Iyrilaeth's new hands (and a shot of Anna's too)

I have this massive fascination with hands and wrists that started with (oddly enough) watching Lady and the Tramp as a kid. I loved the way their paws bent when they were doing things and whilst crawling around the house pretending to be a dog I realized human wrists and hands were really neat.

Anyway, years later hands are still a big deal for me so a major part of doll 'shelling' is finding the right hands to express their character. I have a whole separate wishlist for hands I want for characters that I don't even have heads planned for yet.

Sometimes I'm okay with something generic as long as it's an attractive looking hand but sometimes I have a very specific look in mind.

To get to the point, I really wanted a pair of the Dollshe DS18M rhythmos hands for Iyrilaeth and after selling some things, I decided to go for it before they stopped producing them and I potentially lost my chance to ever own them.

They arrived today and I am pretty much in love with them.

I did a box opening for hands because I was so excited.

The tiny wrist balls are a mild issue since they sink into Iyrilaeth's wrists and he ends up with no mobility pretty  much, but that is something I guess I can try to work on at a later date. He'll need restringing before I can really do much about that since it was really hard to get these on as is.

I actually broke one of his old hands in the process. To fix this I will probably just remove the rest of the resin lump there (aside from the notch that keeps the hand in place on the joint) and replace it with a metal screw-in hook.

After an absurdly frustrating few minutes of trying to wrestle with his overly tight stringing, I managed to get these on and life was good.

I also recently bought a secondhand pair of Iplehouse hands for Anna. I wasn't a huge fan of the default Aoi Tuki ones and had been meaning to replace them for years but none of the hands I really liked for her tended to be sold separately. A few months after putting this pair of Iplehouse hands on my wishlist, I managed to find someone selling them secondhand so that I could avoid the waiting period.

The resin match is not great (although I imagine at one point it would have been because Anna was far more pink years ago). I am not that bothered by it but if I ever decide I am I may just let the new hands sit on the porch for a little while to yellow a bit. (or go and try one of those light dye techniques to make her more pink again all over. Might be a better plan since her Souldoll head is more pink than the body too)

I actually considered taking pictures at the time but I thought it might be weird to make a post featuring doll hands. Obviously I have since changed my mind.

hand mods

This is, so far, an embarrassingly bad mod job. I'm not sure why I'm posting about it aside from the fact that I took pictures throughout the process and feel like it would be a waste to not use them.

If nothing else, this can be a cautionary tale about spontaneously deciding something needs mod work done and not thinking through how you're going to accomplish what you want to do.

This is all started because I have an old FDoll body that has super boring hands. (It also has single joints in all the limbs but that's a mod project for another time) Anyway, I found these old Buddydoll hands that came with a body I bought secondhand. The person had replaced the original hands with Luts Senior Delf hands but sent me the originals as well. These remained wrapped up in my 'head closet' (where all spare heads and doll parts reside).

Today I used the boiling water method to re-position the fingers a bit to give the hands a slightly less boring pose. And I was just going to leave it at that and put them on the body. But as you can see here, they have a very odd attaching system and it gives them almost no range of motion.

So I set about turning this into something like the usual attaching system for hands. I've done this mod before (with much more success) on a Glorydoll body's hands.

Drilled through hand.

Unfortunately, my dremel bit of choice for this sort of mod was destroyed in the process of trying to use it on wooden beads when I was making custom hands for Avelarion. Rather than mark the hands off like a smart person, I just went at it with a different bit and eyeballed it. Horrible, horrible mistake. They look awful. But rather than just scrap the project, I decided it was okay. I could salvage this. And I would just keep on going.

I had intended to leave some resin for an s-hook to latch onto (which is what I did last time I did this mod) but I had messed up so badly with my dremeling that I ended up just having to carve out the whole area. This meant I needed to find a way to put a metal rod of some sort through the hands for an s-hook to attach to.

I can't find my small hand drill, so I tried a couple different things like just holding a small drill bit, hammering a nail through, and using a normal screw. None of these things worked, but a screw with a hook on the end gave me enough gripping power to get it through there.

Hand with hole through the side.

And the last part for today was to use epoxy to fill in the gaps where the old attaching system was. Once that dries I will put wire or a small nail through the hand holes and most likely use some combination of super glue and epoxy to keep them in place.

Not the prettiest solution ever, but most of that will be covered by sleeves. Partly because that's how Alek and/or Layne will be dressed and partly because even if the character in question was a nudist, I would give them gauntlets or something to cover up the hideous monstrosity that is these wrist joints. XD

Now with metal things for s-hooks. These things are so gross looking (and I didn't mean for the hole to go so far up past the wrist joint. this is what I get for trying to drill with a one-speed dremel....) but hopefully they will function and I can keep the wrist area out of sight (and out of mind...)

If they still don't work, I'm cutting off the entire wrist ball and making them work the way Dollmore/Volks/etc. hands work and having the wrist ball as a separate part.

EDIT: The horror story has a happy ending:

 Where before the hand couldn't move back and forth at all, it now has a great range of motion! Statik was holding Aleksandr's arm when I strung the new hand on. I didn't bother to move him for the first photo, but then it looked like he was mimicking Alek's pose so I had him do it again for the second one. XD

making eyelashes and such

I looked for orange eyelashes for Avelarion (because I thought it would be neat to have something like that for him, what with all the crazy feathers on his head and outfit). But I couldn't find anything that was quite right.

So I bought a feather and decided to make custom lashes for him. This was more challenging than anticipated so they didn't turn out as well as I'd imagined them in my head (probably would have had better luck with tweezers instead of just placing things with my hands).

Here is his head with feather lashes. I didn't do them all the way across--just near the ends. Ignore the tube of paint in the foreground. It's late and I wanted the colors to come out accurately so I shoved that in there to get my camera to stop turning his whole face orange.

And I sculpted custom hands for him ages ago and cast them in resin, but I didn't do a very good job of making holes for bubbles to escape the molds, so there were a lot of bubble marks in the resin that I finally decided to fill in with epoxy. Tomorrow I"ll probably sand everything smooth and then airbrush it and then he'll finally have proper hands and be pretty much complete.

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.