first use of my airbrush

It's been over a year since I got it, but the thing is damned intimidating. And I must say that I'm a bit glad I was intimidated. If I'd just gone in and tried to use it without waiting until I was in a calm and patient mood, I probably would've chucked it off the balcony. There was a very specific consistency I had to get paint to in order for it to work, and figuring out which way to pull the lever and how much pressure to apply to get anything to happen was a bit of a pain initially.

Either nothing would come out or everything would come out at once. And then once I was comfortable enough using it on scrap paper and an old chair, I tried it on Kael's head and it just sent the paint radiating out in spindly patterns every which way. It took me a while to realize that I had to hold it pretty far back to avoid that.

I don't yet feel comfortable enough with it to attempt a full face up, but I did manage to blush my mods to Kael's face to match the rest of his head, so now he does not have extremely visible white marks around his mouth! And that's what matters.

If you look really closely you can still see where they are, but it's a vast improvement over being able to see them from across the room!

After this was done I gave him a new face up. This time I didn't have model viewer up so I could stare at the in-game model for Kael. I know this sculpt can pull off Kael, so I didn't really feel obligated to stick to it exactly.

I think I might have gone a bit too far in the 'subtle' direction again. Doesn't show up very well in photos. Oh well. This is what practice was invented for.

 

 In my room.

 Natural lighting.

And for funsies heavily photoshopped shot.

natural light photos and attempts at eyelash application

So I promised some natural lighting photos of Orkas' face. (I'm sure you all were holding me to that and awaiting them anxiously too).

Well it's rather cloudy out and I had to actually go outside on the porch for these because not enough light wanted to come in through the window. So this means the photos aren't from a consistent angle because I was trying to hold a doll and hold the camera.

In other words, these are ridiculously bad, un-artistic photos.

But at least now we can actually see that Orkas has eyebrows and isn't just completely blank. I really fail at this whole 'natural' thing. Not my forte. I much prefer dark and dramatic, or at least like gaunt and worn out.

While I was out there I decided to get pictures of another sort of project I'm trying to work on. My first attempt at applying eyelashes. I never give them to my guys because I have a near-impossible time making them look like men when they have eyelashes. I realize that real men pull this off all the time, but real mean look a bit more rugged than dolls most of the time. There are a couple of my dudes who I have considered giving eyelashes to (Avelarion mostly) but we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Anna was my test subject. She's my only other girl aside from Elaria who is not currently being sold and Elaria already has lashes. She came with them.

Anyway... this is not my forte. I spent ages trying to get them in last night, let the glue dry overnight, tried to put eyes in and the eyelashes immediately started to fall out. So I looked up tutorials and they pretty much did exactly what I did so that was no help. So I just kind of put more layers of glue over them and on the inside and am hoping that will help them stay. If not I think I'll just swear off the use of eyelashes forever...

These are actually meant to go on people so they're obscenely long on Anna. But I didn't want to go to the trouble of ordering doll-size eyelashes for an experimental procedure that might not turn out okay.

Three coats of glue later, they still won't stay put.  I officially hate doll eyelashes. And these photos may very well be the last time anyone hears from these.

face up practice: Orkas (Elfdoll K)

I've had Orkas (right) in the same blonde wig since I got him. It was always intended to be a temporary, but somehow over four years later it was still in use. I got so used to it that I almost forgot Orkas wasn't actually blonde.

But a while back in my quest for the right wig for Loren, I acquired an orange-ish wig that I wasn't doing anything with. Orkas' hair is supposed to be in the light orange-ish range, so today I decided to give that to him and style it appropriately.

After that it occurred to me that I haven't re-done his face up in ages and since I'm trying to get around to re-doing everybody eventually I figured I would do him. I experimented with a more subdued, natural look and while I'm relatively okay with the results, it is hard to photograph in this lighting. I'll probably try to get natural lighting photos tomorrow.

Orkas with new face up and wig:

sculpted eyebrows and other mods

When Impldoll released Triton I was pretty excited because I've been trying to find a doll for a minor character of mine who is a water dragon. I originally tried getting a Vega Last Song for him but it didn't work out.

Basically, the representation isn't supposed to be 100% accurate to the character, but I want something that is similar and gets across the right feel. Technically Aeisthran is blue too but I didn't realize Impl would do blue if asked so I just went for grey because I've always wanted a grey skin doll anyway.

But anyway, I didn't do much with him for ages, but then a couple days ago I decided I wanted to make his eyes smaller and sculpt him eyebrows. He has a gill-beard so it seemed weird that he'd have hair eyebrows.

I tried them first in Premo but they fell off during cooking. Then I tried to cast those in resin so I could just glue them on his face, but my mold release didn't work and the silicon just stuck to itself and ate them. So I got some epoxy putty and just used that. Probably should have done that in the first place but it was late and I didn't want to wait until the next day to try them.

I threw on some paint and such so the white eyebrows wouldn't be so jarring. Everything's pretty messy (there was an experiment with a sort of drippy/watery texture going on with the upper half of the head) but I wanted there to at least be something before I took pictures.

I don't know what sort of wig I want for him. I considered just leaving him bald but if I go that route I'll probably mod like weird tentacles or something onto his head to make his head look less naked. Right now he's in a wig I made a while back because he's supposed to have white or grey hair and this is my only spare white wig.

structural modification

I had planned to put off actually modding Scileraen until tomorrow during the day. But then I wasn't particularly tired and was in such a good mood I decided to just go for it! To hell with caution!

Since the porch light would disturb Selly, I gathered my wood carving tools from my printmaking class, got one of my functional respirators, and grabbed my packets of sandpaper. Then I locked myself in the bathroom with a bucket of water so that I could keep resin dust under control.

I wrapped my left hand in an oven mitt and a towel because whenever I use carving tools I inevitably cut my hands pretty badly. Luckily, this time things went smoothly and the process was injury-free!

I drew lines for where I wanted the hollows of the cheeks to be and really roughly carved in the basic shape. Then I pulled out my 300 grit sandpaper and sanded until the surface was relatively smooth. After going up to about 1500 grit it was back to being the same color as the surrounding un-modded resin.

While looking at the jagged shapes my carving tools make, I got the idea to give Scileraen his forehead scars because the jaggedness reminded me of the weird crinkles scars get. So I gouged up his forehead and it's not pretty but it is accurate to his character. (kind of odd that I feel that way seeing as normally I find scars appealing.)

I didn't want to wipe the face up I just did earlier today so I just modded without wiping it and then sealed over it after and just touched up the modded areas. I can sort of see the line between the two parts, but it's not very obvious. Not near as bad as when I tried to mod my realskin Akando without wiping his face... that was pretty terrible looking XD

Anyway, here are some pictures where you can (hopefully) see the mod work that has been done:

Right side of the face.

Left side of the face.

And fairly straight on.

They're not perfectly even, but I'm pretty happy with it.! Also, the wig is dry now (it doesn't look it, but it is.) I used hair glue on the ends to bring them to points but the rest is just the way they naturally stay after my boiling water treatment. I am also pleased with this! I'm sure most people wouldn't find this look particularly appealing but I had a really specific look in mind and a fur wig, while easily styled this way, would have made his hair look too soft. And it's not supposed to be soft.

wig modding and more faceups

Scileraen is one of my bjds that I really struggle to properly bond with. I think he has a lot of potential and when I do take the time to try to make him work I feel really attached, but it's one of those cases where I got a mold because I saw potential in it, but what I wanted required a lot of modding. And I'm impatient when I first get a new doll and often just want to enjoy looking at them rather than spend ages sanding them.

So I did some quick mods on him but then left things alone aside from that. I'm hoping to get some more serious stuff done sometime this week, but for now I re-did his face and wig (which is always a huge pain). This time I decided that rather than attempt to assault it with hair glue I would try styling it more permanently by arranging strands and pouring boiling water over them so that they'd stay in that position better.

Hair is still drying, so we'll see how it works out for real later. It has potential to work for what I want though.

face ups and photo spam

 Last night I did face ups for two of Selly's dudes: Fug, a Luts Abadon, and her as-yet-unnamed(?) Migidoll Miho. I'm always a little nervous doing face ups for other people because I'm not sure if I'll do them right for the character.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy it. I just worry more. And try to get it right on the first go. Which usually makes me a bit unhappy with the end result.

Here is Fug:

And here is Miho:

I had to wait until today because last night the room's lighting was eating the face ups. Alas, I don't really like how Fug's looks in natural lighting either... But it was my first attempt at incorporating acrylic paints into a face up in like... years. And I should really start trying to do that more but I have a really unsteady hand so that's always intimidating.

The good lighting inspired me to take a few more pictures of some of my own dudes though, so be warned... a bit of picspam ahead.

I started out with Lyric, whose hair I trimmed some last night. I'm not sure yet if I like it, but I find Lyric 90 kinds of adorable regardless.

Then I took a couple of Matthew, but I still don't feel like his head photographs properly. I'm quite keen on it in person but it looks different in photos somehow. Still, these two weren't terrible so they'll have to do.

Doppelganger never gets photo love. A lot of that being because he's not cooperative. I do try, but it seldom works out. Perhaps it's the more stylized head and the fact that I mostly work with semi-realistic ones these days? I don't know. But I really love this head regardless.

Also wanted to get some shots of Elaria, because all of hers are taken in terrible lighting. (Though one might argue that terrible lighting trumps a backdrop of a Spiderman blanket... I don't know if that person would win that argument but they might at least make a point)

Then it was Defliel (left) and Ezsphrein (right)'s turn for pictures. I got a close up of Defliel because he doesn't get much photo love either. Ezsphrein, however,  has gotten a fair bit of coverage throughout his time with me, including being the first to get a proper box opening photoshoot.

Avelarion/Al'ar is harder to photograph at close range, due to his plethora of crazy feathers and appendages.

And lastly, I decided to get a couple shots of Nazoe. He's the odd one out in my collection, with his MSD head that is larger than most of my SD heads. He's on a modified Shinydoll body so he's somewhere between MSD and SD size. Most of the time if someone doesn't fit in they get re-shelled, but Dollstown Seola was one of the first molds I ever fell in love with and I find Nazoe far too cute as is. So unless Dollstown makes a tiny Seola that I can turn into an MSD that's in scale with everyone else, I'm pretty much just going to leave him this way.

painting doll nails

Despite the fact that Sasori and Deidara are some of my oldest bjds, they still didn't have their nails the proper color. (proper being used rather loosely since some argue that the canon color is purple or other variants on ... dark colors.)

Well, Dei's nails were black at one point way back in the day when he had an oldschool Domuya body. But then I sold that and never bothered to redo the nails.

First I did Sasori's and they came out pretty splotchy because I was just using straight up black acrylic paint on them. But then when the paint was starting to dry up before I could finish, I added water to it to keep it alive and that actually made it flow better (I should know this after like five years of art school but I'm not always the best thinker when I'm feeling impulsive)

Anyway...

Deidara's came out much more smoothly thanks to the water. I'll have to keep that in mind when I eventually redo Sasori's.

forcing inspiration

Originally posted: March 23, 2012, 01:31
When inspiration isn't there, it's hard to force it or find a way to make things work. Sometimes I can jumpstart the inspiration by doing something that feels more like something that 'needs' to be done than like a creative endeavor.
Today I started out with fixing Shino's wig.

On the left we have Volks' Amakusa Shiro Tokisada, whose outfit and wig I acquired for Shinozaki. However, the whole curling in ends didn't do much for me so I took a flat iron to it. It mostly got rid of the curling but it did make the ends really frizzy. After ages of being lazy about this, I took boiling water to it to get rid of the frizz. (sidenote: the bangs never behaved like that for me. When I got the wig it wanted to part to the side the way I have it styled. But with more curling, something akin to the way everyone in my elementary school styled their bangs with a round brush)
After taking the wig off for styling, I noticed that Shino's eyebrows were rubbing off and decided to redo his faceup. All was going well until a sudden wave of extreme humidity swept in out of nowhere and caused my spray sealant to misbehave, messing up all my hard work. By this point I wasn't feeling up to starting over so I did what I could to make it tolerable until I feel like trying over again.

Probably the only clear shot I've gotten of Shinozaki in... ever. I'm really fond of him but he just doesn't always cooperate for photoshoots. A lot of that was his rather poorly designed neck hole. He was unable to move his head up and down but I fixed that today and now he has a lovely range of motion in his head and I feel like it just brings him to life.
Shino is probably one of the best 'happy accidents' to happen to me since getting into BJDs. With pretty much every other mold, I hand-picked it for a character or just loved it to death and had to find a way to make it work. But Soom's Chrom never appealed to me. Some owner pics made him look really good, but not the kind of good where I'd think "I want one." But then I was looking for a new head for Lyric and was getting desperate and saw a particularly sad looking Chrom and thought "you know. This could work."
Of course, in person it was all wrong for Lyric. He looked far too Asian and, while he can pull off sad, it's not the Lyric kind of sad. He ended up in the floating head cabinet for months. And then one day I decided it was time to clean him up and take sale pictures and as I was getting him out of the cabinet and heading to the bathroom in search of alcohol to wipe his face off with, I realized what I wanted to do with him.
Reminiscing tangents aside, I did do one other mini-project today. That was to make Esyrlon and Theorin rings:

They're the same style, but Esyrlon's is silver and Theorin's is gold. (Theorin really needs more character-appropriate clothing so he doesn't look so out of place next to Esyrlon). I got the idea because I was trying to think of a new way to do Eyrlon's stole/scarf deal because the gold chain deal wasn't really meshing with his ensemble. I decided I wanted to stick with more silvers and was considering other sorts of adornments people have worn throughout history when it occurred to me that I tend to neglect rings, despite the fact that those are some of the most common jewelry that people wear.
So I decided Esyrlon needed at least one. And then I got the idea to give Theorin a matching one. Kind of like wedding bands or something. (Which would make sense seeing as they are married. Or the Elvish equivalent of married.) If I had some sort of fancy metal cutting stuff I'd probably have made them thinner. They're made from discounted earrings.
Made a couple extras for fun. (tried to do matching ones for Elaria and Malesar too but Elaria's fingers are SO tiny.. it didn't work out). Off to sleep now. Goodnight!

sewing project cont.: perseverance

Originally posted: March 18, 2012, 04:07
After spending a long time watching Scrubs and trying to forget about my horrible sewing failure this morning, during a talk with (read: rant to) Selly I finally got an idea for how to fix things. So we ran off to the store to get a seam ripper (because somehow both of mine got lost in the move. Which is actually really sad because I stole one of those from my mom and have been using it since I was pretty young..)
Anyway, I was able to fix the undersized sleeve with a hideous patch, but it's the under side of the sleeve and the side that wraps under so it won't show. And as I said before... what matters is the visual. If you can't have the whole package deal, that is. But we've already established that I can't.

I do not know what went wrong here. Taking photos under the same lighting conditions as earlier but somehow this was super un-cooperative and Esyrlon looks like a zombie or something.
Not the point though. So um... I fixed the sleeve. Then I took in the inner layer so it wouldn't interfere with how things worked as much. I neatened up the collar some and hand-embroidered some weird little swirlies on it to sort of add a bit of flavor to it. It looked really plain still, so I grabbed my pliers and modified the mini-necklaces Esyrlon was wearing into one piece and added the little red dangly pieces so a bit more was going on there.
The over the shoulder dealy I mentioned before came out more like a cross between a stole and a scarf. Which is a better spawnling than the poncho/yukata mix. In my opinion. Overally, I'm much happier with things than I was. It's still ... I like the outfit but I'm not sure I can see it as everyday wear. Maybe without the stole/scarf.
Still need to make the belt. and I'm not sure if I still feel that butt capes are necessary. Will have to contemplate this.
Off to sleep for now! Goodnight!

sewing project cont.: discouraged

Originally posted: March 17, 2012, 15:49
So today I tried that whole fixing Esyrlon's outfit deal. And there is so much of the fabric and it's so floppy that things got messed up and it's not the same on both sides and I can sort of get it to work if I pin it in the back (so I'm thinking maybe if I take it in in the back it'll be awkwardly functional..)
I mean it's doll clothing and it was designed to be impractical (the sleeves are almost long enough for my arms, for example) so it's not a huge deal if it's rigged up oddly as long as it looks okay. I would LIKE for it to look okay and function properly but... I'll live if it can only do one.
It looked ridiculous with the under-pajama dealy once it was 'fixed' so I just removed that from the picture because I was super frustrated and about five seconds away from doing something drastic like shredding everything.
I think I'll just do the hanging doodads and butt capes and forget about modesty. But I'll probably do those either later when I've calmed down or tomorrow. Or... something. I will let this be a lesson to myself to stop looking for shortcuts and experimenting with things that deviate from my master plan.

sewing projects and fun(?) with accessories

Originally posted: March 17, 2012, 03:26
I designed an outfit for Esyrlon a while back after getting some new fabric that I thought would drape well, but I put off actually making the thing because often my sewing projects don't work out exactly as planned and I get frustrated and give up on them for ages. So it kind of takes a lot of mental gearing up. Convincing myself to persevere even when things inevitably don't go as planned.
So last night while browsing around the sewing subsection of DoA I found some tutorial on how to make something called an 'infinity dress' or something along those lines. I liked how flowy the dresses were and the tutorial was really simple, so I decided to use it to make something for Esyrlon to wear. Or.. use a modified variant on it.

So I kind of did something between the aforementioned dress pattern and the way I've seen various people make miniature yukata. It's massively oversized because I wanted it to have a lot of extra drape (right now it's kind of like the spawn of a poncho and a yukata). The sleeves are so big they fit on my arms. I'll work more on modifying that tomorrow probably.
It's hard to get a picture of everything that's going on since Esyrlon is too loosely strung and can't stand well on his own (that needs to be fixed at some point too). The inner layer is ... not what I was going for. I considered just going for something similar to the outer layer but more form-fitting but then got this brilliant idea to try my hand at something with a high collar again (because I failed utterly at that when I tried it with Avelarion). Well.. I figured out how to do a high collar without needing a zipper, but I don't like it with the outer layer. XD Maybe if I sewed it shut in front so it didn't flop like that...
After I get the outer layer fixed up properly, I have plans for a belt, a multi-layered pseudo butt-cape, and some doodads to hang down around the shoulders. Hard to explain that last one. I also designed a cloak dealy to go with it but decided that might be overkill and decided to throw the cloak design in for Theorin since he is actually described as wearing one and loans it to Avelarion at one point.
I think once the outer layer is taken in so that it fits properly, we see less of the inner layer (it's mainly there because outer layer is translucent and I wanted white as my accent color), and I fix that collar, I'll be happier with it. It's still a bit shinier than I wanted (and looks like a nightgown without the outer layer over it) but I think it might be able to work. I'm hoping that addition of more 'accessories' (cuz I'm not sure what you call things that are part of an outfit but aren't strictly necessary) will help bring the whole thing together.
The headgear and necklace are something I was just fucking around with. They were both around his neck but the collar makes the smaller one not fit so I turned it into a head dealy... cuz he's royalty so... I thought it might be fitting. I'm still on the fence about it. I do want him and Theorin to have some sort of... fancy thing to denote their rank.
That reminded me--while searching through my supply of various accents and accessories I've picked up in the past with dolls in mind, I found this:

Here Elaria is modeling it for us. I had decided a few days ago that she needed something around her neck, but I'm not sure if this is what I had in mind. The metal isn't gold so I'm contemplating painting that if I do keep this as part of her ensemble. That's about it I believe.
Goodnight!

modifications: Matthew (Souldoll Harace)

Originally posted: March 18, 2012, 18:50
Last night I stayed up really late for a variety of reasons so this morning when I woke up I drank some coffee to kickstart my day. When I don't eat enough, coffee makes me shaky and manic to the point of delirium. But if I have enough food it's like some sort of miracle drug. I have tons of inspiration and patience and I'm really hard to discourage. It's hard to bring me down when I've had coffee. (Oddly enough, other forms of caffeine ingestion do not have this effect.)
So, high off my coffee and semi-success with fixing Esyrlon's outfit, I decided it was time to do some mod work on Matthew. For those who haven't been keeping up, I found a smaller head for him that will be more in scale with everyone else and my main criteria was that I wanted a similar shape and expression to his old face. Well I found something but there were a couple things that I felt were slightly off. (The most major of those being that his upper lip stuck out way too far)
So I wiped off his hastily applied arrival faceup and grabbed my handy dandy zillion grit sandpaper and went out to my lovely lawn chair I acquired when it was abandoned by moving neighbors.
Then I set to work on several hours of sanding. Most of that was bringing in the upper lip but I also did some work on his eye shape. I ended up having to re-carve in his lips because the mouth was kind of shallow so it was kind of lost in the process so half of it has been reconstructed. I made the tear ducts more obvious and opened the eyes more and sanded down the eyelids in the center.

There's a before and after pic. It's kind of hard to see some of the changes but I feel like it adequately shows the upper lip change. At least somewhat. I wish I'd gotten a profile shot of the before.
Here's how the profile looks now:

You can see that the upper lip still sticks out further than the bottom but it's not as pronounced as before.
I'm quite happy with how he looks in person. I don't think the pictures captured it super well but that's not really a huge deal! It makes me happy that I can look at him and not feel like something's off. (No offense to the original sculptor. His default look would work just fine if I didn't have a really specific thing in mind for Matthew).

ramble about body switching and Id's mods (Volks SwD Piccolo)

Originally posted: March 1, 2012, 18:14
Where to begin...
Well it probably all started when I decided Defliel's original head didn't mesh well with Ezsphrein's. After that I began this move toward getting less stylized heads for most of my bjds. And you all know this already so I don't really need to go on about that, but I will say that I was left with one head in need of replacing. And that was Matthew's. And I really liked his head but it just didn't fit with anyone else he would be likely to hang out with so I was hoping to replace it at some point.
Anyway, that's difficult when one isn't exactly rolling on dough. There's a trade involved with a head I've been trying to sell for like ... forever now. And a lot of forum browsing for a head with a similar expression and such.
Anyway, Matthew got a new head today. Which I think is going to work out well. The expression and eye shape are almost identical to his previous head (which is stupdendous) and it's from Souldoll so it's about 1/10 the size. Okay not really. But it's a lot smaller. But it was in white skin. And Matthew's body is not white skin. Such minor details don't really deter me for some reason.
I decided that the head I was using for Iyrilaeth (which has never been mentioned here) wasn't really working for me. It wasn't quite perfect and I felt like I was settling for it just because I had it in hand and wanted something new and exciting. So I took that off the body it was occupying and tried Matthew's new head on there, and that was not working because that body is 70cm and a little too broad in the shoulders for the new head. So I stole Esyrlon's body and tried him on there and that was a much better fit, but Esyrlon is supposed to be slender and small and he wasn't really working that image on a 70cm body either.
So that left me in a bit of a pickle. I wanted something that worked well for Matthew, but I have a limited selection of white skin bodies. After a series of aggravated heavy sighs and staring around the room helplessly, I finally noticed Ezsphrein, who also has the whole white skin thing going on.
I popped his head on the 70cm body, and was a little iffy at first. But once he had his hair and clothes back on I rather liked it. I think he seems happy with the height increase, and now his clothes aren't way too big on him (because they were intended for a 70cm body but I liked them too much and they were too good a deal so I got them even though they didn't fit perfectly). Anyway, that allowed me to put Esyrlon back on his original body and put Matthew on Ezsphrein's old body. Which I think is a good fit.
I modded his lips a little and gave him a quick face up. And then trimmed his hair down some because it was too long for his significantly smaller head. I also modded his lips some but I think I'll work on that more another time. They're still not exactly where I want them to be, but they'll do for now. The lower lip was a bit too full and the upper lip sticks out a bit too much. He also needs smaller eyes (like the ones that go in the sockets) but I'll worry about that when I have more funds.
This all actually worked out great in the end though as now I can sell Iyrilaeth's head and Matthew's old body.
This entry seems kinda naked without a couple pictures and I have talked a lot about heads and such.. let me go get a picture of Matthew's new head so we can do a before and after.

Before (left) and After (right). 

Also, after um.. 9 zillion years I finished my mods on Id's head. I don't think I posted about this. I know I didn't post pictures. He was a sleeping head when I got him and I decided I wanted him to have open eyes, but I kind of stopped partway through and decided that was good enough. I was really new to modding and didn't know exactly where I was planning to go with it.
But armed with a definite vision, I decided to finish the job. It involved carving in eyelids and obviously cutting out the rest of the eye shape. And reshaping the eyewells because they were meant to hold eyes in a completely different position, if at all.
Here is a picture of Id now:

lip and nose modification: Theorin (Iplehouse Akando)

Originally posted: June 8, 2011, 14:08
I got an amazing deal on an Iplehouse Akando recently. However, Akando was never one of the EID sculpts I really wanted terribly. Yet another case of the body being perfect for a character but the head not quite cutting it. The lips combined with his huge doe eyes made him look a bit too effeminate for what I had in mind. In this case however, I thought I could fix that.
If he's going to be Theorin he has to look a bit rougher. His overall facial structure is fine. Good chin, good cheekbones, nice jawline. Mainly just the eyes and lips that were a problem.
Normally, I would just acquire another head to get the right look. But heads that fit this body are hard to come by and I can guarantee I would not get as good a deal on another one as I did on this one.
SO! Operation lip reduction was phase 1 (oh and it also involved a nose job). There is probably a phase 2 involving epoxy and eyes at some point after A-kon.

^Quick before and after shot. Before on the left, in case that wasn't obvious.
The lips are pretty rough right now. I still have to go in and even them out a bit more. Smooth the lines. Possibly over-reduced the upper lip, but I'm a bit keen on the thin-lipped look. Selly can tell you. She and I agree mostly on what constitutes 'too big' but we disagree on what constitutes 'too small'.
Also messed with the nose. Theorin has a very angular nose. In his case it's likely because it's been broken. This head had a pretty round nose and I figured that if I attempted to make it angular in one go I would mess it up (which might work for a broken nose but I think, being a king, Theorin would have a physician capable of setting his nose evenly even if it still ended up with a bump) So I just thinned it some and made it a bit more pointy in preparation for future work.
Anyway, despite the rather rough quality and unfinishedness of it, I think it's a step in the right direction for the character.
He is also absolutely getting swivel joints added to his thighs at some point. I am addicted to them and his version of the body doesn't have them.
Think that's it for now!

sculpting hands

Originally posted: June 12, 2010, 02:07
I did this drawing of what I imagined a humanoid Al'ar to look like. I have since embarked upon a quest to make Al'ar in bjd form. The only thing that I am not satisfied with is his hands, which I drew as these super elongated things that taper off into what I imagined to be feathers.
Months of brainstorming later, I still don't know how on earth to go about making feather fingers, but I'm not opposed to the idea of just having something that looks similar to the drawing. So at around 4am, I pulled out two wooden beads that are roughly the size of his wrist joints, some super sculpey, and some wire.

Today I finished getting the basics of the left hand done. They need some tweaking and smoothing out, but I'm relatively pleased with them.

I couldn't make the fingers any longer without them being too fragile. As it is, I'm a little terrified of the idea of so much as moving him while he's wearing them. Perhaps if I acquire some excess funds I'll attempt to cast them so as to avoid damaging the only ones I have.

Blood elf eyebrows for Kael

Originally posted: June 6, 2009, 00:46
I made Kael eyebrows. Proper ones. Like Blood Elves are supposed to have.
I also started work on his clothes. I THINK I have an idea for how to construct things but I'm not 100% sure yet. We'll see how it goes, I guess.

there we go. Eyebrows! I would like to credit Solen of DoA with the idea of using feathers for eyebrows.

casting eyes in hot glue

Originally posted: June 3, 2009, 18:19

I modified my glowing eye design by making a mold and using hot glue for the eyes.

I don't think I showed any pictures of my last attempt at casting eyes in hot glue. In fact, I'm almost certain I didn't. But I did spend hours hot gluing into an eye-shaped mold and mixing in colors to make weird designs.

Some of them came out pretty cool (I thought) but since hot glue tends to be translucent, they were ending up looking really dark when placed inside a head.. I also really liked some where I did a combination of red and gold swirls so I decided I wanted to acquire colored hot glue sticks and try this again a different way.

This time, for the 'whites' of the eyes I used red hot glue and for the center I used the clear with some gold paint! I made probably a dozen or more of these, but these two were my favorites!

_{It's kinda hard to get a close up of something that small without it looking weird..}

glowing eyes and torso mod finale!

Originally posted: April 13, 2009, 20:38

I saw someone on DoA who had a doll with glowing green eyes in a photograph and decided this sort of thing would be amazing for a project I'm working on for Selly, which involves making a head for an Undead from World of Warcraft and getting one of Batchix's zombie bodies into functioning shape for the role.

I asked some questions about how the eyes were made and then set about trying to make some.

Yellow glowing eyes tested inside a head.

And while I was at it, I figured I'd go ahead and make green ones.

And since Ver wanted to see this in context--front and side shot of the leg joints in action. Previously the leg could only face forward and bend at the knee, but with these it can twist to allow him to cross his legs or bend to raise the knees while sitting.

Looks kinda weird because of the mismatched colors but at some point when I have more cash to burn I hope to smooth them out and cast them.