Shelling OCs vs Dolls You Like

Honestly, If a doll I want isn't directly for an OC, I will make one for them. It's part of my bonding process, and I think it makes them just a little more fun to work with.

 

Both, I think.

My first doll came to me because I felt like she was the perfect host for a character that I'd been dreaming of for a while. The doll in question is waiting for a proper body to really get the show on the road, but it's been incredibly inspiring just to have her sweet face to look at as I daydream.

The second doll is simply beautiful in her own right, and I suspect that if she does have a story, it will unfold in good time. I look forward to enjoying her in more of a casual way, without worrying over all of the precise details that accompany the first doll.

In general, I think that I would prefer to have an identity in mind for any doll that I wanted to add to my collection. For me personally, that gives me a justifiable reason to add a doll. When I find myself acquiring things without a direct purpose or plan in mind, I usually lose interest pretty quickly.

 

Mostly oc characters, but I have one that I got for looks only. And I’m currently eyeballing some more.

 

I started the hobby to shell my original characters from the stories I write. However, that proved to create snags. One, I didn't want to give away what happened in my stories, there were so many characters I wanted to shell, and also i ran into the problem there were dolls I just liked. So I did/am doing a complete overhaul on my collection. While they are still original characters, they do not have a written story that created them. I create them from the doll up, therefore I will be able to do photo stories and reveal their secrets then.

 

I've been wanting to shell an OC I have, but I just feel it's too difficult to find the sculpt I love for them. I could be searching for hours for the perfect one but still would be worried if it accurately depicted my OC. I feel with looking at dolls I truly love to bits because of small details is so much easier. I love making OCs, so I just feel it's another way to make another OC that I'll love and cherish!

 

One of the main reasons I got into the hobby was because I loved that dolls could be customized to look like I wanted them to, from eyes, hair and clothing to facial features themselves (though face-up or even modding). So the very first thing I thought was "hey, I could recreate my own characters with dolls!"
...And, basically, that's what I kept doing. For me, it's easier to work with a doll whose character and appearance I already know. Most of my characters have been with me for years, so it's easy for me to know what their style is gonna be, what their face-up is going to look like and even what their attitude in photos is gonna be.

With non-OC dolls, I don't think I'd be just as dedicated, because I'd have to do everything from scratch, figure out what the face-up would look like according to the doll's features... my main fear is that I'd get frustrated after a while because I wouldn't know what to do with the sculpt and the lack of an already formed character wouldn't make me "bond" with the doll. And since bjds ain't exactly a cheap hobby... I really wouldn't want to end up spending a lot of money on a doll that looks pretty, but with which I wouldn't know what to do .__.' also, although bjd sculpts are none of my work, I would somehow feel that a non-OC doll based on already existing features would be... not completely mine? '_' Not sure how to explain it, but basically... for me one thing is finding a doll sculpt that looks like my character (aka, having someone else's work fit my own ideas) and another completely thing is basing my ideas on an already existing sculpt (aka making my own ideas fit someone else's work). The latter would feel more like creating a fan character, and I'd always feel like my "ideas" at that point wouldn't fully belong to me, so I'd have a hard time getting attached to the doll, too.

That is just how it works for me though! I actually really admire people who manage to come up with gorgeous dolls based on the sculpts they get and I sure love seeing full set dolls as well!

 

Mostly OCs. I saw MYOU Ben and was immediately struck by him, then I started to study his promotional shots and thought that he'd work as a child-version of an OC. Since he's come home, it's not really worked, but I still adore him. So, he's stuck around with the name of the OC.

I have an ideal image for my collection. A group of five from the same story, maybe six if I can find the perfect sculpt for the additional character, and a couple of 'artist interpretations' of popular characters. I've always wanted a doll-version of Devil May Cry's Dante and, for a while, one of Resident Evil's Leon Kennedy. I have a sculpt for Leon, I've just got to put enough time aside to work on him, and I did pick one out for Dante. I did think I could cheat and switch one of the main five to Dante occasionally, but I would love to make a proper project of it and have him as an 'art piece'. My own hard work on proud display 24-7.

But, it's mostly OCs, so that I have that strong bond from the start. I started out with an impulse doll and tried to make a character for him, but it didn't work out. However, there's a sentimental connection. It's not quite the same as the character dolls, but it's keeping me from allowing the OG doll to move on to someone who could fulfil his potential.

 

I buy dolls I love and then create characters for them. Or see a doll, love it, create a character for it, and then buy it.

 

I think this is an important question for all bjd owners
My dolls represents my characters who I have in my mind for almost 20 years now (well, many of them are younger than 10 years). BUT the doll does not represent the character's physical appearence in 100%, sometimes it only represents something (like the 3rd arm of a girl I'll make represents the demons and bad memories that haunts her etc.)

But I have a doll, who was based on a character which had no real physical treat except for being a female, and the doll's design became the character's design

 

I'm firmly in the shelling OCs camp; I usually look out for sculpts with a character in mind. For me an OC is like a beating heart, it gives the sculpt life, purpose and personality. That character reflects the choices I make when customising the doll. Although I have fallen in love with doll sculpts, I find it hard to justify getting it without a character to stand behind it and animate it. On some occasions I've had the sculpt shaping the character, but there will always be one behind that. I have not owned a doll for purely aesthetic purposes. It wouldn't acquire the same emotional value and importance as a doll which is a shelled OC, and it would be a shame to invest that much in something that may only be second best.

 

I've done both~! Of my six boys, two were chosen based on OCs, the rest were chosen because I fell in love with their sculpts. And then made OCs based on them afterwards.

 

I buy them to shell my OCs, and I tend to avoid looking at dolls unless I have a character in mind... that being said, I have made OCs to shell into sculpts I like! My DOD Elf Ducan created an OC and my DOD Elf Petsha too, but it's like they were part of my group already! My OCs are largely all different generations of the same families, with new characters coming and going, so if there's a sculpt I really like, I can quite easily either add a new generation line, or fill up an existing one! I have two obitsus that I had OCs for, but they were a bit of a passing phase, so they don't get any attention... whereas my resins all come from the massive lineage I have, and I seem to bond with those characters much better.

Basically, I can make an OC for a sculpt I like with very little issue!

 

I both shell OCs and have dolls that I got simple cause I loved them but I actually have more of the latter, with only 3 of my dolls being shelled OCs. I picked those 3 characters because each was kind of special to me in it's own way (all my OCs were special but these for very specific reasons). But others were ones that just kinda...spoke to me. Ones that I saw and fell in love with.

I didn't shell any of my OCs into a body unless I liked the sculpt, though. Even if I felt it might fit the character, I was worried I'd eventually grow to dislike the sculpt so it took a while to find ones that fit all the criteria, but were also ones I loved.

 

I'm just a collector... A few of the gang were very deliberately picked to be avatars for favorite City of Heroes MMO toons, but the vast majority of my crew were purchased simply because I liked the look of their sculpts.

That said, I've been an old-school, paper-and-funky-dice tabletop RPG player and GM for thirty-something years now, and have found that sometimes a new doll will remind me strongly enough of a particular player- or non-player character to become a resin avatar for that individual. I didn't go looking for doll versions of Kareyeru, or Solomon, or William Adolphus for instance... but I still happened to end up with dolls that worked really well for them. When that happens, I go with it.

Being a long-time GM also means that I'm a habitual world-builder. Coming up with new settings and situations as thought experiments is just something that comes pretty naturally. In doll terms, that's resulted in most of the members of the crew who didn't remind me of any specific pre-existing character still finding character-like roles in one of my (often specifically-themed though vaguely-defined) world-groups. They may even have a new group grow up around them. I call those groups "casts", and there are several of them in my collection… The kami and elementals from the White City's celestial bureaucracy, the Montanari brother's circle of modern magi, the Turtle House extended family... Some of those casts' worlds are more developed than others, but they're all a useful framework for figuring out what I want to do with a doll that's included in them.

I also have a few dolls who just aren't characters at all. They're neither avatars for existing ones nor did they ever settle into a role in one of the casts. They're "just dolls". Maybe someday they'll become characters of some sort, but if they don't... I'm okay with that.

 

My first doll I selected because of how much he resembled one of my OCs and I hadn't initially intended to shell him. I absolutely love him and so far I've gotten myself organized as to which OCs I want to shell. One of the most recent dolls I ordered was not the sculpt I had initially intended, but the doll just came out, looked amazing, and I liked the body much more than the one I planned. He's a bit younger looking than the character's current age but I think overall the doll fits him.

One sculpt I chose I absolutely fell in love with and after three days of consideration I decided to get my hands on him and make a character for him.

A few of the other OCs I'm shelling were somewhere between selecting a doll that matched their personality and selecting one I liked the look of, since I never got around to completing the appearance of these characters. But I had initially shelled one of them (who has a twin) and decided to do the whole set. There will be a total of 6 (not counting the twin duplicate), the 2 vaguest of the group were the easiest to find sculpts for. The most difficult was the OC that is the brother to the twins I needed to find a sculpt that fit him and was close enough to the twins so they would look related. Ultimately, I settled on a sculpt that fit his character and was appealing to me, turns out he's fairly close enough in features to the twins.

I currently have a list of sculpts I like and a list of OCs I might want to shell. I try to find an OC that matches dolls I really like so I have an excuse to buy them. But I'm still waiting around for perfect matches to my main OCs.

 

I bought my first doll way back in 2010 with the intention of making her a specific OC for a writing project that was glorified fanfiction, but that was a bad time in my life – a person who I was friends with at the time ended up stealing from me and the IP I was basing my story off of had a lead actor who turned out to be abusive...
The OC I was trying to shell reminded me of those bad times and my doll stayed in her box for over a decade.
I pulled her out of her box this year, wondering if I should sell her, but instead I felt she and I had been through a lot of hardship together, and I wanted to give her a second chance, which is how I fell deep into the rabbithole of bjd collecting!
So now I just buy sculpts I like that call to me in some way – my MSD Toki head's grumpy little face, or the Noh-mask-esque serene/sad face of my Volks F-55 girl.
I let the sculpts "speak" to me while I'm handling them to let their personalities emerge, and my original doll has gone from her first incarnation as a Victorian-esque seer to a tough cyberpunk shopkeeper!

 

I have both, but I really enjoy picking out all the parts to shell out dolls. I have way too many OCs to ever do them all but some of my characters translate to doll form so well. My other dolls I didn't have any ideas about the character, I just let the doll do the talking I love meeting them for the first time out the box and seeing what personalities they have! some dolls really just challenge what you might've planned for them, and you end up completely changing course because of the way they feel in hand.

 

From my very beginnings in this hobby (way back in 2006) I wanted to create characters. It came so naturally to me, something my imagination had been doing in one way or another since childhood. I wanted to explore fashion styles to my heart’s content, so coming up with characters to wear them became my thing. I began by creating a fantasy-based world in my mind, which would enable me to indulge in many styles and creatures…rather like a Tim Burton’s “Alice”. This gave me tremendous freedom to collect and create anything that caught my fancy, allowing me to slowly build the collection of my dreams over the years. My only hard and fast rule has always been “no character, no doll”.

 

I felt like shelling an OC was what you *had* to do for a long while, but I honestly find myself enjoying the hobby a lot more if I don't put that stress on myself. I love how things turn out from unexpected choices (and my faceup skills that never give me a predictable result ), the dolls will develop their own character in the end anyway.

 

I have a problem where I buy dolls I love and then create an oc just for them. Which makes me end up with sooo many ocs that I couldn't possibly do anything with all of their stories. And the characters that I've already written novels for, or are in the process of, I'm rarely inspired to shell those characters. I'm a bit of an oc mess I guess.

 

Definitely a mix of OCs that need to be shelled, fan dolls, and dolls I just *like* where the character gets created around the sculpt!

Vince, Marigold, Party Martian, and Bambi are dolls I fell in love with for how cute they were and then created characters around-- Vince is pretty basic, he's just a living doll who will wear anything I think it's cute to put him in, whereas Marigold has a whole world and other OCs that I haven't shelled that are her family... and Party Martian and Bambi are kind of a couple even though they're not perfectly scaled to each other? But when I got the chance to bring her home, she was just one hundred percent his girlfriend. I had wanted to find a partner for him who *would* be really well suited to him in scale, and he fell in love with her just like I did even though she's a real amazon next to him.

Jack's my D&D character from a campaign that never got to finish, and I've also written about him since he didn't get his resolution at the table. With him it was ALL about finding a character who looked the most like the guy in my head and the art I've made and commissioned of him, and I struck gold. And then Deanna is heavily based on a friend's character from a different role playing game but I sort of translated her into Jack's world so *he* could have a quest buddy. And I've got a couple new super tiny mature tinies, Downfall and Istraeth, who are NPCs for a game I would love to DM who really took on such a life of their own beyond how they'd feature in said game.

Pete and Billy are sort of in a nebulous between-- they are very much *named after* characters they're styled to look like, but are also based on OCs from an old abandoned writing project, who were kind of side characters I never found something I could DO with, and then they've since kind of grown into themselves as something totally different since being shelled as dolls. So they're... all three, depending?

Eddie's a fan doll through and through, but my own *take*. And two of my floating heads are fan dolls, though one of them I'm waiting for the artist who makes his body to do another run and the other just has a bust to be displayed on...

 

I am mixture of both. Mostly because I make characters that ARE the doll I want to buy. A good example of this is my anthropomorphic fox character Force who is literally a Force Fox doll by FallinDoll that I'm planning to purchase. Two more good examples are my anthropomorphic cat character Charlotte and anthropomorphic deer character Rudy who are literally Pipos Charlotte III 2021 and Pipos Deer Rudy (27cm). Other than that, if I want one of my bajillion OCs to be a doll, I'd rather make the doll from scratch so it will look as close to my OC as possible. However, making dolls from scratch will have to wait until I can actually DO that sort of thing, lol.

 

I usually like to pick dolls with a character in mind, but sometimes I just can’t resist a sculpt even if I don’t have a character for it. Either way, I try to create a character for the doll in the end; whether it’s new or one that I already came up with.

 

The dolls I have so far are moreso dolls I picked out because I enjoyed the sculpt a lot, and then I made a character around them.

I do have OCs, but only one or two specifically I'd like to see in doll form, I just haven't found quite the right sculpt that fits them as my art style unfortunately isn't to the level of fitting the more realistic / semi-realistic offerings on the market! I know that I could still shell them despite that, but it would feel a bit off to me.

 

My ocs have facial features that arent common in bjds- and I'm too fixated on them looking right to ever consider shelling them before.

My current dolls; I just liked the sculpt and the character grew from there! I do have a few sculpts that I've loved that I thought would make great fan dolls. I think if I ever reach a point of completion with my crew that I'm happy with, I'd like to try shelling those.

 

I buy dolls that I like and then create OCs for them afterwards. That's the best of both worlds for me.

I originally joined the hobby with the goal to shell pre-existing OCs, and tried that with my first doll. Right out of the gate it didn't work: I didn't pick an appropriate sculpt either in appearance or "vibes", but I was also a newbie who didn't know what my doll tastes were, and my expectations for the doll (and myself) were too high. Whereas I bought my 2nd and 3rd dolls because I liked them, and then figured out a character for them -- and I enjoyed these dolls much more. So I ditched the idea of shelling pre-existing OCs and sold my first doll. I still love creating characters though, so it was just natural that I created an OC for every doll, using the doll as inspiration.

My doll OCs are now a single cast in a shared story and world. I don't bother shelling pre-existing OCs anymore: no interest, don't want to try a second time. In fact, my doll OCs have become so important to my imagination that I've pretty much stopped thinking about all my non-doll OCs -- at least for now. On the other hand, I find myself kinda locked out of buying dolls that don't fit in with this cast. I once tried to get into tinies, because I liked certain EU-based doll artisans who make quirky pet/creature dolls and fashion 1/6s. I bought one 18cm tiny, thinking I might start a second doll collection... only to discover that I didn't have the mental bandwidth or desire to deal with that. I quite liked that tiny doll, but I eventually sold it and went back to my 1/3 cast. I still look longingly at those tiny dolls, but I'm not gonna try to start a second doll collection -- not for a long time at least.

So I guess I'm stuck in a narrow lane: I buy the dolls that I like, but they have to fit in with the existing collection, and this bar has just gotten higher and higher as the collection has grown. It does mean I miss out on many sculpts that I like, even ones that may fit in, because I can't see them enhancing the crew and the story. But I love my dolls and developing their story, so I'm actually quite contented about this - I'm having lots of fun playing with my dolls and developing their story.

 

I've just shelled my two OCs, and based on limitations of money, space, and diversity options, I'm calling my collection complete.

However, I've ordered an extra doll for the purpose of a body upgrade so that leaves me with the choice of either selling her with the older body swapped in, or I let her be the experimental doll who will tell me who she wants to become. I also dream of owning a very poseable and mature 1/4 or 1/6, perhaps something more stylized than what I currently have. Most likely, it will be an artist doll that catches my fancy.

 

I don't shell OCs...the dolls give me OC ideas when I get them! It's as if they were whispering into my ear, telling me who they are.

 

This is how I do it.

I tried to shell OC's way back at the beginning of my collection and no doll was ever *perfect* enough to represent my OCs.
So now I let the dolls inform any characterization I come up with for them.