Materials Material Suggestions - OOAK doll (no casting!)

There are many different materials you could use. La Doll is white but you can mix in pigment to get skin tones. You could try Sculpey's living doll skin colored clay which needs to be baked in an oven. You could try apoxie clays such as magic sculpt or other brands and I'm pretty sure you can mix pigment in with that also to make it a certain color. There are way more materials than that in which you could use. It all depends on what you like to sculpt with and whatever feels right.

 

Just to add a little, Apoxie Sculpt can be colored but if you're going to do that make sure you get the Super White version. The normal 'white' is actually slightly grey (at least, grey enough to bother me) and that will throw off the color. They do have a flesh tone color but I don't think it's quite suitable for BJD purposes.

 

there are different brands of polymer clay ooak artists use to sculpt their unjointed one-offs in. I don't think polymer clay can handle stringing, though.

One of the best ooak materials is porcelain clay (and stoneware clay, too), but often this involves slip casting esp with porcelain.

 

I tend to agree that an apoxie clay would be best for an OOAK jointed doll. It CAN be pigmented with paint or powdered pigments blended into the clay, and will withstand stringing tension better than polymer clay. However, a smaller BJD (30cm or less) you could probably do in polymer clay if you really wanted to. You would just need to be careful not to have any of the pieces too thin. Polymer clays made specifically for figure sculpting have a slight translucency and luminous quality that is quite beautiful. All 2-part apoxie products are quite solid/opaque. So it really depends on what qualities you want your sculpt to have. Any sort of paperclay you would HAVE TO seal when you are finished sculpting. If it got wet by accident, it would resoften the clay and damage your sculpt. The skin tone would have to be in your sealing agent (gesso, gofun, etc.) instead of your clay.