20–39cm Dolls [UPDATE OCTOBER 21st 2022!] Making a Dark Crystal (Gelfling) inspired head

Edit: There's already a lot of broken pictures, so for posterity's sake, here's a link to the Flickr album where all the pictures for the project are posted.

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So I have to preface this with saying: I am NOT a sculptor, outside of school projects I have hardly ever touched clay. That being said, I'm a painter and have been a collector of BJDs for many years so I feel like I have a somewhat decent grasp on anatomical knowledge, proportion, and aesthetics.

So for starters I have secured myself some Premier Air Dry Stone Clay, some sculpting tools, and screenshots of some Gelflings from both the original movie and the new show.

For anyone unfamiliar, here are the lovely Gelfling puppet chatacters from the original 1982 film:

And some characters from the new Netflix show, wonderfully done in the same traditional puppet form:


As for now I have no other idea than to make a "generic" Gelfling head. I want it to be in between 1/4 and 1/6 scale, so I'm designing it to hopefully fit on the DollFamily-H 35 cm body. Since I don't actually *have* the body on hand it'll be just experimenting at first.
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Anyway, here is my first very (VERY) rough pass at a head. (please forgive the ears, I just kind of stuck them on before I took the pictures)
I'm using 12mm eyes, and right now the head circumference is just under 6 1/2 inches. As it stands now, the head is definitely MSD sized and will look far too big on a 1/5 body. But just like how you have to get the water out of the ketchup bottle before you can get to the ketchup- I don't expect my first attempt to be the final product.



Goals:

• refine test head to learn how to sculpt a little better.
• Use test head to practice "finishing", AKA cutting the headcap, refining the neck and eye holes, cleaning out the inside, etc.
• use actual measurements to create a better scale head for the body I want to use. This may take a few attempts.
• Buy the 1/5 body (at some point..?)
• finish and refine the "final" head
• casting????

Thanks for joining me on this ride!

 

Update 1/31/22!

Review of my goals:

• refine test head to learn how to sculpt a little better.
• Use test head to practice "finishing", AKA cutting the headcap, refining the neck and eye holes, cleaning out the inside, etc.
• use actual measurements to create a better scale head for the body I want to use. This may take a few attempts.
• Buy the 1/5 body (at some point..?)
• finish and refine the "final" head
• casting????

The Doll Family H 1/5 body was on sale on Alice's Collections for their new years sale, so I bought it in tan skin! (yay! ) I can cross that off my list. Now I just need to wait a few months for it to get here...

I refined the current head a bit- I made the overall shape of the head more symmetrical, I added a taller and slightly more defined nose bridge, and I heavily sanded the brow line so she looks way less alien and more Elven instead. The eyes and the overall head shape need to be totally changed which I can't fix, I'm still planning to sculpt another head for the "final"- but in the meanwhile, I'm using this opportunity to get better acquainted with the materials and the process.

I also cut out the headcap and removed the inside stuff (I used a wad of thin paper, that was a mistake. Making notes to use something else next time) But BOY it was a hell of a time getting the eyes out. I bent one of my metal sculpting tools trying to remove the left eye, and ended up smooshing the eyelids in the process. oh well. I ended up having to cut out some clay from the front of her face which looked like I was giving her a lobotomy



As a small "test" I put the head on my kid delf's body. It was..... unnerving to say the least.



She kind of looks like she has a lamb head, in a way? I said before that this head seemed more MSD sized, but now that I have it on an MSD body I can see that's clearly NOT the case. Anyway, I recently got a wig that is just ever so Gelfling-esque so I plopped it on her tiny head just for laughs.



Not great, but the vision is there...
I'm not going to put *too* much work into this head, but I would still like to see it "finished" to a useable degree just to practice sculpting.

New goals:

• Wait for body to arrive (easier said than done)
• Fix eyelids/ general eye area
• Attach and refine ears
• clean out inside of the head
• work on cleaning up and engineering the headcap design.
• Give this girl a name!

 

Update 2/1/22!

Review of goals (aside from waiting for the body to arrive)

• Fix eyelids/ general eye area

Done. I was initially trying to capture that hooded lid/mono lid look that Deet has from the new series, but I wasn't able to portray it properly. Instead I decided to go for the almost "sleepy" look that the original puppets have. Still not totally happy with the shape (I still have a serious struggle with the brow line) but this is good note taking for the eventual version 2.

• Attach and refine ears

Done, but not that well. I left the toothpicks inside the ears which ended up probably hindering me more than it helped, but because of the way I attached the ears they're the only things keeping them in place if I handle the head roughly. Not sure how this information will help with version 2... Cutting out the headcap was hard enough without the ears in the way.

• clean out inside of the head

Hm, well, I cleaned it up a bit, it's not smooth by any means but I at least filled in the neck where there was just a hole before- now there's a slot for an s hook to go through and divots for it to rest.

• work on cleaning up and engineering the headcap design.
• Give this girl a name!

Didn't do much thinking on either of these, other than making little pegs to hold the headcap in place for the time being.

Though I did found out that the particular "chan" character used in Xiao Chan's and Mian Chan's sculpt names means "Cicada" in Chinese. (The body itself is just referred to as the 1/5 body, but those are the two head sculpts that are available for it) I love cicadas and was already planning on making some kind of cicada-esque wings for for my Gelfling (She's a girl, of course she has wings!) So now I'm thinking that a cicada inspired name could be fitting.

Here's how the head is looking so far:






I'm not sure what it is, but she still doesn't look like a proper Gelfling, and there's only so much I can do without majorly re-working it. At this point I think I'm going to focus more on the inside of the head and the headcap, and get those to a relatively "finished" state.



I've been neglecting the inside and it shows haha. Though the kid delf body I put the head on in one of my earlier posts actually has a comparable neck size to the 1/5 scale body, so I can keep using her body to test the fit of the neck hole. The scale is a whole different story, though...

New Goals:

• Hollow out eyewells so that the eyes fit better
• clean up the inside of the head, as well as build up parts that need to support structure
• Come up with some design for the headcap that works with magnets (and possibly built-in pegs)
• Get the headcap to sit flush with the head.

 

Mini update!

I finally compiled a few references and also did some digital sculpting in blender while watching the Dark Crystal again, so that I can get a better understanding of the facial proportions.

I finally realized that the brow bone has these two raised points on it, rather than it just being a solid heavy brow. I'm planning on sculpting the face to look more like Jen from the original version, but there's lots of behind the scenes production pictures of the making of the Gelfling puppets from the new show, which are great because I can see what their heads are shaped like without hair.... and BOY was I off! Their cranium is much closer to human than I guessed. I'm planning on re-watching/actually finishing the new show, plus the "making of" special that netflix did to get some more references.



Bad blender sculpt is bad but you can see it's much more Gelfling like in shape!



I know lots of people digitally sculpt their dolls and print them with an SLA 3D printer, which I could definitely do... I won't totally write off using a 3D printer for this project, but using traditional materials just feels right as an homage to the spirit of The Dark Crystal.

I now have much better direction when I start the 2.0 version of the head!

 

Update!

Alright, it's been a moment but the Doll Family H 1/5 body arrived! I couldn't be more in love with it. The tan resin is a beautiful color (I'm styling my girl based on Jen, or the Stonewood Clan) and the posing is amazing. The body sculpt is actually more defined looking in person than it is in the pictures- I was almost afraid it would look *too* child-like, but I think it's perfect for a Gelfling woman/young adult.

Just out of curiosity, I put the head on the body, and... the proportions aren't totally terrible! Warning for bare-chested dollie nudity below:





It's going to be much better working on the new sculpt now that I actually have the body in hand. Outside of the obvious corrections like the size/shape of the ears, I can see where the neck hole needs to be, and how large I need to make the cranium to look proportional. I'm probably going to make a custom wig, so I'm not terribly worried about head size, though I think I'm going to shoot for roughly YoSD size.

Also on the docket is the hands! The DFH hands are beautifully sculpted, but Gelflings have 4 fingers, not 5. This particular clay I'm using is not super strong, so I'll have to look for something to use as the ball joint on the wrist.

For the next update I will hopefully have a rough start on the new head!

 

Apologies for the lack of exciting news from the last update, but I've started on another head! I've been meaning to make this update earlier, but I've fallen into the trap of chipping away at it so slowly and saying to myself "when it looks like [x] I'll post an update". So to break that I'll just post what I have now even though I'm far from finished working!

Here's the current (and very rough) sculpt after about 2 weeks of on-and-off sculpting:













And a bonus pic of the profile with a random wig that's too big:


Apologies for the lighting of the pics, it's pretty difficult to take a decent picture of an all white sculpt lol.

I learned from my first attempt that using a wad of aluminum foil was a bad material for the core of the head. Being the cheapskate, er, as resourceful I am, I improvised my materials and cut a little sphere out of spare upholstery foam. This was *also* a mistake as the material was too spongy to really start sculpting a decent form right off the bat. (I had to wait several days for the rough coating to clay to dry before doing any actual sculpting) The material also wasn't great for holding in the glass eyes I was planning on sculpting around, so I'm currently sculpting it *without* the eye size I want to use inside the head like I did in the first attempt.

However, since I was able to pull the foam sphere out of the neck hole once the clay dried, I didn't need to cut the headcap right away, which has actually proven useful as I'm having quite a bit of trouble with the shape of the skull.

To-do list:

- While re-watching the 80s movie as well as the 2019 series this past week, I see that I was *gravely* wrong in my new reference sketches for my sculpt. It's hard to describe but I've essentially made the jaw completely horizontal & also made the nose almost parallels to the jaw line, whereas the nose should be pointing much more downwards than what I have now. I'm going to attempt to make a work-around fix by shifting the angle of the neck hole and adding to the shape of the skull.

- Change the angle of the outer corners of the eyes to point slightly more upward.

- Possibly move the eyes further apart...?

- Ears. Just in general.

- Cut the headcap once I'm satisfied with the overall shape of the head. Once the headcap is cut I can start working on the interior bits like magnet placement, fitting the eyes, etc

I also have been toying with the name Shida...? (Sheeda?) Unsure of the spelling at the moment, but Sidhe (pronounced like "she") is more or less the celtic equivalent of faerie- One of my sources of inspiration for this character & how she looks comes from an old book on faeries with illustrations by Brian Froud, who is the concept artist of the original movie & his son worked on the 2019 series. A lot of his illustrations in that book are very reminiscent of the gelflings. The "da" comes from cicada. Her future wings will be patterned after cicada wings, as a nod to the place I grew up listening to cicadas every summer. Unfortunately the place I live now has no cicadas and I very much miss their call.

Whew, that was a long one. Thank you to everyone following!

 

Wow! It's been a while. Haven't actually worked on the head much at all, I keep forgetting that I won't get around to doing things if I don't set aside time for it.

Anyway, pics!









Finally I added some ears. The other big change is that the cheeks are much more... lumpy? lol I don't know how to word it but they aren't completely rounded and show some of the imaginary underlying bone structure. I really like how she looks now, I didn't want s super baby/cutesy face- I know that doesn't really mesh with most BJD aesthetics but this is my own doll, dangit! She's still very very rough in the pics, so she won't actually look wrinkly or anything when she's finished BTW

I believe I also did a lot more adjusting of the shape of the cranium, but I could just keep messing with it into eternity so I decided I was done with that- That was actually the reason this update took so long, I was still a little frustrated about the head shape. Still need to adjust the nose bridge and the shape of the eyes, but my next big step is to cut out the headcap! The neck bit will be significantly reduced- basically it'll be inverted. I kept the neck hole open as wide as possible so I could hold the head easier, but after the headcap is cut I will sculpt it into the normal concave neck hole with an oval-shaped s-hook opening like we see on most BJDs.

Also in the future..... some hands?

 

Ah thank you for the kind words! And I agree, I think I’ll be much more confident in adjusting the shapes/form once the head sits correctly on the neck.

 

October update! I try to share things in the order I did them.

First things first, I cut the headcap and started working on the inside of the head.

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I have done some sanding on the head, I fiddled around with the eye wells & the eyelids to make them more symmetrical. I'm still having trouble sanding out the inside eye wells so that the eyelids don't look so thick.

I also started on the hands. The first one I've made is on the small side. Otherwise I'm actually surprisingly pleased at how well my first attempt turned out.

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I still need to tweak things on the head before I start thinking about Mr. Surfacer 1200. Smoothing the nose bridge on the sides, evening out the ears, working on the tip of the nose and the mouth area, and making sure the neck hole properly fits on the neck.

Also! I upload more frequently on my instagram @mainframe_dolls and I have a dedicated story for this project, so feel free to follow me there if you're inclined to do so.

I will try to go back and fix some of the broken pictures- but I went through the flickr album and made sure that all of the pictures were set to public. (A bunch of them were private and I don't know why hah) There are also some more pictures in the album than I have posted here.

Next up: expect more hands, further refining, and maybe.... the first coat of Mr Surfacer...? I don't know if people would prefer more frequent updates (see: as frequent as my availability allows) with less exciting changes, or less frequent updates with more noticeable changes...? Let me know if you have a preference!