype joints with and try different styles of jointing. Unfortunately I haven't got any photographs but I've managed to make double knee and double elbow joints in the wax without brittleness problems I experienced while using in polymer clay. Wax proves to be a steep and time consuming learning curve and was very expensive in terms of hot waxing equipment (not a necessity, but I'd be lost without my electric wax pot and temperature adjustable pens), so it has it's pros and cons. I would really recommend epoxy putty though, I'm only familiar with "greenstuff/kneadite" but there are many different brands. It cures over time, usually less than 24 hours, and becomes a very strong durable material even when sculpted very thin. It's the material of choice for artists who sculpt or modify miniatures in the 28mm range, since it is very durable and can hold extremely fine detail. OutsideTheBox and a few other artists on the forum have worked with it to produce stunning dolls.
I second the Apoxy Sculpt idea... it's very strong and easy to sand. I use it to modify my resin masters. I mostly make my dolls out of paperclay any more. Believe it or not but they have less of a tendency to break than the super sculpey does- at least for me.
I have almost exactly the same problem as you do. I work in super sculpey too and the doll I’m working on is of a similar scale and my knee joints looks very much like yours right now. The thing I'm going to try right now is to add a little to the front of the joint piece to give it a more rounded shape and remove a bit from the inside of the leg parts to match. There shouldn’t be any problems with cracking of the thin edges as long as the joint parts fit nicely in their sockets so that the main force is at the bottom of the sockets. I am also going to try to shorten the joint piece slightly ad fill up the sockets accordingly and hopefully that will bring the parts closer to each other. I t will affect the range of the joint slightly, but hopefully not enough to really matter. If I have to, I'll reshape the back of the leg parts a little to compensate and give it some of the range back. Since I have almost exactly the same problem I thought I could at least share my thoughts, for what it’s worth.
