20–39cm Dolls My first BJD - 3D printed

So I only just found this corner of this site, and I wanted to post my ongoing efforts in making my own BJDs.

For this girl I referenced this doll on thingiverse: Little Ball jointed Girl by 7Fish for the joints, but used my own model for the bulk of the body. The hips area is probably the largest piece I kept from that doll. I've got a 2nd doll in progress right now that I did much more all-on-my-own and referenced more current-standard sort of hips for it - but this doll specifically was before I'd done a whole lot of research and didn't really realize at the time how non-traditional this hip joint is.

It works, so whatever.

Anyway! I'm not big on really really large dolls. I kind of feel like 'SD' doll sizes are like... huge. I don't know - I'm probably weird. But I wasn't imagining a doll too awful much larger than a Monster High when I was deciding on scale.



My 3D printer is 6 years old and has been worked into the ground over the years. It is not great.
All of the pieces had to be printed in multiple pieces and then sort of glued together, and then sanded and sanded and sanded and sanded....

My printer SUCKS at printing support material and things that use support material, and it generally results in garbled garbage, so a huge amount of clean-up and sculpting with epoxy-sculpt was necessary with every part printed here.

So much filler primer and glazing putty, and sanding, and more sanding....


At this point, I used my airbrush to start painting her. I did an under coating of red to get a consistent color over the whole thing, and then a skin-tone over that. The Vallejo paint clogged up my air brush sooooo much, it was infuriating.


Here she is mostly laid out after paint.


And here she is laid out after I did some sealant with two different kinds of sealant because the darn MSC ran out after the head and torso....

Anyway, you can see she's only about 12 inches tall.


Stringing!

Kind of janky-desperating stringing though, because she's literally held together by rubber bands here. No real elastic stringing stuff to use...


Testing out some poses.



The site tells me that a post can't have more than 12 pictures, so I'm gonna split it here.

 

Part 2



So at this point, I decided she needed some clothes. To make my own patterns, I did the masking tape trick. I covered her in blue painters tape, drew on certain lines with a sharpie, and then carefully cut it off and laid it out flat.


First were some leggings. Probably need to be a bit smaller, but with a thinner and stretchier fabric. But it was a pretty good first pass.


Got some pants and a bra done


Made her a halter-top!



Started doing some blushing and early face details.



Did more of her face, though at this point, I kind of decided I wanted to take a crack at a version of a head with eye holes.

I also made her a wig. First time ever trying anything like that. And this has absolutely no styling done yet. So it's a big poofy mess right now.


What what? Are we going backwards? Sort of? Anyway, I printed, cleaned, epoxy'd, sanded, polished, etc. a whole other dolls. This one was for making molds, and after I'd finished making the silicone molds, I decided to paint this version too. I also made a new head - this one with holes for the eyes.




I made my own eyes too. I found these little beads that were a good size, ground in indents with my Dremel, and cast them into silicone so I could make eyes from that. These are the first ones I made from those molds, and they're kind of rushed.

In the background you can see some of my first attempts at casting pieces from the molds I maid, though they're full of air bubbles, and need a lot of TLC...


Doing some blushing.


Two heads? The one up close is 3D printed, while the one in the back (lower part, not the cap) is a resin cast! First bit of semi-successful resin casting. wooo...


And that's where I'm at right now!

I'll keep posting updates as I make more progress.