progression of modification: Deidara

For those who haven't followed me since I used to post these updates on doll projects on LJ, a looong time ago back when I was first getting into bjds, I was really heavy into Naruto and my favorite characters were Sasori and Deidara (I still wear a ring on my left thumb because that's the finger Sasori wore his on).

Anyway, I decided I needed them in doll form. This was something I had to have, and it felt like this oh-so-appropriate combination of their two methods of creating art, what with things being hand sculpted with clay initially and then cast as crazy puppet-esque dealies. (minus the explosions but.. sorry Dei, I'm in Sasori's camp there)

Rambling. Sorry. So I got molds for them and I did all these heavy mods to Sasori's body to make it look right for him and it's still one of the mod projects I'm the most proud of. But as the years have gone by and the direction of my collection has changed, I've been less inclined to do anything with them because their style just no longer appealed to me as much as it once did.

I mentioned last time (I think) that in an effort to reconnect with Dei, I attempted some mods on him that didn't turn out so well. And recently I was inspired to try to fix him up.

We'll start with a couple before pics to show what I was working with. He is a DiL Rydel and I'm fairly certain they were an offshoot of DiM that doesn't exist anymore.

The first is an old picture I took. The face up was still mostly default but I added eyeliner. This was back before we'd actually seen Deidara's left eye, so I was kind of making up stuff and decided to go with some crazy target eyes from Soom for that one. The second picture is from someone's sales thread since I don't have many good pictures.

The first order of business was to reduce the size of the eyes to something more reasonable. I was having trouble getting the other eye to match up properly so I decided to just sculpt his scope right onto his face and be done with it.

I had originally planned to mod the mouth back into a more neutral expression but then I got it in my head that maybe the grin could work after all so I added more epoxy and went in that direction.

 After sanding things (relatively) smooth I decided to coat everything with my airbrush and test out a face up to see how things were coming along. Of course, I found all sorts of little scratches and uneven spots after airbrushing was done. Mostly around the mouth and corners of the scope. The eye was pretty smooth.

I put on Dei's old wig just so the head would be less naked for pictures. From certain angles I like the mouth and from others I don't. Not sure yet what I'll do about that but I'll sleep on it. I didn't bother to paint the scope since this is a trial run anyway and that would have taken a lot more time and energy.  It feels slightly off from the other eye, probably because I sculpted it with his original eye size in mind and didn't take into account where his eye actually would be if it had been modded as well. Silly me. Not sure it bothers me enough to fix and it'll be covered with hair most of the time anyway.

failure (and fixes)

So I've had this head lying around forever that I've been trying to sell and having no luck with. When I went to bump the thread yesterday the pictures had broken links and I was finally like "screw it. This thing isn't going to sell. I'm just going to turn it into a mod project."

So I marked the thread for graveyarding and grabbed my epoxy and set to work.

Here is the head in its original state for those who are curious:

I was really fond of the sculpting pics of this as it was coming along, but the finished product just didn't do anything for me.

Today I went outside to go sand things smooth and test out a face up and decided I'd go ahead and redo the faces on Andael and potential Kael.

Things started badly when during wiping Andael's face up, his chin spontaneously got this jagged hole in it. I'm guessing there was an air bubble below the surface or something. Anyway, that ruined my plans for doing his face since I then had to break out the epoxy again and fill in the hole in his chin. So he's been sitting around waiting on epoxy to cure ever since.

That left Kael and mod project head.

Here is the head in the early stages of modding last night. I decided to make the eyes smaller and get rid of the smirk since I don't trust my sculpting skills when it comes to pulling off expressions like that.

I don't have any spare WS bodies around at the moment so I went ahead and airbrushed the head a more peachy color. I didn't even get the paint thick enough to fully cover the mods but it still took forever to dry so I started on Kael's head.

As I have mentioned, I'm attempting to use an Arvid head for this project, but it's one of those things where I think I'm trying to force myself to love the head because I have wanted one for so long. In person I feel like he's too smiley and his nose is way too thin. I still feel like he looks fine in other people's photos but he just really doesn't do much for me in person. But I keep trying to make it work. And so I was working on doing his face and I got done with the blushing and was starting to lightly mark where I wanted his eyebrows when I decided I just really hated what I'd done so far and gave up.

So I didn't actually end up accomplishing anything because Andael decided to get injured and I just don't think I care for the Arvid mold in person, and by the time my mod project had dried it was dark out.

Here it is as it looks now. I want to work on the mouth more. It looks a bit odd in photos. I don't really notice it so much in person though. Not sure what else I want to do though. I sanded the cheeks a tiny but but I wasn't sure how far I wanted to go with that. I don't really have a specific idea of what I want to do so I guess it might help to decide on that before I go any further.

Might try and give him a face up just to see if it will work at some point later this evening.

EDIT:  
  After chatting a while with Selly, I decided to get busy on something I've been meaning to do for ages. A long time ago I started a mod project on Deidara's head to make him more smirky and I ended up hating it so I left the head in a drawer and pretty much never wanted to look at it again.

I figured I'd try to fix the damage I'd done, among other things. I used the cheap epoxy because I didn't want to waste a ton of the good stuff in case this turned out horribly (the cheap stuff being the five dollar tubes of plumbing epoxy they sell at hardware stores). After I got about as far as I could with the epoxy, I worked a bit on his mouth (might attempt that smirk thing again) and then set the head aside to let the epoxy finish curing.

I then set about a massive body switching party. I recently got an absurdly good deal on an old style Souldoll double body. The newer version looks arguably fancier but after handling the Zenith body and not liking its posing capabilities, I'm not over eager to try out the newer version since it looks like the engineering is similar.

Anyway, I let the body sit around headless for a few days while I decided who was going to get it. I'd originally intended to give it to Andael but then I ended up deciding to give it to Orkas because with the body he was using, his arms were too long for his clothes.

I liked Orkas on the Souldoll body so I decided to keep that, but then there was the issue of who to give his previous body to (which was a Domuya Perennial body). I initially gave it to Alek because he was using an ancient single-jointed Fantasy Doll body, but the minute I put him on it something felt off. He was too tall and lanky and my first thought was "this body makes him look too elvish."

I really didn't want to put him back on the FDoll body because I made the happy discovery that it works pretty well with my Drazen head (who has never been able to get a body because the head is super small. Pretty sure he'd wear the same size wig as an Unoa but he's supposed to be SD size).

Anyway, so I was trying to figure out who might work for another switch and then it occurred to me that Defliel might work. I was instantly pleased with that combination and it makes his clothes fit much better because he's been wearing clothes for a 70cm doll forever now and the Domuya Perennial body has the longest arms of any 60-65cm doll I've ever handled. So his clothes pretty much fit perfectly now and he looks much more regal, which is more appropriate for his character.

Alek then ended up on Defliel's old body (a Domuya flexi-body I have had for forever now). I initially wasn't keen on the match, but after his putting his clothes on I decided I liked it.

After all of that I feel much better about my accomplishments in the doll area for the day. Tomorrow I will probably attempt to give Andael a face up since his epoxy should have had more than enough time to cure. Might attempt one on Drazen too since he has a body (though if Dei's mods work out well he'll likely lose it again until I can afford another one for him since it was Dei's body originally and the only reason he lost it was because I was really unhappy with his mods).

wig making

I've been meaning to make Auralion a new wig for a while now but have been very intimidated by the prospect since he has a rather specific hairstyle.

I read a lot of tutorials and watched a lot of videos and finally decided on a method I thought would work well. Then I proceeded to get sidetracked and after buying the materials I put the project on the back burner and ignored it for a solid two weeks.

Well then I started work on my mod project for Aura's twin brother, Cailath, and while I didn't think the head turned out similar enough to be successful in that regard, I did grow rather attached and wanted to make a proper wig for the as-yet-nameless head.

So I went out and bought a children's wig from the party store so that I could deconstruct it and sort of play around with wig making.

After watching a few more tutorials I decided that for the sake of practicing (since I don't know what style I want to go for yet for him) it would be easiest if I didn't have to sew, so strapped a plastic bag over his head and hot glued down some lace in the shape I wanted for a wig cap. I then cut away the plastic bag and started to hot glue down wefts of hair. The entire process was extremely quick and easy and looked surprisingly decent (in my opinion) considering the materials used.

Anyway, after this was done I decided I really wanted to make more wigs just for fun so I looked at yet more tutorials and decided I wanted to attempt to fix Aura's wig after all. But I initially decided I would be lazy and just try to make a clip on ponytail for his wig.

So I gave that a try and was less than pleased with the results. If I did it again I think I could do it better but I didn't have the right color to work with anyway and I had used all the longest wefts from the wig I bought to make the attempted ponytail and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth to try to detach them.

I still wanted to fix Aura's wig, however, so I decided to try my original plan. This was to use yarn to make the wefts myself and then brush out and straighten the yarn before attaching it to the wig cap. Since I had also planned for this to just be a prototype, I went with the same plastic bag, hot glue, and lace method. Then I brushed out tons and tons of yarn wefts and used a flat iron on the lowest setting to straighten them.

The yarn that I thought matched Aura's original wig well ended up almost white so I attempted to mix in a brighter yellow I had. The result made it look more like he has streaked hair and I almost scrapped the project after gluing down the first strands, but I decided it would be good practice to see if I could finish and get the style right. Since I was working with really thick yarn, his hair ended up thick enough to make the ponytail without any fancy additions, clip ons, or two part wigs.

I was going to just leave it be after finishing the ponytail but I ended up cutting and styling it and I think I might actually keep it as his official wig.  It ended up looking much better than I'd expected. It's kind of a lot to adjust to because he's looked so prim and proper with his neatly parted long straight hair for ages and now he has all these layers and spikes. It's much more accurate for his character but it's a big change after all these months of dealing with the temp wig.

I couldn't decide on one picture because I wanted to show various angles of it. There are a few things I'd change if I did it again but for now I'm fairly pleased!

face up: Atlas(?)

For about... forever now, I've wanted a Luts SSDF Cane. I was never super motivated to get any of their other sculpts even though I thought some of them were pretty neat, but for years now I have had Cane on my wishlist. The problem with the wishlist is that things that end up on it often get perpetually moved to the back burner. Especially if they aren't limited or discontinued.

About a zillion other impulse purchases or trades have made their way into the collection since I decided I wanted this guy and every time I had the money or saw one up for sale on the MP, I found some reason not to buy it. The face up didn't appeal to me. I'd have to pay shipping from a foreign country. I had something else I wanted that was more important. Etc.

Pretty dumb excuses for the most part since I almost always wipe and redo face ups and buying things from overseas is just a given in this hobby.

Anyway, after seeing a few companies discontinue some of their basic sculpts, I decided it was about time I went ahead and got Cane for myself on the off chance that Luts exploded one day and left me with no option to.

I had been warned his head was big but I just really wasn't prepared after collecting mostly smaller-headed dolls for the past few years. At one point my roommate had and Abadon head from Luts and we both found it to be a bit on the large side so I really should have expected it, but I didn't.

This was a while back and I didn't have the energy or motivation to give him a new face up and see if that helped me overcome the size issue, so after about a week of letting the head sit on my desk, it ended up in the head closet because I couldn't stand to look at it anymore.

I seriously debated just reselling it and probably would have if it seemed like it might move quickly on the marketplace. But the last two Canes I saw for sale stayed up there for months and months before finally selling, and I already have one head that refuses to sell so I just left him alone.

Too much back story. Moving on. My airbrush was being particularly well behaved yesterday (I only really use it for sealant and color matching because I have thus far been too impatient to practice using it to actually do parts of a face up for more than two seconds in a row) so I decided I needed to get at least one other face up done today.

I looked around for someone to redo and was having trouble deciding. I considered just redoing the face on my mod project (a Panda Workshop Bene for those who were curious) but then I remembered I had this Cane head sitting around in my head closet. So I took him out to the porch and set to work.

Before he had eyes and a wig, I was certain the head was going to look too severe for the character I had in mind. Once I had him properly put together on the spare body, I felt like the face up made him look entirely too childish and innocent.

Atlas is supposed to be Eskilys' younger half brother so obviously the next step was to sit him down next to Esky to see if they looked at least a little bit similar.

(some photos, the above in particular, really don't merit any kind of identifying marking because they are clearly not going to be enticing anyone to visit my blog if they stumble across it, but it has kind of become habit to hit my logo shortcut in photoshop)

Anyway, I feel like it works. They don't have to look super similar  since they're only half siblings. Not like Aura and Cailath who are supposed to be twins and failing at looking like it.

I'm quite happy with him now. Not entirely sure he looks the way Atlas does in my head, but if he doesn't work for Atlas I'm sure I can come up with something else.

Mod project: Cailath, continued

Apologies in advance for the horrible photos in this one. I couldn't get the camera to focus well.

I woke up this morning feeling sick and feared that all of my plans for today were ruined. So I went back to sleep and didn't bother to set an alarm, and when I woke up again I was feeling a lot better but still not 100%. I've tried to take it easy so I didn't end up doing as much as I'd originally planned, but I did do some sanding work on my project head and then gave it a quick face up to see if things were working out the way I wanted.

 Sadly, I felt like they really didn't look enough alike and of course crushing disappointment started to set in.

However, while I felt that the head wasn't working well as Cailath, I was relatively pleased with it overall and decided I should consider other looks for him. (in the above picture he was borrowing Kael's hair since I did not get to mess around with attempting to make him a wig today like I'd planned to initially)

I threw one of my red wigs on him for funsies. I'm keen on redheads so I had difficulty telling if I actually liked this on him or if I just was biased because it was red.

And then I threw a shorter blonde wig on him and have been letting him sit around on the computer desk like that. In looking at the pictures, I think part of the problem is perhaps the shape of his chin and jawline. And of course there is the issue of the way his lower face (in particular around the lips) protrudes by comparison. It was much more intense when I first got the head but still very noticeable (to me) when compared to Aura.

The nose shape also might be part of it.

I am less displeased with things overall as I give it time but I'm not sure I have the patience required to make this work for what I'd intended. I will see how I feel after sleeping on it.

modification project: Cailath

Last night I was screwing around and put Auralion's head on Loren's body on a whim. He may not end up getting it back. Aura was kind of on a temp body (which was a modified Angelsdoll v2, and I didn't much care for it before mods and then I kind of botched the mod job and cared for it even less but had ruined the resale value at that point and have been too lazy to try to modify it to the point where it's reasonably decent looking again.)

Anyway, I much preferred the Popodoll 68cm body I stole from Loren. It felt like a more appropriate size, being a little more slender and less muscular.

_{(Loren's body had been sitting around in black pants for 90 years and had various stains on it so Aura got a bath)}

This got me wanting to do more stuff with Aura again and then I was feeling bad that he doesn't really have anyone to hang out with since most of the rest of my dolls are characters from my story and he's from WoW.

So I decided to actually buckle down and try to work on Cailath for more than five minutes at a time.

Brought out the various grits of sandpaper and my pointy sanding tool (and later on I also got out some dremel bits and used them sans dremel)

I took some side by side pics shortly after I began sanding to get a feel for how much further I had to go and how things were coming along.


Ideally, I would have to take in the entire lower face a bit, but that would be a LOT of work and require a lot of additive sculpting to fix so they will probably have to settle for looking like fraternal twins.

Here is another picture after more sanding. It doesn't look that different since the outside kind of washes out the white and also I didn't want to work with really low grit sandpaper and overdo anything. I then took the head inside for some additive work on the lips.

I ran out of time before work so this was as far as I got. I will need to do a bit more sanding on the nose and mouth and possibly the chin. I was going to work on the eyes a bit but the resin there is very thin so I don't think much can be done. I'll just have to try to use creative blushing to give the illusion that that area is similarly shaped. I will probably leave the eyes more open than Aura's because Cailath is less of a snooty prick.

Really minor updates

It has been so long since I posted here that I don't know what I have posted about and what I haven't. So I'll just kind of start rambling and you can ignore it if it's something that's been posted about.

A loooong time ago, Kael had a Mecha Angel body, but I never really warmed to the 80cm size. So I looked and looked to find a smaller alternative and discovered the Spiritdoll Proud body, which was in the 70cm range and had broader shoulders and a less slender build than many 70cm bodies I'd owned in the past.

So I sold the Mecha Angel body and purchased that. Later on down the line, having less disposable income, I came across a cheap SSDF body and decided to get that and sell my Spiritdoll body. Kael was a bit bobble-headed on the SSDF body but it wasn't so bad I couldn't stand it so I was fine with that for a while. But then a while later when I had more disposable income again, I found a (relatively) cheap Spiritdoll Proud body and decided I preferred that look after all.

So I got that body and gave it back to Kael and used the SSDF body for my IOS Infernale head.

But then recently I got a damaged Iplehouse Arvid head on impulse (he's missing most of one ear and has a chipped eye). I've wanted an Arvid for a while but never really had a set idea of what I'd do with him, so he kind of sat around being neglected because I didn't have any brilliant plans for him. I've kind of hit that point where I'm fairly content with my collection and there are only a few very specific things I can think of that I want.

So for whatever reason, I tried Kael's wig on the Arvid head and decided that he probably better fits my mental image of Kael than Soom's Vega did anyway (as that was more of an "I already have this doll so let me see if I can't make it look like this character I want to create" type deal). So I gave the Spiritdoll body to my IOS Infernale and I'm much happier with the proportions.

Sadly, my camera refuses to capture this and his head ends up looking huge.

I also decided to give Esyrlon a new face up a few months ago. I never posted it because I wasn't happy with it. I tried to give him lighter eyebrows because he has white hair and I felt like it made more sense, but I felt like his face just looked very washed out. I probably just need more practice with this sort of thing but anyway... after months of not even wanting to look at him, I went in an darkened his eyebrows and was instantly much happier with him.

Still might redo the whole thing at some point but for now I'm not unhappy enough to bother with it. Esyrlon is spoiled anyway and gets more frequent face ups than anyone else.

Another project I've been very slowly working on is modding a head to be a twin for my Nabarro Har, Auralion. I got a head from a fairly new company called Panda Workshop a while back and it sat in the head closet for a long time. I feel like the overall structure is similar enough to Har that it could be modded to look at least fairly similar to him. So that's been sort of an ongoing project. When I have more free time I will probably take shots of both heads from different angles to get a better handle on what would need to be added or subtracted to get the most similarity.

The head is in a more WS color because that was all the company offered, so I will probably see if I can't dye it a more pinkish or even light tan color since Aura is supposed to be the less healthy looking twin. I'd consider just switching which head portrayed which twin, but as Aura is my favorite, he gets the head that I know is functional and that I paid a small fortune for.

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.

arrival of IOS Infernale and face up attempt

IOS shipped my Infernale exactly when they said they would. I was very impressed. He arrived over the weekend while I was out of town for A-kon and my mail carrier was kind enough to call me on my cell phone and get my permission to leave the package with the apartment office so that I could pick it up as soon as I returned. (This saved me a trip to the post office. I was very happy!)

I got home Sunday night but was able to get him from the apartment office on Monday morning before work. For the last couple days he's been sitting around without a face up because I was intimidated.

My last two attempts at face ups came out... less than stellar, to put it politely. I'm very easily discouraged when I fail at something so it can take a while to push past that. Adding to my anxiety was the fact that Infernale has an open mouth with two interchangeable tongue pieces and I struggle with doing face ups on dolls with the tiniest bit of teeth showing.

After a bit of arguing with myself, I decided to gather up my airbrush and pastels and assortment of brushes and head out to the balcony to get to work. It is absurdly hot outside today so I was quite uncomfortable, but luckily I was in my project zone so I didn't notice until I was all done.

I didn't really get any in progress pics, because I didn't want to get too attached while there was still the possibility of screwing it up terribly, but here are some pictures of the face once it was pretty much finished.

I think I overdid it a bit on the red under the eyes and on the eyeshadow. I really struggle with face ups on WS dolls.

Here are the tongue pieces post-blushing. These were a pain to do because they're so small and they wanted to fly off the table when I tried to seal them. And then the pastels didn't want to stick to them so I had to airbrush them and they kept getting stuck to my fingers and falling and collecting dust. I'm going to have to break out the tweezers if I redo these guys.

And here are some shots of the completed head with the two different tongue pieces. It was already a tight fit, but the layer of gloss on the tongues made it even harder to get them in and out. I'm sure there is some chipping of the paint in their future.  I was, however, relatively pleased with the color.

And here we have a shot of him on a body which may or may not be his permanent one. The hands I've been saving since 2008 just in case I ever decided to shell his character. They came with Soom's Vega - Last Song and they've been sitting in a closet for about five years now.

Not 100% certain about this wig, but the one I was planning to use didn't look quite right once he had a face up. (really liked it before that though). Will see how it goes though.