Tag: male doll

This is another project I’ve had going for a while… Tennant but Big! The faceplate is the full width of my printer so I did the ears as separate pieces. I got this Charmdoll body (72cm) in the older opaque resin and I like it but in photos the neck looks a bit thin for his jaw. (It doesn’t look as bad IRL so I I have no idea, haha.) I sanded the jaw down a bit, which was easy enough to do since this is the first print I’ve done where I’m trying to use the actual printed resin as the final surface – many thanks to @aishavoya for giving me a tip about using the white resin pigment ages ago. There’s also a bonus digital mockup and a bonus shot of the first try at the faceplate where I seriously undershot on how much resin I needed in the vat.

1. Custom 3D printed resin head on a Charmdoll 72cm body body in old resin pink

Also in that last post, but I received the Dream Valley body in yellow for Tennant, so naturally I went right about cutting it up, haha. He was way too tall compared to Daniel and Conchita. He’s still a bit too tall but any further height would be harder to remove. I removed a chunk from the ankles and shortened the neck.

It wasn’t too hard, just a lot of sanding to smooth it out. I did it once before on a Resinsoul body and used Milliput to connect the pieces which I think was less visible, but I got lazy here and used superglue since I could always Milliput later.

What I did was stick the calves onto the feet, then draw two level lines around them by holding a pencil parallel to the table and rotating the calves. I drew perpendicular lines across (like a train track) and also marked the back center to keep things lined up. I cut the pieces out with a Dremel (saw might’ve been better but I don’t have a good one) and used a coarse sandpaper flat on the counter to get the edges flat and even. I glued them together by lining up the back center lines and the internal channel, then sanded it smooth.

1. Dream Valley B4-04 51cm boy body in yellow with mods and Dollshe 18M Fashion Maxi Mystic hand in Oriental
2. Custom 3D printed head and body with Resinsoul Tang limbs and Dollshe 28M Fashion Maxi hands
3. Dream Valley B4-04 51cm boy body in white, unmodded

More recent photos of Daniel, mostly to show off his new rings. Also there you can see that Tennant on the Dream Valley body is way too tall, haha. When his body in the right color arrives I’m going to shorten the legs.

I took these boudoir-y photos of Daniel a while back for a Men’s Monday BJD thing that IG was doing a while back. I get the distinct feeling the Tumblr crowd will be more interested than IG though. Thanks for all the nice comments on him!

Also from late 2019 to Summer 2020, here’s Tennant 2.0, which I worked on alongside Daniel. His head sculpt is a lot more refined compared to the first version, and more appropriately scaled. Like Daniel, he’s printed on my Anycubic Photon, primed, and airbrushed. I think it’s cool to see how much I’ve improved at faceups as well! I did go back and darken his brows a bit when I replaced his eyes. I’m very pleased that these two look good together now.

Daniel 2.0! I worked on him (the head + wig, the body is unchanged) from late 2019 through mid 2020. I refined the sculpt slightly and printed it out on an Anycubic Photon resin 3D printer this time. I didn’t do much sanding, just primed and airbrushed the head. The faceup went a lot better this time as well. I made him a wig from some mohair I had custom dyed on Etsy, but I think I’ll make a separate post about wigs later. I’m quite proud of how he turned out.

After I made the Tennant BJD, I had to make Daniel, but he was a much bigger project because I knew that I couldn’t get a body with the right body type (ESPECIALLY not in ¼ size). He was a work in progress through a lot of 2019.

I created the torso sculpt starting with an open source character creation addon for Blender (Manuel Bastioni or something like that? It wasn’t available anymore last I checked.) but I modified/resculpted it quite a bit. The head, like Tennant’s, was done in Sculptris then Blender. I finished the pieces the same way as Tennant’s head… it was just more pieces and a lot more work. I also put some heavy gloss around the joints to protect the paint under the final matte sealant coat, and all the pieces are sueded with real suede very generously. None of the joints have chipped yet.

I used the limbs from the Resinsoul Tang body Tennant was on before and I got some ¼ Dollshe 28M hands. He’s kind of similar in measurements to a DearSD or “Big Baby” doll. I’ve since created an updated head (I didn’t even finish the wig for this one, haha) but the body is still the same.

Another doll head I’ve had forever: High School Musical 2 Troy. This is honestly one of my favorite faces Mattel’s ever done. The eye paint is unusual and gorgeous; even with slight wonk as this one has, it has a lot of spark and personality. The face mold is nice and doesn’t have that “celebrity face mold” look at all. But it’s a small head because they apparently decided that the best way to make teenagers was just to shrink down a regular Ken. 

I found a Hunter Huntsman and I really wanted to put this head on his body using @dolldirt‘s bread tag trick, but I carved the hole a little too big. OTL I want to try using some hot glue in the neck rim to get it to work, but for now, he’s on a Fashionista Ken body. (No, the clothes really don’t fit.)

Also in the garage sale action figure haul: plain ole single-jointed, no-molded-clothes GI Joes. I kind of prefer this to the super-articulated one to be honest, if only because two of my three SA Joes have had their elbows disintegrate while sitting on my shelf. At least these guys are sturdy.

Anyway, Kocoum here is another “didn’t have a color match for a long time” head. The body looks a lot closer in real life than it does in this photo. OTL He seriously needs paint and styling (look how frizzy that top part is), but I’m way more inspired to do it after @dolljunk‘s great Kocoum. 

*insert meme here*

A few pictures of Tennant all put together outside. Thanks to @oak23 and @dollsahoy for the nice comments on the WIP (I don’t know what the best way to reply is, I’m awful at Tumblr.)! John, I’ll try the lighter next time I mess with him, and Andrea, that made me actually laugh, he is VERY my style, huh? 

Anyway, outside and dressed. Now that his shoulders are narrower he looks much better in the Rosie O’Donnell suit jacket. I cut apart his finger and tried to heat shape them but they’re soft and it didn’t take. I’m going to wire the fingers with pins, but I can’t find my metal cutters, bleh. 

@oak23, you’ve put these hands on this body, how do you get rid of that ridge on the wrist? The plastic’s so hard and brittle. 

Finished up Tennant-doll for now! First two photos are him finished, third is the WIP where I left off (although I’d glued his hair down between that and the last time I posted him), and the fourth is his original repaint from… 2010, whoa. I still think it’s pretty funny to be painting a doll to match a character that was based on the doll in the first place, but, either way, I think it’s an improvement!

I got some Golden Fluid Acryllics for my birthday, which I used to finish this repaint, and they are awesome. Passable out of the bottle, and mixed one drop paint to one drop water, they actually feel a lot like using a pencil – a light, even line that dries super quickly. I also love the little dropper bottles, I don’t feel like I’ve wasted a ton dropping the colors onto the palette.

As for the paint job itself, I mostly tried to soften up and even out the eyes. I didn’t like the look/color of the brows I’d blocked in before, so I wiped them and started again. Whatever mix of paints I’d used, it was apparently terrible because it stained the area yellow despite only being there for like two weeks.

I also tried to cover up all the stress marks from prying open the torso with some bruises, but in my attempt to actually get the paint to stick to the slick plastic I definitely overdid it. For now i’s fine though, since I don’t leave him sitting around shirtless, heh.

Also, can I just say that this face mold looks 10 times better with the hair slicked back like that? It’s also smirking, which I hadn’t really noticed.

Before and WIP after plus a character drawing for comparison.

Remember when I painted doll-Tennant originally and my concept was just that I wanted him to be a nicer guy than my other characters? HAHAHA. Anyway, I’d fallen very much out of love with his repaint, so, time to do him over. It ended up being way too late to finish his face in one sitting so here’s a WIP with eyes + rough brows + slapdash pastels so he doesn’t look nakedfaced (these fade like hell without sealing so I wasn’t fussy).

Mostly I can tell that my style has become very very different over the years! It pretty much matches the way I digitally paint eyes now which is… predictable. I think I want to paint some more soft in-betweens in there though, they just look like solid cartoon eyes unless you’re right on top of them and the light’s bright enough to differentiate the brown and black (which it only is under my painting lamp). On the bright side, look how I was patient enough to get a nice smooth white this time!

I haven’t done it at all lately, but seeing recent and nostalgic stuff from @oak23 and @dollsahoy has given me a serious itch to start doing/posting some more dolly stuff lately. (Just, like, with lower production values from somebody with less free time who’s too lazy to set up photo backdrops now.) I know this has been a drawing-only blog forever, so if this bothers you I can always move to a side blog. 

Anyway! My main project I’ve wanted to do for a while was improving my OC dolls (shocker). M characters based on dolls no longer look that much like the dolls, which is weird but okay. Tennant here is definitely the most strongly linked to the doll but he really needed a body upgrade because I hate the awful shoulders on the 1999 poser Kens, plus I wanted a wrist on him. I thought about changing him out to the newer Fashionista Ken body with a hip mod but I only have two and felt kind of bad about chopping an arm off a perfectly good one. I saw the shoulder mod @dolljunk did on one though so I thought, hey, I’d try it out on his original, already-broken body and worst case scenario, I don’t like it and do the new Fashionista. 

So, this was the result. Cracking the torso open took 80% of the time and was awful. I don’t know what kind of glue is in there, but all but ONE peg broke clean off instead of coming unglued ever. Half the outer seam just had to be dremelled open, so his sides are a mess now. Thanks, Tennant. I also chopped off the hand and drilled in a Dragon one, which was super easy (although only like 2 out of my big eBay lot of action figure hands were even close to a color match), and tried dremmelling the elbow joint, which made no apparent difference in posability. (I tried.)

The shoulders were pretty easy. I expected to have to make new shoulder wells but I didn’t. I just dremmelled out the outer part of the shoulders and put the arms back in deeper. The leather twine (which is just what I had on hand) makes it a tight fit that can hold poses. 

In the end I added some hot glue sueding to the shoulder and torso joint which made it even uglier but works fine. I’d like to pretty the rough edges up sometime (and I made a mess of some things I didn’t have to, like the left arm, oops) but for now he looks way better in clothes than he did before. 

Re-repaint coming up next.