Aesthetics Making Magpie (shelling a tiefling rogue) (doll nudity within)

You know how sometimes you start a D&D campaign with your friends in the late winter of 2020 and roll up a tiefling rogue and then a global pandemic hits and the world isn't quite the same, and you're not quite the same as you were at the very start of that campaign, but regardless of what you've been through nearly four years later you still have your friends and your tiefling rogue?
Okay, I know my experiences aren't universal. Point is....I really love my D&D character and the campaign my friends and I share. The best part of D&D is it's like starring in a TV show (with your friends) and deciding what the characters are going to do and say (with your friends), and then when you're done playing you get to be the biggest fans in the fandom (with your friends, and yes, there is fanfiction).

Anyway, I decided to shell my tiefling rogue because she's incredibly important to me.

Spoiler: Meet Magpie.

If you really want to get into her specs, she's a chaotic neutral tiefling rogue with the thief roguish archetype and the piercer feat. Basically, she's good at sneaking, stabbing, stealing, and sticking her foot in her mouth because her people skills? Not great.

Here's her project journal, loosely organized by tasks. These are based on me running around like a headless chicken, and are absolutely not in anything approaching chronological order

Part I: Doll ✓
Her sculpt, what I got, and additional masochism on my part.
Part II: Mods
In no particular order she's going to need: tief ears modded onto existing ears; SP head modded for open eyes; tattoos; painted nails; body blushing; piercings (studs up ears to cartilage and nip bars) Bust and hand painting/blushing and nip piercings completed as of 11/20/23. Tiefling ears modded by Angel Toast as of 3/21/2025; SP head modded for open eyes as of end of year 2024.
Part III: Horns
Tiefling horns fitted to magnet bases. Do I feel brave enough to sculpt these myself? We'll see! Horns ordered from Synthetic Ephemera, arrived, finished barring any potential painting as of 3/20/24.
Part IV: Faceup
I am absolutely not doing this myself, she deserves better than my crummy attempts at eyebrows. Good thing I already have an artist in mind! Head 1 of 3 modded and painted by Angel Toast as of 3/21/2025
Part V: Wig
Her hair is complicated and I'm not the best wigmaker. Welp. Custom alpaca wig commissioned from milklegsdolls on instagram as of 10/21/23, finished and in hand as of 3/20/24.
Part VI: Eyes
In-game her eyes are white and slightly luminescent. IRL I'm not sure how to pull off the luminescence, but I'm definitely going to be commissioning an eye maker. Eyes ordered from Secret Art Studio, finished and in hand as of 3/20/24. New custom pearl eyes completed and in hand as of 3/21/2025.
Part VII: Wardrobe
A non-exhaustive list: 1 set rogue's wear, Alderglassian casual wear, embroidered coat and dress set, casual D&D fantasy wear, rogue boots, fancy boots, and a suite of modern clothing (including a battle jacket, lingerie, and more boots. She's a shoes girl.) All of this will be interesting because I am a novice sewist at best, but what I lack in experience I make up for in audacity. I also have.....extremely vague aspirations of making her a jeweled body harness set with opals (purely for Plot Reasons, I assure you.)
I am a clown and a fool and we've had a masquerade ball in-game since I posted this. Yes, I need to make her masquerade ballgown. (underskirt fabric and seed beads purchased 2/19/24).
Part VIII: Props:
Guess who thinks their audacity can help them craft the entirety of her inventory in 1/4 scale? Including but not limited to: Backpack, coin purse, sleeping roll, tinderbox, 50 feet of rope (hempen), potions, lantern, candle, ball bearings, bell, boyfriend walkie talkie sending stone, thieves' tools, Horn of Silent Alarm, and so on.
Doll stand/mini scene started 3/17/24.
Part IX: Weapons/armor
Rogue leathers, darkwing daggers, crossbow, band of resistance, and so on

Part I: The Doll ✓

When I first started thinking about shelling her, the primary issue I ran into was finding a good match for her skin tone. She's pale gray, and while there's been a huge expansion into fantasy resin tones over the last decade or so, most companies that offer gray resin didn't really have a sculpt I thought would suit her.
Eventually, I resigned myself to buying a doll, dyeing it, and then finding a faceup artist who would be willing to work on dyed resin - but then in June Fairyland did their gray and blue resin event. Since I had been considering Mirwen (either F60 or Minifee) for Magpie, it was a no-brainer.

I ended up ordering the full doll, SP head, optional heel feet, and two extra sets of hands. (Once again, thank you Denver Doll layaway). She arrived on October 20th.





As soon as I had her in hand I knew Mirwen was the right sculpt. She can toe that line between intense and carefree that Magpie likes to dance over, and the gray resin is gorgeous in person. I'm also really happy with the optional hands I got for her - look at how sassy this set is! She definitely doesn't know what happened to that heirloom ring you just had in your pocket that just happened to mysteriously vanish right after she accidentally bumped into you. Why would she know anything about that??

One thing I am considering is trying to hunt down another SP head, so she can have not two, but three different heads/expressions. The SP head she already has is probably going to be modded into a fully open-eyed head with what I call her Rogue Look; if I can find another one I'd really like a half-open eye/"romantic glance" optional head. So uh....if you know anyone selling an elf gray Mirwen SP head, let me know.

Other Updates as of 10/25/23:
Wig progress: I've secured a commission slot with milklegsdolls on instagram, who will be able to do Magpie's oil slick blue hair more justice than I could ever hope to!

And last night I did what I could to blush some hands and paint some nails before it got too rainy and cold for me to spray MSC outside.




I'm not the best at blushing or painting, but I am incredibly pleased with how these turned out. Amazing how much depth a little pastel and acrylic paint adds!

If you've made it this far, thanks so much! I hope you're enjoying coming on this journey with me.

 

Thank you so much! I'd love to see your bard - what sculpt did you choose for a halfling?

Thank you for your kind comment! You may be on to something with jewel eyes - my Minifee Hwayu came with a set of sparkly jewel eyes so I may see how they look in Magpie. I was also considering commissioning a pair of glow in the dark eyes, but those usually have a greenish cast to their light rather than the white I'm hoping for. It'll be fun to see what works best!

Haha, I'm glad it resonated with you! I've been seriously pushing myself out of my comfort zone with this project, but again - the audacity. Glad to know it helped me pull off the blushing!
As for the entourage, well. My girlfriend isn't into BJDs but the temptation to order one in blue resin during Fairyland's event to shell her moon elf artificer Prudence was ENORMOUS. If they do another fantasy resin tone event, I may not be able to resist temptation a second time. Luckily one of our party members (and our DM!) are into BJDs, so our tabaxi druid Dr. Doctor was just ordered a few weeks ago from Dream Valley. It'll be fun taking pictures of the shenanigans Magpie and Dr will get into!
Now if I could just find a sculpt that would suit Magpie's kinda-sorta boyfriend (also a changeling bard, coincidentally!)

 

October 29th Update:
Not gonna lie, up until about 2pm today I was kind of dreading the idea of taking apart a Minifee. There are so many Fiddly Bits. Every doll I've restrung has been an older clunky Volks or Luts, so there's not much in the way of Fiddly Bits - but either way, I got her taken apart and the Fiddly Bits are safely sorted into L and R bags. I'm still kind of dreading the idea of restringing her, but she's probably going to be in pieces for a good long while. That's a problem for Future Me.

On to the work!

Spoiler: There are doll boobies in here

Would you believe I've never blushed a full body/torso before? I was hoping to keep it very subtle, and I hope I've achieved that. I had to blend something like four or five colors of pastel chalk together until I found a shade that I liked, and applied it with a fairly light hand. All of the little details on the Minifee body really come to life when there's a little bit of blushing!

Then, because #Audacity, I decided I was going to try to give her a couple of scars. More mod work I've never done before! I ended up going with a method I saw linked here on DoA, which is laying down a layer of pastel/mapping out the scar, sealing, applying a thin layer of white glue (I used Aleene's Quick Dry Tacky Glue, which worked like a charm) and then shading/blending out the glue once it's dry.



Doesn't look especially subtle when it's just drawn out in watercolor pencil, right?



Here's the layer of glue. It was easiest to squeeze a drop of it into a paint palette, dip a small thin paintbrush into it, and then dot/lay the glue out a little bit at a time to control how the scar would look. I also did a little experiment with a more circular-shaped scar (from a crossbow bolt) on the back of her torso, but unfortunately I think it looks more like a zit than a proper scar. Ah well. It's reversible.



And here they are all dried and shaded/blended. I'm rather pleased with them! I like the slight shininess the glue has when it's dry, it really does look like scarred skin that's still kind of tight and shiny. I may end up adding a few other nicks and scars in the future, especially if I can figure out how to make a good-looking crossbow bolt scar. (She got nailed by a crossbow a few sessions back. This was after she'd fallen off a roof into garbage. She was having a bad night. )

Finally, while the glue was drying, I wrapped up her hand blushing and manicures.




Not bad for a day's work. Unfortunately, this project is probably going to be at a standstill for the next week or so until I can get more MSC. I'm also hoping to order some caviar beads for nail art for her piercings, and get a lead on an artist who can paint her thigh tattoos. Until next time!

 

November 20th update:
It's been fairly slow going since work has been busy beyond reason and I haven't really had much energy in the evenings, so I haven't really been able to work on much of the smaller projects like getting her clothes and accessories started. I did, however, wrap up the work on her bust, which I'll get into below....but first, I may have done a little oopsie.

Basically, I was having no luck finding another elf gray Mirwen SP head. I'm not even sure another one exists. And because I am an animal, I didn't want to work with just one optional head for Magpie because she deserves everything. Why have one optional expression head when you can have two, right?
Enter the last elf gray Mirwen in-stock on Denver Doll, stage left. Enter my recently-increased credit card balance, stage right. A financially unwise decision was made.
My mantra while I was checking out:



So now I think I have a monopoly on elf gray Mirwens. It's a good problem to have. I also got two other pairs of optional hands - one to blush/paint, and one to eventually modify to grip her daggers, but we'll cross that knifey bridge when we get to it. The order also came with the Dark Elf Soo A ("pouty") head, which I am going to be making into a campaign NPC as a gift for our DM when the 4-year campaignaversary rolls around in January.

But I digress. On to the project progress!



Nice head you have there. Don't mind if I do.

Spoiler: There are doll boobies beneath this cut

Revisiting the blushing I had done in my previous update, and especially looking at the layers of pastels I'd put down, I realized they looked fairly...flat. This was going to be a potential problem with placing the piercings, because Minifee bust nips aren't actually prominent enough to look like the piercings are actually...pierced through the flesh, I suppose? In the end, I decided that darkening the most prominent spot of the nipple for a spot of 3D trickery was the wisest course of action.



Please ignore my nasty palette in favor of my new favorite find for doll piercings: caviar beads for nail art. These are essentially tiny, tiny ball bearings. I bought a kit from amazon with several colors, and ended up going with the smallest size in the dark silver. As you can see just from the side-by-side, even the next size up would be far too big.

Spoiler: you guessed it, another spoiler for doll boobies

Here's the final results, and I'm fairly pleased with how the bust turned out! I'm hoping the glue is sturdy enough to hold up to getting her dressed eventually, but it's not the end of the world if these eventually pop off. It's not like I don't have a billion other caviar beads in my faceup/mod supplies box now

And, slightly less exciting....the new set of hands.





Thrilling, right? This isn't how I imagined my glamorous thirties - squinting down at tiny nails through my magnifying lamp on a Wednesday night and discouraging my cats from chewing on doll hands. (It's the tiny bags the hands are in, mostly. They're plastic baggie addicts.)

That's it for this update! I'm hoping to get some sewing done over the Thanksgiving holiday since I simply do not feel like cooking this year. Until next time!

 

Hello everyone! Long time no update Between the general insanity of the holidays, briefly switching to another project (shelling a campaign NPC for the DM with the Minifee elf grey DES I got with Magpie's third head), a bout of severe depression and lack of proper tools/weather to work, progress has slowed down a bit. But slow is fine, just as long as it hasn't stopped. On to the updates!

Going chronologically: I ordered her wig custom from milklegsdolls on instagram back in October, and got it early February. It is, quite frankly, astoundingly gorgeous. She did such a wonderful custom dye job, the depth of color is so beautiful and matches how I envisioned Magpie's oil slick-rainbow sheen hair perfectly. It still needs some styling, as the curls kind of fell out in transit from the UK, but that's to be expected. I can style it on her when she's all put together.


(photo via milklegsdolls on instagram)

Towards the end of November, I ordered her eyes from Secret Art Studio. Initially I wasn't sure about what size pupil to order, given that I don't have very many 14mm eyes in my stash to get a good idea of large vs small pupil, but ended up going for the 5mm/14mm size. They arrived just after the new year, and are a perfect fit. Not much I can do about the slight luminescence, but I am very pleased with these eyes. I really appreciate the fact that they're pure white - no light grey for the pupil, just more white! Despite being all white, they're incredibly detailed - believe me, don't believe the terrible photo I took in my kitchen on my lunch break.



After a laughably pathetic attempt at sculpting horns myself, I decided to outsource. Magpie's horns were ordered from Synthetic Ephemera at the beginning of December - I got the Agamemnon style in medium size, which I think is a nice scale for Minifee. They arrived a few weeks later. The look of the horns is incredible, but I'm a little miffed with them because after gluing the magnets in one doesn't like to stay put, so it might just have to stay attached with a little dot of eye putty for now. Maybe in the future I'll order another pair and use UV resin to backfill the magnet cavity just to make sure the magnets sit flush, but until then, these will do. I'm considering doing a touch of painting towards the bases, just so they'll blend in better with her resin tone, but for now I'm satisfied with them.



While I haven't made much progress on the actual doll, I have started some auxiliary projects/made a few other purchases in the meantime (and have updated my tasks list in the first post accordingly!)

First up, clothing:
February was a haze of serotonin shopping to ward off depression, and while I can't say it worked in any lasting way, Magpie does have some new duds courtesy of nata.ko on instagram now! It's a good start to her modern wardrobe, in addition to the boots I'd ordered for her all the way back in October. (also I want to take this moment to shout out nata.ko's work - every piece is incredibly well made and the attention to detail is spectacular, and she was so sweet and accommodating and sewed my order incredibly quickly! Go buy stuff from her!)
I ended up getting Magpie a dress, panties, stockings, a chest harness, and a harness belt:


(photo via nata.ko on instagram)

I also purchased a pair of genuine leather pants from Saphar BJD Tailoring on etsy, and was prepared to live with the brown color...but let's be real, Magpie is just a horrid little goth bird. No way she'd wear them if they were brown. So, after doing a little bit of research on what could be done without risking resin stains, I ordered some Angelus leather paint from amazon and got to work this last Sunday while I had a friend over for a little crafternoon.



Fresh out of the box....let's take a moment and appreciate every BJD craftsperson who uses real leather in their work.



This is the point where I started to worry/feel guilty that I was ruining Saphar's hard work. But we must persevere! Magpie needs, nay, requires, nay, DEMANDS black leather pants!



Still needs to be touched up in a few spots, but! I'm beyond pleased with how they turned out. Angelus leather paint is the MVP. The GOAT. I'm interested in trying to touch up peeling pleather doll shoes with it, but for now, it was perfect for this job. 10/10 highly recommended for painting leather.

And finally, the last task I embarked on during Sunday's crafternoon was attempting to make a doll stand, inspired by Lomi's tutorial on youtube. My goal was to create something between a stand and a little....I guess you could call it a setting or something akin to a diorama, given that I quite simply do not have the space for a room box. Last weekend I purchased this rustic "barn wood" frame from Mal-wart's craft section, thinking I could stain the "planks":



Then I got my mini-dremel and started sanding to fit a 1/4 in wooden dowel. Because Minifees are pretty light I'm comfortable using a dowel to provide the support, but I personally wouldn't do this for my Volks SDs or anything taller/heavier than a Minifee, just because of the fall risk.

After a coffee break and a trip to home depot, I realized I'd been overzealous in my dremeling and the hole was just a bit too big for the dowel. Nothing a good shmear of epoxy can't fix, though!



You can accomplish anything with coffee, tortilla chips, and a friend hovering at your shoulder asking questions about your dolls.



I probably should have waited until the epoxy was dry and sanded flush to stain the planks, but you know what? I'm impatient. I still need to order props to glue down to the planks (thinking about making tiny wanted posters, loose coins and jewelry, a spilled bottle of wine, and maybe a little chest of loot) to make it a proper scene, but I'm pretty pleased with what I have so far.

Finally, I've ordered miliput and sculpting tools to attempt modding the ears on Magpie's heads, but first I need to check in with the faceup artist I have in mind to see if they'll be able to do a resin match. That, I think, will probably have the biggest impact on when I'll be able to send her out for faceups and get her closer to completion. In the meantime, I have tiny props to complete, sewing to do, and a whole ass ballgown to try and create. Let's see if the audacity can keep carrying me through. Until next time!

 

Well it has been.....quite some time since I've updated this project journal! and there is some exciting news: She's all in one piece!

Now, caveat yadda yadda: This is only one of her three heads that is complete - but now that I have her in one piece and in a presentable state, I feel comfortable sharing her as she currently is.

In my last post, I had stated that I bought the epoxy and sculpting tools in an attempt to mod her tiefling ears myself. Unfortunately...I had the audacity, but the audacity didn't have me So I have one of her heads with a half-finished, really poorly-done asymmetrical lumpy ear mod that I'm going to have to carefully sand back down when I manage to pull together some energy. As for her sleeping head, I sent it to a mutual on my doll Instagram (shoutout armeleia, and sorry for all the trouble she caused you!) to have her eyes modded to be half-open (or "romantic glance" to steal the Volks term.)

Last year I spent some time emailing Andy/Angel Toast back and forth about the feasibility of the mods I wanted for her, and finally got to send her off in October. I got her back on March 21st, and oh my goodness. She is well worth the wait. She has one of the most beautiful faceups I've ever seen, and I'm not biased at all because she's my beloved daughter.



Everything came out exactly how I had envisioned her - from the subtle shading in her eyebrows to the slightly mischievous slant to her smile. Andy also did an incredible job with the tiefling ear mods! They came out exactly how I hoped. I'm almost hesitant to glue more caviar beads onto her ears for her earrings because I don't want to accidentally ruin the blushing - but those ears would look SO cute with some studs, right?

And almost immediately after getting her home, she got to sit in on a D&D session for some moral support!




A few things here and there:
- despite ordering her eyes from The Secret Art Studio (still highly recommended!), I ended up going with a pair of eyes made by a friend (shoutout constants!). I think the pearl pupils do a lot to give her a better-looking gaze and that very slight luminescence I was hoping for.
- I really, really, really need to style her wig. I am slightly afraid to style her wig, and I am so so so so so resistant to buying a tiny curling iron (or, really, just about anything else) from Amazon.
- I haven't made much progress on her other things, as all of my time/energy/money went to getting to LA Dolpa last year and then I promptly got sucked back into Dragon Age Hell in November. I also can't say how much time/energy/money I will able to devote to her going forward because, well....I'm brewing up another project that I'll probably be posting about here soon. It may or may not be related to Dragon Age Hell. I would still very much like to sew her some more generic fantasy gear. At the very least some tunics and maybe a dress or two so she's got some variety. And if the audacity strikes me this summer, I might try to make her some wee sandals with my leatherworking scraps. We'll see!

Not end with a bummer but the state of the world has had me very stressed, depressed, and angry for the past few months. It does my heart a lot of good to see my best worst girl on my shelf - not complete by a long shot, but at the very least in a state where she brightens my day just a little bit.

Can't promise when the next update will be, but thanks for sticking with me!