Aesthetics Making Lawful Evil Cute

So I have loved bjds for AGES but have finished a whole... zero projects. I've made it about to the sealing before faceup stage and then get too scared because I am a MASSIVE anxious baby. But I sort of fell in love with Aimerai's Ryou sculpt recently so time to try again! Trying my very best not to get too stressed out and accept that baby's first time at well, everything, is not going to be perfect. v__v

I considered character before even committing to buying the actual doll, I love the sharp teeth mouth so so much so I wanted to come up with a character where they would be prominent. Eventually I decided on oni and thus this idiot baby was born.



I had honestly intended to find someone to commission for the horn and ear mods but was having no luck finding anyone who did mods that major and had slots open. So finally impatience won over fear of doing a terrible job and I settled for doing it myself.



Before horns...



And after! Honestly it wasn't nearly as much of a pain to sculpt as I thought it was going to be, they're uh. not quite centered correctly as I really should have made more thorough measurements rather than eyeballing it but that's charming in its own way right?;;



Also rounded out the ears a little, as much as I love pointed ears they just weren't what I wanted in this case. Taking a blade to resin was definitely terrifying but again, the whole thing was a lot easier than I expected.



And with the horns color matched! This was actually the worst part, not because of the actual painting but because my airbrush decided it hated me very much. So I had to disassemble the entire thing to troubleshoot and ended up stripping and repainting like three times. There's a couple of places that after painting I realize I could have sanded a little better but I'm leaving good enough alone.

Currently working on the faceup so I'll try to update soon!

 

@Loptr
Thank you so much! I'm really glad you think it looks natural, that makes me feel so much better. I think I tend to be overly picky about details, especially since I'm used to doing digital art where I can make minute tweaks a lot easier than is possible with sculpting.;;

@0bsequi0us
I fell for the tiny teeth so hard it's just such a cute face! Three fingers is just a style thing I do so I'm staying with the default hands. I think it would be fun to try and match my style with a doll some day but right now it's too far out of my comfort zone haha,

@Gamine
tysm! Even though I'm nitpicky I'm definitely happy overall, honestly even though it's not super complex I don't sculpt much at all so I wasn't expecting it to be very clean. Fortunately color matching is something I've done a lot more so it was actually weirdly a little relaxing!

 

@Mori Carter
Thank you so much! I always have a lot of fun coming up with layout and stuff for refs and just designing characters in general

 

Thank you all for the comments! Assuming I can commit to not starting over I'm hoping to finish up the faceup in the next couple of days!

 

Thanks! Yeah I def have a bad habit of dropping things because I get frustrated getting things to turn out how I'd like as a beginner but I'm trying really hard to look at this like "I gotta just finish it now, if I get better in the future I can come back to it" Cuz like you said it's not like it's permanent permanent. I'm mostly happy with it right now, just a few things I think I'd do differently if I started over. ^^;

 

Little update cuz... I started over on the faceup! I really didn't intend to but I really disliked how the mouth came out. On the plus side I think I know what I'm doing better this time but it does mean I'm back to the beginning with that. In the mean time though I finished up a smaller part with the mask for the yukata outfit!



I'm absolutely hopeless when it comes to sculpting so I actually asked my mom if she could make the mask part the last time she visited me! I think it turned out so cute, she even made it so it would fit if he wore it on his face, the eyeholes match up and everything. I forgot to take pictures early on so please forgive this one being a last minute remembering when I started painting the gold parts;;;



Because I thinned down my paint a lot to limit brush strokes it took a long time to build up the gold to a decent level. It's still a little thin on the horns.



And some dramatic shading to make it look like a proper mask! Mostly pastel but I cleaned up a few parts with watercolor pencil.



And the final result! Now to go back and attempt his face again, I'm determined not to start over this time. T__T

 

So after caving and starting over once I finally finished the faceup! There's some parts I'm not satisfied with but overall for the first time trying this I think he turned out pretty cute. Also redoing the paint for the horns was a giant pain so I'm absolutely not doing it again any time soon.



Process photos under the cut!

Spoiler

Base blushing! I like the anime very blushy aesthetic so it's probably a lot lmao


Eyelashes were not as much of a pain as I thought they were going to be? I did go very simple but I only had to redraw them a few times. It would probably be better to go over them with acrylic but I have very shaky hands so just colored pencil was easier for me to work with.


I unfortunately forgot to take photos quite a few times, but mostly just of going over layers again. At this point all I did was a little cleaning up and adding some gloss to the mouth.

Next step is going to be trying to make a wig... not really looking forward to that but I'll try my best orz

 

@sugarbeta tysm! I'll let her know, she does sculpting for work... not usually for dolls though lol but I was definitely happy she was willing to make it cuz there's no way I would have done as well myself

oh that's a relief! I'm doing glued with synthetic fiber and planning to style like a cosplay wig more or less. I was originally just going to buy a wig and style it but foolishly didn't realize until after I designed him that the spikey hair was going to require more bulk to the wig than a premade one would have :'D

 

@moonlightnocturne thank you so much! I'm kind of anxious about the wig since I've never done anything like it but I guess that's most of what this project is haha

@Brytewolf thanks! even though I'm taking FOREVER to actually make him I've been having a lot of fun doodling him :' D