Modification Making Frank

I just wanted to make like a journal of the process of this doll; it's one of those grail projects for me. I'm excited to finally do this, and wanted to sort of document the whole journey.

I've got a World of Warcraft character that I adore and have had for several years. His name is Felfrank. Last year I made the decision to bring him to life. My spouse ordered me the doll several months before X-Mas as a gift, but due to the pandemic he didn't arrive until after my birthday in April.

Regardless, he made it. He's a 72cm Impldoll Nicolas. I chose this doll without knowing what I was doing or what I was getting into, because he was the only one I saw after scouring collector sites and different doll companies for literally MONTHS trying to find the right one. His face is craggy but still attractive, which was hard to find. Way harder than anyone would suspect, way harder than it should have been. I didn't know dolls of this size are a class of their own, either. Honestly, I knew NOTHING about the doll scene, I just was like "This is him, this is my canvas."

I ordered specialty hands for him, too, so he can have the claws typical of his race. They're articulated, which is neat. I hear articulated hands are a mess for newbies, but I am already neck deep in ad advanced doll and an advanced project, so why not?

I did not want to start on learning to make eyes in the middle of this process, and also reasoned that molds and tools for it would probably be as expensive as ordering eyes, so I went ahead and just looked around. No one had eyes anything like what I wanted, so I went to a bulk gem store and just bought some peridot cabochons. Not cheaper, oh well. But hey, my doll got gems for eyes, so that's pretty rad. They have gold leaf on the back, though, so that needs to be removed. I know it will reduce the reflectiveness of the eyes, but they're still peridots. They'll still be green. I plan to put a light in his head. I really hope it shines though the gems and makes them look lit up with fel demon fire like how his eyes are in the game.

Also my son's cat was helping me unbox him, that's Cheezers.







The process to build him is going to be pretty... long? I don't know. I've never worked with this type of doll or a doll of this size, so there's definitely going to be some trial and error. I reckon this is a VERY long term project, especially considering the scope of what I intend to do with him.

Rough Outline of Phases

Phase 1: Getting Acquainted

• Take the doll apart and put it back together (for learning purposes) ✓
• Unstring/Restring ✓
• Replace Hands ✓
• Modify the neck hole ✓
• Wash doll ✓
• Dye & rinse all resin parts
• Seal

Phase 2: Modifying the head

• Sculpt ears ✓
• Finish ears (sanding & fine tuning) ✓
• Model horns ✓
• Print horns ✓
• Finish horns (sand and fill holes) ✓
• Apply horns ✓

Phase 4: Detailing

• Wash, mask & seal all parts (and seal again between steps!)
• Apply Skintone to all parts
• Faceup
• Horn details
• Body blushing to match final face skin tone
• Tattoos
• Manicure
• Remove gold leaf from eye backs
• Suede
• Wire

Phase 5: Wings (will need to be completed individually rather than as part of final doll)

• Model joints and fixtures
• Print pieces
• Finish pieces
• Paint pieces
• Assemble with membrane
• Affix to doll

Phase 6: Wigging

• Wig Cap
• Wefts
• Apply
• Style

Phase 7: Clothing

• Model bracers, belts, blindfold clips, shin guards
• Print bracers, belts, blindfold clips, shin guards
• Finish printed pieces (sand, fill, construct as needed)
• Paint printed pieces
• Pattern additional belts, tassets pants & blindfold
• Construct fabric pieces & add closures
• Add detail work (gems, paint, embroidery, ect)
• Dress Felfrank

Phase 8: Weapons

• Model handguards
• Print & finish guards. Make 2 copies, for a total of 4 handguards; 2 left, 2 right
• Use additional copies (1L, 1R) to sculpt blades with clay. Bake. Remove from resin guards.
• Make silicone molds of the blades.
• Cast with clear resin
• Coat finished blades with clear resin & cure.
• Paint & seal copy A of handguards
• Affix blades with resin
• Insert LED

Finished????

Maybe???

Who knows, other stuff might crop up. It's a rough outline.

 

I got excited about the horns and skipped a few parts, whoopsie. I'll get to them, I will.

My first step was modelling the horns. So for this, we start right at the beginning: we get a copy of the character right off of the wowarmory and drop it into wowmodelviewer. I removed his hair, beard, clothes and accessories in the model viewer and exported the model file. Then came the tedious bit; putting it into blender and deleting vertices. Now, let me tell y'all, this model was so freaking dirty. It had literally THOUSANDS of redundant vertices. It took more than an hour to clean the model up. Once there, I deleted everything but the horns and changed any problem areas that might interfere with fitting the horns to the head.

Now, here was a tricky part- sizing. This was an extremely frustrating process of moving the horns from chitubox for slicing and prep to blender for adjustments to tinkercad for size references and cutting and back and forth a million times. Once I KNEW the horns were the right size and shape and nice and clean, I sliced them and twisted them to fit the buildplate on my resin printer.

This was my first time using a resin printer, so I give myself slack. The entire process of preparing the horns (and learning how to do so and use all the software I needed on the way) took me a solid 6 hours, but it was my first go, so I think it'll be easier in the future when I want to do things like this. The only thing I knew how to do anything with is blender, but I actually took modelling courses on Udemy in preparation for creating resin printed dolls. After all, that was the point of getting a resin printer in the first place.

The first horn print took about 12 hours. There were... complications. But they did print and I got an idea of what I would be dealing with.

Here they were on my prep counter, waiting to be finished (detached, cleaned, cured, ect).



After I got them loose, I saw the errors and problems with them that I didn't know were there. Also, they were so heavy! I couldn't figure out WHY! Also the tips of them were completely... gone. They just failed to print.

I did a test fit knowing these would not be my final product, but oh my gosh! Did that test fit make me feel like all the tears had been WORTH it!



The size! The fit against his head! The MAJESTY!

It was here that I realized why they were so damn heavy- I had made them hollow, but I didn't put in a venting hole for liquid resin. The weight was literally liquid resin just sitting inside the horns! I knew these were not going to be the ones I used, so I didn't panic!

Back into software I went to fix the issues with supports and venting holes and set up for another looong print.

This one only took about 10 hours, though. I don't really know why, but it is what it is!

When these were done oml... they were SO MUCH LIGHTER! They were a bit smaller, but they had the full tips and they weighed NOTHING compared to the first set!

I was so pleased I did a little dance.

Here's a comparison photo of the two pairs, with the good pair being the one on the bottom:



I won't be affixing them permanently to his head until after I sculpt his ears, because they will make it unwieldy to work with, but they do have to go on before the faceup because the bases will need to be blended into his head properly.

I think I will use apoxie sculpt to make sure they stay the frigg on there, and possiby top it with something like premier clay for details.

Things started with no small amount of trouble, but also I couldn't be happier with my results.

 

Today I decided it was time to take Felfrank apart and clean him really well. I'm not going to put him back together just now; I think I've decided to dye him and I'll wait until I do a test on his unwanted hands. Airbrushing this body is unreasonable, after having taken him apart. The peeling from the handling I'd have to do to put him together is just.

Out of the question.

While taking him apart I took some pictures so I could remember the orientation of his joints and hooks. Also, I've run into some issues I didn't know I would be dealing with, especially so soon!

It turns out that the towel I was sitting him on, despite being like 15 years old, still had enough dye in it to stain him!

HORROR OF HORRORS!

Look out, naked butt incoming:



The marks on his butt look like pencil. I think it's from the towel? Maybe it's just from not being dressed? I'm not sure, but I hate it. I hope the cleaning will get rid of it, and then if not, the buffing.

The real problem is in the torso, however. Or more specifically, the neck.

His head has always been slightly angled and I couldn't get it straight. I thought it was because maybe his strings were too tight, but while I was taking the doll apart, I realized it was only tight in the arms, which were unrelated to the head at all!

After I got him all apart and was inspecting the torso, I saw it. I thought I imagined it or misunderstood what I was seeing, but no- it was there.



His neckhole...




...is crooked.

This is a new doll from the factory and very late, I might add. They didn't send me a defective item, did they? I've been trying to research if this is a deliberate design feature for the Impldoll 72 CM Idol TGB but I cannot find any clear photos of the actual hole in the neck. Also photos of the body with a head don't seem to list like mine does- he literally can't look straight! I will search more, but the fact remains:

This cannot stay crooked.

Now, I have no intention of waiting another 8 months for a replacement. Seems like it's that time.

It's time for...


surgery

 

Yeah, I have some photos of him.

Here's a good look at his horns:


Here's a nice front picture of his face, which I know you cannot see his eyes in this because of the blindfold. The finished doll will wear one of those, but the eyes underneath are definitely green and on fire, and I just wanted to include it for my own personal happiness. The swirly blue-purple stuff isn't part of the design, it's just some corruption from in-game mechanics at the time.



And finally, some whole body shots of him. The coloration in the second one is the most accurate to his true appearance. I estimate him to be around 7 feet or 213cm tall, not including his horns (figuring that out was part of how I ended up deciding how big to print them. Compared to what size I think he would be irl, the doll is 1:4, but compared to an average person it's 1:3, so I've been sizing his stuff based on the assumption that he's 1:4 scale. A lot of the flat detail on his clothing won't be flat on the doll, like his belt, tasset, and rivets in his bracers and junk.





Today I purchased some dye for his skin. His original hands will be my test subjects. I based my choices in dye on a thread I found here on Den of Angels, but I still need to figure out the right ratios to make it more pastel than it is- his skin is an odd shade of steely blue-purple (dull periwinkle??), but it isn't particularly dark. I chose Jaquard's iDye for synthetics in gunmetal.

I'll need to modify his neck and learn how to assemble/disassemble his new hands before I dye him.

 

Just a small update today. I was feeling SO daunted by actually modifying this 400 dollar doll that I just took him apart and let him sit on a shelf for a while. Today, I was feeling especially courageous, I guess?

It is finally time to tackle the neck issue. There are some photos above, so I won't repost them for brevity's sake.

I broke out my dremel, fitted it with a cylinder diamond bit, and put fresh particulate filters on my aspirator, then got started.

The first step was to mark out where I wanted the hole to be, so I did. I forgot to take a picture of it before I got to sanding, but I did get a pic before all the sharpie had been sanded away.



Once happy with the shape, I wiped the resin particulate up with some shop towels. Here's an after shot. The change is small but it makes such a huge difference!



I think the side I did is neater than the side I didn't touch, but I mean- it's MY work, if I don't gloat, who will?

The test fit was a little loose since I just held the elastic wrapped around a pencil at the base, but it DID fit well, and now Frank can turn his head and it doesn't lean!

I was all freaked out over nothing, I guess!

The next phase will be test dying his original hands to get the color right for the full body dye job.

 

Whew, okay. Today's update is so big I think I need to break it into two pieces.

Let's start with the bad:

I tested the dye out. To do this, I took my spare hands and sliced them up. It was super macabre.



I tied a piece of thread to each part so I could dip them easily, then prepped a work area in my kitchen with an old pot we don't use for cooking anymore. I was initially adding tiny scoops of dye to the boiling water but it wasn't working so I decided that I could just buy another pack of dye if this went well and dumped it all in the pot.



I held the pieces in for 10-60 seconds, trying to get varying shades, followed by a quick wash with just water after the piece cooled.

What I found was that there's no way for me to hide the green undertone of the resin itself. No matter how long I left it in, the green was still THERE. I'm not sure if it's visible in the photos but in real life, it looks really gross, like literally Night of the Living Dead green-grey. I don't have a zombie, here, I have a night elf!

A more minor and solvable issue is that there were marks wherever the item was tied, but I think a slotted spoon or clever tying would have dealt with it.

If I had not started with a green doll, I would have figured this out. The green tone is just not hideable with gray dye. I could try dyeing him red first and then gray but I don't know that I could reliably get even color with two different color dips. The doll was supposed to have a nice gray skintone to start and not need color at all, but... well, it is what it is.

After this tragic realization, I sat around for a day mulling over my next steps in my stinky, dye-smelly house.

It was my wife that finally came up with the solution!

She went and got the spare wrist parts for the hands and settled into her airbrushing station (she does Gundams & model kits) with a bottle of primer gray paint and this is what she showed me:



Again, I'm not sure how visible it is in the photos, but in real life the difference is profound. The one on the left is the original greenish tone and the one on the right is the primed tone.

Turns out, Vallejo acrylic primer gray is actually the perfect skintone?!??!

This necessitated another expenditure- my wife's workshop is just as cramped as mine and we'd been talking about just biting the bullet and picking up a new airbrush and compressor kit for my space so we don't have to keep moving things back and forth, and this latest setback just tipped it. My all-in-one handheld just doesn't have enough pressure and beads up all the time anyways. I also took the time to choose a few purple and violet pan pastels so I could blush him properly when that time comes.

Because I won't be dip dyeing him and instead painting him, I decided to go ahead and mount his horns and then sculpt the ear modifications he needed before his supplies get here.

To Be Continued...

 

As promised, MORE!

This post will be photo heavy.

After realizing I could just paint right on him, I decided to add the head mods he would need prior to priming!

The first step was scary and I cried the whole time, ask anyone:



Once I had the holes drilled above and below each ear and two in his forehead, I threaded some 16 gauge wire in and fixed them in place with 5 minute epoxy from the dollar store. Here he is, being a beautiful butterfly.



Next, I added his horns onto the wires via drainage holes I had already built into the print. I had such a hard time getting them to stay on! I used E6000 first, but it wasn't setting properly because I didn't have a great way to hold it while it did its thing. I ended up using some alcohol to reclean the whole surface of any epoxy, then fixed the horns with Krazy Glue to get an initial hold. Once they were actually staying put, I jammed a syringe full of E6000 under each horn for a more permanent solution.



Now it was time to go get references. For this, I just logged in and went to a barber to put my guy's hair up in-game so I could really look at his ears. I knew I wouldn't have something exactly like them because in WoW, they are so over-the-top that I couldn't possibly make the ears look like that and still match his new, hyper realistic face and body, so I decided I would just use them as a baseline. My friend Kari even got me a super up-close view of the inside of the ear.



Once I had my references, it was time to sculpt!

I put some sausages of La Doll air dry clay around each horn, in the visible drainage holes, and just globbed it on his ears. It looked terrible. I left this bit to dry overnight because wet innards causes mold no matter what your medium is. Subsequent layers didn't need as much time because they were over-all thinner.



Round 1 sanding was when things started to really look like something. I did this work with a nail file and a detail sanding stick.



I think there was a problem with my respirator this day because I was a bit coughy and my throat was sore, so I decided to fix that before continuing. No one wants bits of rocks in their lungs.

Next I filled in gaps and did a little bit of the detail work.



Now, if you haven't worked with La Doll- you can use water to get things to stick to previous work, and it's better to have slightly wet clay. Not too wet or it disintegrates, but wet-ish. It's easier to work with if you dip your fingers in a standing bowl of water, pat them on a piece of paper or your wrist, then lightly rub the clay with your dampened fingers both on the dried pieces and the yet-to-be added pieces. In some instances I get it almost wet enough to paint with, because a tiny, stiff paintbrush is one of my favorite sculpting tools.

Remember that you do need to go back and forth. No one sculpts in one pass. Sculpt in phases; it'll save a lot of heartache.

Here we are with more sanding and another layer of detail work added. Since these layers were thinner, I was only waiting 5 or 6 hours between adding and sanding. Immediately following sanding, I would dust the whole thing with a dry paint brush and clean my area up, then add the next layer of wet clay and sculpt it.



Finally, after several layers, I had something I was happy with. I touched up the tips & undersides of his horns at this point as well, to make them a little less unfinished. I made sure to sand it close to his skin for what I hope will be a seamless finish. It feels seamless. I guess only paint will tell how good I did. The last step was to take a wet paintbrush and brush water over all the sculpted surfaces to tack down all the particles and fluff from the clay for a smooth finish, and give the resin a good wipe with a cotton bud dipped in alcohol.



And this is where I am now. My airbrush came in today, but my primer did not. It's actually fine though because he can have an extra day or two to cure fully.

I feel like he's actually starting to look like something!

 

So, just an update about this project.

Following all the stuff going on at Blizzard, I wasn't sure how I felt about this doll. I put him on a shelf and left him there, along with my other WoW merch, my authenticator and my will to log into that game.

I have had time to think a lot about it, and I decided I will continue work on the doll. I don't think I will be ever be able to play the game again, but I spent nearly 16 years- my entire adult life, logged in. I made so many friends, and even met my spouse there. Whatever the current state of affairs, it was a part of my life, and Felfrank was one of my favorite things to do, to be, to see, to work on.

When I played with him I felt happy. He had his own personality that just rubbed off on me, in and out of game, and made me feel like a nicer, better person. In my headcanon, he was such a chill person who had his struggles because of what he was, but was still very much trying to be a decent being and do good things. I wanted to be able to do that- to be flawed but okay with it.

Also the idea of him "re-exploring" life after so long sequestered and imprisoned with other beings like him was too funny to me. While I was out doing things in the game world, I often considered what Felfrank thought of them- I think he tried to find the funny parts.

fairyfrank by Missy P, on Flickr

As his story developed, I found that prior to joining The Cause, he contributed nothing to his society and had no prospects. He was literally a shiftless beach bum, whose parents were disappointed in him and who never had any intention of getting a job. His time was 1000% spent vibing and being an example to good little elven children of what not to be. He never was really "bad" per se, just uninterested in the hustle of being part of his community but also unwilling to leave and stop taking space.

When the attacks came and so many elves found themselves following Illidan, he saw all these literal children selling their souls and he thought, "Well man, that ain't right." And then that was it. He literally did what he did because he knew that he was not valuable to his people and so much potential was being thrown away in favor of becoming a monster with a half-life. Why not just offer himself up instead of a bright kid with a real future?

Vengeance is something that is inextricably tied to Demon Hunters, and I think the fact that Felfrank did not do it out of vengeance is part of why he maintained his generally happy outlook on life. He saw himself as taking up the glaives to protect people in what he deemed the most effective way, rather than to get back at the Burning Legion for taking from him. When his own kind put him in prison, he wasn't angry. He knew that he had the potential to do great harm if he ever lost control.

I admire him.

In the end, I decided it is okay for me to have an homage to that part of my life, and this doll based on a character that gave me such joy, and that I have spent so much time and effort on is just that. A reminder of a really long, mostly happy part of my life, which I have left behind.