one way to approach sculpting a grouchy angel bjd

a couple of people have asked for suggestions to help with sculpting a doll - so just in case it might be of interest or helpful - i thought i'd start a new one and post pics .... these things work for ooak's - you would need to go on and do a LOT of refining and perfecting of the sculpt before you started making a mold from it for resin casting.

I would really love to hear what other people do differently - in hopes of learning better ways to do any of this.....


my daughter Meg has masses of ideas and is a great sketch artist - the house is papered with quick sketches she does and then forgets.

she has been after me to make bjd's of some of them - so for fun i'm going to have a try at a grouchy angel :



I asked her to give me sketches of the angel front and side - and she changed her expression and body type :



but thats ok, cause i'm probably going to end up changing her as i go anyway - I always do. sigh.

so anyway - the first thing i'm going to do is mix up some prosculpt - i'm from the old ages of fimo - when you had to knead it for about 10 minutes before you start sculpting - so i still do that - if nothing else, it softens the clay for me.

Then i loosely crumple a ball of aluminum foil so it fits inside the lines of the drawings of the head :




i try to keep it small enough to allow space for at least a 1/4" thick wall of clay around it in all directions.

you are going to be removing this from the inside of the head - so loose is good - just pat it into an egg shape firm enough to hold its shape.

Flatten the front - (I press the front side down on the table so it is flat from eyebrow to chin)

I've been experimenting with something that seems to help me sculpt the eyes - i make 2 half spheres of paper clay and glue them to the aluminum foil where the eyes are going to be.

remember - your eye is a lot bigger than the part that shows - make the balls the size of the eye you want to be able to put into the doll's head - after the head is baked and you remove the foil, you are going to soak the paper clay briefly with water and remove it ... this gives you a nice eye socket to put your eye into, and seems to help me in shaping the eyelids like i want them....



now cover the whole thing with an even layer (about 1/4" thick) of your clay - cut off the extra (don't overlap - you end up with way too thick in some spaces)



do put extra clay over the face - look at the side drawing of the face in the sketch - or look at a doll head you have sitting around - the forehead in these dolls usually gently bulges out past the eyes, as does the nose - so add some clay around those strange paperclay half spheres until the face area is flat again.

now lightly mark in your guidelines : straight line down the middle of the face, top to bottom - center everything on this line.

now a line horizontally, halfway between the top of the head and the point of the chin - a young child's eyes will be below this line - an adult's eyes will be right on it (more or less -) I want a teen / young 20 - so i'm aiming just below it for eyes.

now roughly halfway between the eye line and the chin - another horizontal line for the bottom of the nose

and last - halfway between the bottom of the nose and the point of the chin - a horizontal line for the mouth.



I like to use fine metal doublended knitting needles to sculpt with - but the short pointy orange sticks (for working on your manicures) work well too -

most important parts of sculpting the face - keep looking at the head from all sides to make sure things line up - if you have one eye that is much stronger than the other one, it can really skew how you see - when you have the face kind of roughly sculpted - hold it in front of you and look at it in a mirror. My faces always slide off to the left and i have to do some nose straightening and work to get the eyes kind of even ....

keep comparing your head to the drawings - this one is growing a bit, but not too bad - if you work with a drawing, it helps keep your doll in the size you expect (i think it was my 2nd one that ended up a few inches taller than my Bermann --- that was a LOT of clay..... )

just quickie overall steps here - so won't go into all the details of sculpting the face - but i'm learning that being methodical helps here - so i mark the inside of each eye, making sure they are at equal distances from the center line of the nose - and that they aren't too close together (in theory most people have a distance between their eyes roughly equal to the width of one eye - but this is a chibi (big eyes, little head) so proportions aren't the classical ones) and I tend to sculpt most of the eye on the right first - then measure it and make sure the eye on the left is the same size. Work to make sure that the eyes mirror each other - if the outside of the right one angles up, then so should the outside of the left one.... etc. Dont make the eyelids too thin, you want them strong enough not to break when you are setting eyes in place.

press the clay in lightly between the eyes to indent the bridge of the nose - then squish clay towards the center of the nose from each side to build up the nose ridge.

I usually do the mouth last, except for smoothing things out - i'm not good at smoothing things out, so she will be getting sanded some after she gets baked. any suggestions on good ways to smooth her before hand, greatly appreciated....

so about 3 hours later - here is the head




partly it looks bigger than the drawings because of perspective, but it IS a little bigger - so i'm going to have to watch out to keep things from getting too huge.

I usually use a round wooden bead about the size the neck is going to be, to push the clay up under the chin where the socket for the neck will be. After it bakes i'll go back in with my dremel and smooth it even more, and then add some apoxy clay to make a very strong socket.

Now i'm going to cut roughly the head cap (would be wisest to cut a guide out of paper and make sure it is symmetrical) and bake this - for at least 40 minutes at 270 degrees in the toaster oven out in the garage....


please let me know if this is at all helpful or interesting - would love to hear where you do something differently and how it works or doesn't for you....

take care
patl

 

cool - Ashbet, I've heard really good things about Kathy Dewey - I have one of her charts of people proportions, but haven't gotten her book. I'll have to get it to see --- i was never any good at following instructions either, but i really love to see how other people do things, and sometimes you see something and it works for you too...

Hey Kami - its both a lot of fun and kind of frustrating - but you should try it, you might get hooked.

hey Batchix!!! I need to go back and look for a doll by you - I think i remember talking to you about it a long time ago??

hi Rave,
because i started the cut before it baked - i just used an exacto knife to cut the headcap. I'm kind of klutzy so am dangerous with a dremel - hey Ashbet - how did you cut the head cap on yours? there has to be a cleaner way than i did.....

 

ok - head is cooked, time to open it.

have to cut thru the headcap lines again, because some parts cooked together - be careful not to pry too much - you can break the head cap doing that. but finally i get it apart :



doesn't look too great right now - I got the forehead awfully thick - but maybe we will experiment with embedding a magnet there to keep the head cap on.

after you pull the foil out - you can see (barely) the paperclay eyes still stuck in the eyesockets. hmmmmm...... don't like how close the neck socket is to the eyes - going to be hard to switch eyes out when you have the head attached to the body.... hey - does anyone have one of the tiny 8 or 9" bjds? could you post pictures of the inside of the heads so we can see what we should be trying to make this look like?



ok - going to let this sit in a bowl of warm water while i eat breakfast - then take it out, wrap it in plastic and let the water soak into the paperclay.....

ok, home from work - digging the paperclay out of her eyesockets. somehow she came out of her plastic wrap (looks suspiciously at complacent looking cat......) but the clay is pretty soft, so i can get it out....



going to be doing a lot of dremel work to smooth things out inside, and then build up the necksocket with 2 part apoxy to make it stronger.....



you can see that her eyelids are going to need some careful sanding to smooth them - but all in all not bad....

now I want to see what she looks like with eyes and wig <grin>

of course - turns out she probably needs 12 mm eyes, and for some reason all i have are 10 mm and 14.... ok, we'll use the 10 mm but they aren't exactly what i'd like...
now steal Sharmin's wig for a quick pic....




coming along.... i kind of have a short attention span, so i probably will start on the body next, and work on cleaning up the inside of the head later....

 

for this one i'm using prosculpt - you can get it from Jack Johnson at
http://www.artdolls.com/catalog.cfm/ProSculpt/showCategory

I'm wishing that i had mixed some cernit in it - prosculpt bakes to a kind of matt finish, usually with no moonies, but it is not as strong as i'd like for these dolls. The cernit would give a slightly shiny finish to the baked doll, and make it much stronger. An all cernit one would be lovely - but it is a very soft clay that melts in your hands if your hands are warm, and i can' t sculpt directly in it.

 

quick morning update - got a brief start on her body last night.

I want to be able to run the elastics from her leg sockets up thru her head and tie off inside the head (its so small, its going to be a tight fit..... need to think about that some more)

and i want to be able to run elastics straight thru the body between the two arms.

she is small enough that i'm going to experiment with making her body solid except for these channels. So i'm going to use a rolled up piece of aluminum foil to make the channel between her arms, and another roll of aluminum foil running inside her body from hip, up thru the body and out her neck.



I'll run one of the leg foils over the arm foil, and one below it to gently keep it in place until I get clay around them. You will be able to work the aluminum foil loose and pull it out after the body gets baked. A pair of longnosed hemistats would be a good tool - but long needle nosed pliers work too.

Her neck is going to be very thin walled with the channel thru it for the elastics, so I'm going to reinforce it with a short section of tiny pvc pipe... aluminum or brass would work too - becareful to ask about any you buy - some of the plastic pipes you can buy in a model train store are out of plastics that are poisonous at the temperature (270 degrees) you need to bake the clay at...

this will give her a strong hollow neck



so since i've decided to try a solid body - i'm putting a pad of clay between the 2 leg foils, below the arm foil (kind of in the center of the body - then wrapping a 1/4 " layer of clay around the whole mess, and start modeling her body.

keep checking the body against the drawings and with the head - to make sure you like them together and are keeping in the correct size range




her neck is too long (and too thin at this point) - but i'm going to be reworking the socket on her head - so it will fit up inside a little bit further --- if it still looks too long, i'll grind it down abit and work at it again.

her body is heavier than I hoped. we'll see how it goes.

got to run to work now.
take care
patl

 

ok, baked her body and removed the aluminum foil. ALMOST worked like i was hoping - the foil came nicely out of her arms... and came out of one of the channels for the legs well - but stuck in the other one. But the funny thing was, when i rammed a wire thru the stuck side, to clear out the foil - the wire went thru perfectly. (easy to string).

however ---- the channel wasn't straight to the neck hole on the other side - so even though the foil came out ok, the wire wouldn't feed thru it.

So went out to one of my favorite stores (Ace Hardware) and bought a 6" long drill bit. then drilled the channel, widening it up in the armpit area so you can guide a wire thru to pull the elastic through.

works great now - Sanded her face with 320 and 400 grit sandpaper (can't find the 600, will have to find that later) --- used a ball grinder to grind her armpit openings round.
Now need to think some more about how the joints in her hips are going to go...

thinking more about it, i think it would be easier on these little ones to make the 2 part torsoes - to make it easier to string them. But she works - so that is cool.

She is lining up well with the drawing - so I strung her temporarily, and Meg made her a wig....

here she is at the moment :



and here Meg is holding her so you can see her size :



she is coming along nicely, with lots of personality ---- though not exactly the personality in the drawing!

good thing Meg has such a good sense of humor.....

 

hey Tamamushiiro,

I can see them on mac and pc.... I wonder if they are too big for the new software....

 

hey Rave,

post your picture, and folk will help you see what you can do to make it more like what you want. A big difference between a young girl and an old boy is how much forehead they have - children have much more forehead - draw a line half way between the top of the head and the bottom of the chin in your drawing. if the eyes are at or above that line - not enough forehead. children's eyes are below that half way mark...

big eyes also make you look younger, and delicate brow bones make you look more feminine....

would love to see your picture.... there are some good sites showing difference between ages in faces - let me go see if i can find them and post them for you....

 

just a quick pic of the arms in progress.

I'm having problems finding wooden beads the size i want for the joints - so the elbow joints are a bit smaller than i had hoped.

I'm using 24 gauge wire to make the loop for the hand - i make a tangle of wire to embed in the hand to seure the clay to it well.... then the loop goes up into the lower arm opening.

at the moment these are just roughed in, going to now carve away where they meet until i have pieces that work well together -

 

still adamantly avoiding the legs. sigh. ok - going to have to start on them.

but anyway - here she is with both hands roughed in, her arms need to be sanded down and carved to work better.

behind her you can see the tip of one little wing showing - embedded a magnet in her back, and made a quick test wing to see how it works - works great. (this is just a proof of concept wing - now have to figure out how to make cute chibi wings that don't look too obviously like ripoffs of the sei tenshis (I am so jealous of the people who won them this weekend!!!!! wow!)






she is pretty heavy for her size (6" top of head to base of crotch) so i need to work at removing as much out of the inside of her head as I can. She should be about 9" when finished --- bigger than i thought. I have the most intense respect for the people who sculpted the tiny white lati dolls and the elfdolls....

 

hey guys - thank you for the kind words, she is a lot of fun. I love making figures - its kind of a persistent necessity for me - but it is just plain fun to make one that moves and sasses.

hi Rave,

I have my pics up on my website and just reference them...
you do that by typing (without the quotes around it)
""

but if you make the picture small, under about 38k, you can reply using the "Go Advanced" button, and there is a way to post a pic there that looks like it will allow you to submit a picture directly....

if you can't get it to work, pm me, and i'll put the picture up for you...

take care
patl

 

hey Wolfie,

first off - grab some other clay and just allow yourself to play and practice on it for awhile (wrap you head up in plastic wrap to keep the dust off - )

please let me know how big your head is? if it is tiny like this one's you mostly just indent or push the clay around. If it is more like 3" tall or so - you will probably be adding clay on.... If you will let me know, i'll see if i can do some pictures that might be at all helpful.

hey NoNoNanoon!! cool - i'm going to have to go thru the threads - i want to see pics of your doll!

take care
patl

 

whooops -
fell asleep with body parts in the oven last night - so will have to redo the legs again.... have been trying to get all the parts basically done before i have to leave town on wednesday - then do refinement after I get back.

sorry about the delay
patl

ps - hey Rave, I've been wondering about putting gofun over the polymer - i bought some, but didn't get the rabbit skin glue to adhere it with - what did you use?

for polymer - you might have better luck with some of the gessos that are formulated to work with acrylic paints - they sand nicely and can give you a nice smooth surface to work from.

 

ok - the oven spirits were friendly tonight, so here are some pics with her rough legs.

now i need to spend time adding clay to even her stance out, cutting away to make the joints work ok together and sanding down.

this is the end of the fun and easy part, and the beginning of the long painstaking part - but she is cute and probably worth it.

 

Rave,

I think the problem you are having with the head is mostly a headshape thing.

she will look much more little girlish with less face around her eyes, and less chin - also the ears much smaller

i took your picture


and cut the head shape differently -


(not a very good job - but to give you an idea to consider)
this is very anime-ish - but is it closer to what you were thinking of?

 

hey Rave,

I really love Hizuki's dolls too ....

a good tool to get your sculpt closer to what you want.

print out a photo or picture of a doll or some other face that looks like you want. It is important to remember that you aren't going to copy it exactly, you are going to make your own doll, not Hizuki's --- but you can use it as a basis to help your sculpt go how you want it to.

try to get a picture that is mostly straight on - then draw guidelines on it, across at the base of the chin and the top of the head, then across at the eyes, the base of the nose and the midpoint of the mouth...

here is one of my favorite of Hizuki's to use as inspiration....



notice how the eyes on this child are below the center line of the face? that makes her look younger. Notice how tiny her nose is and how there is no visible brow - it is just smooth..... this makes her look younger too

one thing to remember - pictures flatten out an image. so even though you see skin beside the outsides of her eyes, that skin is bending around her skull back towards her ears - it really doesn't stick out much beyond her eyes.
one rule of thumb - there are about 5 eye widths from ear to ear on your head. check it on your own face. measure your eye with finger and thumb, then slide it back towards your ear - is it about the same width? another eye distance between your eyes...


I like to use calipers, dividers - those thingies like you use to draw circles (compass?) - to measure things on a sculpt - so i measure one eye - then use that measurement to make sure the other eye is the same size, and more or less the right distance away.....

see how tiny her chin is? you got her pouty mouth really well, and the rounding of her chin and jawbone....

 

Rave,
how big is the head you are going to make ? I really like the premiere red, but it is hard to get the careful detail in it - try it - it has a totally different feel to it, and works totally different than the cernit. take a look at Hannie Sarris
http://www.hanniesarris.nl/web/index.php?page=gallery&lang=eng
she gets lovely detail in the premiere (and ladoll)

personally, i can get better face detail in 2 or 3" faces in polymer clay - but i love the premiere for bodies.... so sometimes i mix them in a piece
like

where the face is prosculpt (like cernit) and the body is premiere red.

you might also get some fimo or prosculpt to mix with your cernit - it changes the way it works - you might like it better. each of us ends up likeing a different clay more - my favorite is the earthenware type clays - but i don't have access to a kilm.

 

hey Rave,

fimo and cernit are great together - you might get those frustrating moonies, but if you can find the new puppenfimo - it gives a lovely satin translucent effect and NO MOONIES- wonderful stuff.

fimo and cernit together makes a really strong clay - so that will be perfect for a bjd.

look around for Sculpy Living Doll --- i've heard that is the european (or English) version of prosculpt.... not as strong as fimo, but no moonies -

best of luck with the premiere too - I think a lot of the Japanese artist dolls are this airdry clay - i love it, but find it harder to sculpt in.

take care - post more pics of your sculpt.

happy Thanksgiving everyone - i'm off to Oregon to spend it with my folks.

patl

 

Snow Song!!! wouldn't it be wonderful to have a "how to make a bjd " book??? I keep watching yahoojapan thinking surely there must be a Japanese or Korean one somewhere - but haven't found it yet.

thank you so much for your kind words - i would love to see one by the people who make such lovely refined dolls - mine are just quick thoughts. I really envy the people who can stick to it and make them be perfect.

take care,
patl

 

hi Ann and Acexkeikai,

I've used the paperclay that Ann talks about - i use it alot for bodies. For faces and detail work I like the stone/paperclays like LaDoll and Premiere that come already mixed - they have volcanic ash in them and are extremely fine and strong... you can get them at www.miniworlddolls.com

they have a very different feel and work effect from the paperclay that i mixed from the powder.

As for baking the polymer clays - I bake most of mine at around 265 to 270 F in a toaster oven that i keep out in the garage - you will want it outside, or at least outside of your living area if possible - or in a well ventilated room. And its good to get one of those oven thermometers and keep it inside the oven - if the wind is blowing on it the temperature can really spike (not to mention that i've not met one yet where the temperature dial was very accurate)

best of luck - hope you start a doll, they are a lot of fun and its really satisfying to make your own. (ok - not the same as finally getting that Sasha i've always dreamed of, but still very cool)

take care
patl

 

hey Batchix,

I've tried that - but i think i'm too slow - I'm forever trying to freeze the movie so i can have a few more minutes to look at that face (really, its only so i can sculpt it, really it is (grin))

something else i do is collect magazines where they have multiple views of a face I like - or go onlne to the photo galleries for someone whose face i like (someday i'm going to do a sculpt of these guys - really i am. why is it that some people can really catch a likeness and i cant at all? its not fair!) and print off pics of the face from different angles.

patl