further fixes on a work in progress

Several years ago I got a damaged Production Ariadne body for really cheap on Yahoo!Japan and decided to try to fix it up. I'm pretty sure it was put together from spare pieces from various casts of the body since the resin color varies from part to part. Luckily, I'm not picky about resin matching  so that doesn't bother me. I had to sand a few pieces smooth because they were rough or uneven.

Production Ariadne only did female bodies in 60cm (as far as I know) and the body's aesthetic didn't quite mesh with any of my ideas for female characters. So I decided to mod the body to be male, because I can never have too many male bodies that can assume the fetal position.

Since I'd just finished some spray painting on the work table, I decided to take photos on the lawn chair. Today's fix was fixing the shoulder joint so it doesn't pop out of place and make it look like it's shrugging randomly.

I don't really have reference photos to show how the shoulders behaved before, but moving the arm at all used to cause the arm part to pop off the ball at the shoulder. But here they are staying put properly. My next fix will probably be to mod the lower arms so that hands fit properly on the wrist joint. The end of the arm gets so thin that hands don't really fit right, as you can sort of see in the extended arm in this second picture.

I do appreciate the sorts of poses this body can manage, though. This is the one that Andael is normally on. It's not 100% perfect for him but it works well to convey his vulnerability.

Edited to add!: After putting Andael's head back on the body, I decided something was off. I felt like he looked too big for the body, and then it occurred to me that part of the problem was the tendency of Migidoll heads to get wider on the upper head. Photo for reference because I didn't take time to do before/after pics. 

Here's Andael's head after I took a dremel to it. It's uneven but not visible under a wig. I'll probably go in and smooth it out later. But since he wears a really fluffy wig anyway, this helps reduce how big his head appears. His character is supposed to be on the small side and the wider upper head was making him look better on larger bodies despite the fact that the features on the face are relatively small. I might also possibly go in and shave a bit off the top at some point but for now I'm happy with things.

Taking in Statik's clothes

I felt like sewing something today but didn't know what I wanted to work on. I considered attempting to start on Theorin's clothes but I figured that was likely to just make me discouraged (terrible reason not to start, I know) so I decided to work on something a little easier just to sort of get back into things.

Statik has been running around in very over-sized clothes for a while now. He's on a Shinydoll body and therefore is very short and petite compared to most normal SDs. I had him in a spare shirt and pants that I had lying around , but I had to roll the sleeves up a lot and roll up the pants by about 4 inches.

So I decided since no one else needs that outfit, I would just take in the shirt and pants to make them fit better. I think the shirt still needs more work, but the pants fit very well now.

This is just Statik sitting outside on my work table.

And just a couple more shots of Statik sitting around on the table. His left pant leg is slightly shorter than the right but I can fix that. They're both rolled up about a half inch on the inside so I can just let that down more and re-hem it.

(If one wants to see the previous fit of the outfit, my previous post where I tried the Elfdoll Tasha head on this body shows how loose the shirt used to be, though I don't have any shots of how loose the pants used to be.)

A couple experiments with Elfdoll Tasha

A while back I got an Elfdoll Tasha head in a semi-trade on DoA (someone traded the head to me to pay for their shipping costs). Anyway, I haven't done anything with her. I have no idea what I want to do with her or if I actually can make use of her, but VampireAngel13 mentioned that this was a head being considered for a character, so I offered to try out a few different looks. 

I figured this might also help me figure out what I might want to do with this head or maybe get some decent sales photos. I don't know. XD 

I didn't end up doing anything fancy with any of these. Just plopped Tasha on a couple different bodies and tried a few different wigs and took photos on the dining room table. I probably could've done more with this shoot if everyone's wig wasn't hot glued to their head, making it a pain to switch things around. I did pull off Elaria and Statik's heads for body usage. Might mess with more later. Anyway, here are the pictures. 

Here are a couple on Statik's body (modded Shinydoll) with a Dream of Doll wig. 

This is her on Elaria's body (Dollmore Glamor Eve) with Elaria's wig which I got from some ebay seller. For some reason the more dressed up look makes her look more masculine, IMO. 

And for the last wig I tried on (another ebay wig that I cut shorter) I didn't bother with a body.  It's only just now that I've realized I didn't try anything darker on her, so I'm off to remedy that before hitting post! 

Here she is with some crazy brown rock star-esque wig I have. Can't tell from this angle. Mostly just looks unintentionally unruly here. 

Here she is cosplaying Merida from Brave. 

And this is the wig that almost every newcomer who is supposed to have dark hair ends up wearing for a while!

Accessorizing

It's been a weird week and I haven't been very productive. I did find time to mess with Avignon's look a few days back and today I decided to get out my random pieces of discount jewelry to mess with Esyrlon and Theorin's accessories. When proper motivation returns I will be attempting to make Theorin real clothes, but for now he's just wearing.. neck things.

too lazy to go acquire natural lighting or even set up a backdrop. I've been cleaning the house and it's unbearably hot today so I just didn't feel like it.

Here they are from the front. Color correction makes Theorin look rather green around the face.

And the side (sort of). Theorin's hair is a mess. I didn't realize when I took the picture. Vaguely interesting story behind that: I ordered a custom wig for him because I had a certain length and color in mind but couldn't find the right sort of thing. I didn't want it to  have a defined part anywhere either. Anyway, I get said custom wig and despite having ordered it to fit a 9-10in. head, it won't even fit someone who wears an 8.

I don't know what method they used to make the wig, but it apparently involved plastic and some sort of adhesive. I had to pull out the wefts of hair from the weird adhesive stuff (which was black and goopy and not fun) and then I sewed them onto a new wig cap that I made. So after much work, I managed to get a wig that properly fit Theorin's head and is the right style. (I can't remember if I've mentioned this story here before but I don't think I have.)

Made the discovery that my Phonolus head fits on my Limhwa Mano body. Color isn't too far off either. If it didn't look too serene to be my Scileraen, I'd be sorely tempted just because I really love that head.

waffling

I spent years looking for the right mold for a character of mine, Avignon. At first I thought Soom's Olivine would be perfect and I got her during one of their christmas kit sales. I ended up having trouble bonding and sold the body. The head I kept and turned into my Lyric.

I then spent another significant portion of forever trying to find another decent mold for her. This time I decided on Souldoll's Ignis. I found one that was quite a bit cheaper than retail on DoA's marketplace and this is what she looked like:

After about a year or two (I forget exactly) I decided I wasn't really doing anything with her. This photo was taken for her sales thread and it was one of maybe two photos I ever took of her. And it was the only one I took of her by herself. The others were all her with Loren (her on and off boyfriend).

Anyway, the sales thread was up for months and no one was interested. And then I saw someone else selling their Ignis and liked what they'd done with her. I thought about trying to change her look for a while, but decided to just keep bumping my thread. And then another few months passed and I saw another Ignis for sale that I liked. This time I was convinced that I just didn't like what I'd done with her, so I set about wiping her face so I could redo it.

After the redone face up, I decided to try different wigs on her. The one she is supposed to wear (pictured above) just wasn't working. So I got out the box o' wigs and started trying them on one by one. I ended up rather liking her in a wig that belonged to Sasori waaay back before I got him a more appropriate one for his character.

Here she is in a dress borrowed from Selly. Ignore the wet streak of hair. The wig had bangs in the front and I wanted it to have a part so I broke out the boiling water to fix that, and it wasn't dry yet in these pictures.

And here is a better shot of her face. But it's blurry. The camera batteries were dying and I didn't have time to get one that was in better focus.