rit dye tanning

Using funds from selling some things, I managed to acquire a body for my floating Phonolus head. As I didn't want the original body he came with, having head not-so-great things about its posing capabilities, I decided to go for the Idealian body instead. So far as I know, that doesn't even come in Tawny (which is the color my Phonolus is) so I decided to just get whatever color I could and dye it to match.

For only my second attempt at dyeing a doll, I'm relatively pleased with the results. I was too lazy to go get natural lighting shots, but I tried to get the color at least somewhat accurate. I used Rit Tan and Pearl Grey because I'd heard somewhere that the grey comes out somewhat tan. I have no idea if this is true since I didn't try dipping the pieces in just the grey, but the end result was a pretty warm tan color which isn't a perfect match for the head but I feel like it's pretty close. The arms are a bit more of a dull/ashy kind of tan. I guess I hadn't completely mixed the colors yet when I did those, but they're not off enough from the body to bother me either.

Phonolus here will be playing the part of my Malesar, who is supposed to have more ashen-toned skin all over, but I'm thinking I'll try to accomplish that look with blushing instead since dyeing a doll grey is nigh impossible from what I hear and I'm fairly certain I'll never be able to get my hands on a Monzo body (and I'm not sure I'd want to since, as I mentioned before, haven't heard great things about Mega Gem posing).

The Idealian body poses really well so far. Much better than my EID. I was expecting it to be similarly difficult to deal with and was going to just put up with it out of love for the Phonolus head, but I've been quite pleasantly surprised.

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.

eye mods continued

On day two of eye mods, I tried to even them out and make the eyelid area more clear. This resulted in him looking rather stoned once a face up was applied, so I opened the eyes a bit more again and sanded down the eyelids some and then I decided to try my hand at an airbrush face up (at least partially).

So all the blushing is done with an airbrush. The eyebrows are pastel and colored pencil because I'm not that good at the airbrushing yet. XD Only my second(ish) attempt. The first attempt turned into me painting a whole face blue in frustration.

Before on left and after on right. I slightly opened his mouth and changed the eye shape by making them smaller. His eyebrows are way too high and the blushing is a lot darker than I would have liked but it's not the end of the world. I think it'll be fine once I get him new light blue eyes. That's probably the thing I miss most at the moment since he's been using the same light blue glass eyes since I got the first Statik.

eyelashes: take 2

Selly wants her Zaoll girl to have eyelashes, so I figured I should practice this some more before she has any so that I don't mess up Aeri.

So here is Anna sporting eyelashes with eyes in and hair on and such! I didn't make it to that point last time. Putting in the eyes messed them up, but this time I cut them to a better shape so that they fit in the eye holes better. They aren't super pretty up close because there is residual glue from my last attempt, but they are functional and I don't think that would be an issue again now that I know what I'm doing.

headgear

Damon has been bugging me about posting pictures of Batu's in-progress headgear, so even though I'm not entirely happy with it, here are some pics.

I probably should have done a mock up in cheaper fabrics first, but oh well.. live and learn. At least it was only doll-sized so I still have plenty left. The main issue is that it doesn't drape very well. If I do this again I will probably use lightweight fabrics with patterns printed on instead of actually sewn into them.

I had NO idea how to construct this thing and Phobs' most recent comic with them seems to have it working differently than I thought it did, but that was posted on DA yesterday and I'd already started work on this the day before. XD

{inspiration} eye mods

These still need a lot of work, but that will have to wait until they are dry. After seeing Selly's Zaoll girl, I decided I really liked the way the default sculpt is as far as the eye size. Statik came to me partially modded from a sleeping face plate and I couldn't get a feel for the eye size just from online pictures, so his eye opening job was kind of guess work.

I did find the big eyes really cute but they  made him look a bit odd next to a character he spends a lot of time around who has tiiiiny little eyes. So I decided to mod Statik's eyes smaller and got the idea to try tinting the epoxy for once (something I have never done before).

So I did that and I feel like I got the color pretty close. I had a wee bit extra so I gave him tiny elf ears. Something I never considered doing before but that is technically part of his character.

A couple pictures of the eye mods and ears. I spent a disturbingly long time trying to sculpt these but they still will probably end up needing a lot of work either with sanding or more additive sculpting, because the left eye has way more raised eyelid action going on than the right.

Tried to imitate the shape I was going for before but just make it smaller.

body mods: Zaoll Luv

Selly got a Zaoll girl in the mail today right before she had to head out for work. She was concerned about its posing capabilities since she'd heard they weren't the greatest in that department, so I suggested adding a mobility joint to the upper thighs and told her I could do that while she was at work if she wanted.

The body also didn't seem to want to sit all the way up, so I decided to lengthen the ... thing the string goes into. So here are the legs marked up for modifications.

The stringing channels weren't really in the center of the thigh, so I tried to move them over and then I hollowed out the leg area a bit and put some epoxy on the upper part I decided that while I was at it I would make it so the legs could be pulled up to her chest if such a thing was desired. The color is off but when I go back into smooth things out I could paint it if necessary. Won't really be noticeable with clothes on though.

While I was putting a face up on the head, I had tons of pinkish colors left over (because Selly wanted a pinkish color scheme) so I decided to try my hand at body blushing. I really had no idea what I was doing so I'm not sure it came out very well. The back especially isn't very pretty, but for some reason things kept wanting to stick to her butt....

Here she is all strung together again and utilizing her new mobility joints.

And with a wig and her legs swiveled to the side.

I don't have a lot of spare female clothes so I improvised with a piece I don't know how to use from the dress Avignon is borrowing and a random dress/robe that came on a tree topper I got ages ago. Aeri lacks the bosom to make closing it in the front a viable option XD Well... I could, but she ended up looking completely flat.

And I attempted to get a shot of her face so that Selly could tell me if I went in the right direction with it, but my camera didn't want to focus well.

body modifications continued

I had this idea that included moving the entire shoulder joint on the Angelsdoll body down a bit. But then I decided that was a bit extreme. So I decided instead to just sand down the shoulders a bit so that they slope more, because it doesn't bother me on the naked body, but when clothed it looks like the body is eternally shrugging its shoulders.

I still haven't bothered to fix the abs so they don't look like they just spontaneously cut off there, but the shoulders now slope more. I've included a picture of how they looked before for reference. I also fixed the joint on the left arm so that it doesn't have to be out at an angle all the time (the smaller 'before' picture is how the arm was when completely at rest).

Beside the body, you can see Batu's head drying off after being airbrushed. It's taking quite a while due to all the humidity so I'm going to just give it a few hours under the fan in my room. I have to leave for a family gathering anyway so I can finish giving him a new face when I get back.

Last night I took a bead reamer to his lips to give them more depth. I'm not sure if it will be at all apparent in photos, but I'm much happier with them in person.

impulsive activities

I mentioned before that I wanted a shorter body for Batu. Well... his head was meant for a 70cm body originally and I was trying it on a few of my shorter bodies and it just wasn't looking right so I decided to go another route. I have an Angelsdoll 72cm body that I was planning to sell because it didn't go quite right with the head it came with in my opinion and I just didn't like the way the lower torso joint popped out of place all the time.

So I decided to take it off the market and modify it to be shorter and pose better.

I started off by marking with pencil all the places where I wanted to cut. I decided to shorten the body in the lower torso and the lower legs. I brought along the hip/pelvis joint and a foot to test fit as I went along. I had originally planned to cut the upper torso shorter as well, but decided against it once I got going.

I started with the legs. I used the dremel to cut off the ends because it was a lot faster than using the coping saw.

Then I started doing the torso. The line I marked is where I wanted it to line up with the pelvis joint, so I cut lower than that so I would have room to round out an edge. I started out with the dremel, but it was thicker than the lower leg so I had to use the coping saw to finish it off.

Here is the beginning of rounding out the bottom of the torso joint.

And I went in and rounded out the insides of the lower legs.

And then I tested the fit with the pelvis joint and lower torso and found that it didn't sit well in there, so I dremeled out more resin to help it fit in there properly.

After a quick rinse to get off any remaining resin dust, I reassembled the body. The line between the upper body and pelvis joint isn't as smooth as before and I will probably want to go in and re-work the anatomy some, but for now it is functional and the joint does not pop out of place. It also has a greater range of motion, which is quite nice.

And here is a picture of the feet on the lower leg joint. They look uneven here but they actually are almost exactly the same length and the feet sit in the sockets almost the same too. The body still stands well and everything.

He now is 63~64cm (down from 72) so I feel like that works better. I didn't finish sanding everything smooth because I was close to running out of daylight and my neck was hurting from leaning over things in a gas mask/respirator deal.

brief really late night (early morning) update

I have been itching to start work on Batu's clothes, but he's not on the right size body and I don't want to make things so they don't fit properly when/if he gets a shorter one (which will hopefully be acquired with funds received from sales of my two spare bodies).

I decided that one thing I can make is his headgear stuffs. Somehow, I ended up making his sash dealy instead. I'm not really sure how that happened. I was laying out fabrics next to each other to see what went well next to what and making arrows to my clothing sketches with what fabrics I wanted to use where, and then suddenly instead of working on head things I'm making a sash and.. I don't even know.

I was pretty much eyeballing it the whole time because it was almost 2am when I started and I don't have enough room in my room to lay out fabric that long, but I feel like it came out reasonably well given the circumstances. I am mostly using this as my reference, but with bits of other pictures from the comics and sketchdumps.

Anyway, here's what I have come up with. (just the red and gold thing. the white thing is not part of the outfit)

Also, did a massive photo shoot the other day, so my section for dolls now has pictures of (almost) all of my bjds! Not much in the way of info yet, but just getting pictures was a start.