Two New Polymer Bodies

Continuing from Two New Faces

 With new faces must come new bodies, right?

The crucial parts of a ball-jointed doll are the joints. For mine, I've been using wood beads. To accommodate the movement of the elastic through the joint, I've widened the bead holes into slits using a small bow saw.

 Initially, I made a mold from one of these modified beads, and cast a few resin replicas, but I ultimately couldn't justify the extra time, work, and resources when wood joints work just as well.

For the bodies, I've been using Super Sculpey. On these arms and legs (as well as Morgan's torso), however, some quickly-made terra cotta sculpey will do. At least, for the moment.

And here are the crudely-hewn but very useful new bodies for Saterlee and Morgan. Sans hands.

Two New Faces

I've got two newly finished heads to show you, from the BJD webcomic Emmy: Self-Titled.

The two most major characters besides Emmy herself: Dr. Mike Saterlee and Morgan.

Saterlee

Morgan, profile

Morgan

They've got finished bodies (except for Saterlee's feet...) too. All that remains is to put some paint and clothes on them and finish the set, and I'll have another few pages to put up on the web SOON.

BDJ Update

In the last blog, I proudly showed off my Sculpey clay ball-jointed doll/puppet. It was a first attempt, and I think it turned out well, but the design needed some work. The joints didn't work very well, as I had predicted. It was simply more important that I have a model upon which I could improve than it was that I got it perfect the first time.
So I tried it again. This time, however, I wanted to go with a stronger material than regular Sculpey (which had proven to be a bit too brittle). I looked at the reviews for a half-dozen different polymer clays, read through BJD forums, and ultimately decided to go with Super Sculpey.
Let me just say, I love this clay. It's not called "super" arbitrarily.
I didn't use any filler, such as styrofoam, for this one. I simply hollowed the insides after I'd sculpted it, and then again after I baked it.
The result:
A rather nice second attempt, if I say so myself.
The joints, I soon realized, still weren't quite right. The knees, in particular, refused to hold the weight of the doll.
I re-examined the online tutorials I'd been working from and searched for new ones. I considered several different types of joint, and chose to try the simplest one: the wooden bead joint. Conveniently, my mother just happened to have a string of round, red beads that fitted my existing doll's sockets perfectly. So I made a new right arm and tried them out.

It worked so well that I showed my parents and grandparents as soon as I could. XD
The bead joints hold position extremely well, and are much smoother than the ones I tried to sculpt myself. As soon as I find the right size for the knee joints (larger) and the wrist joints (smaller), I think I might be ready to cast this doll.
Last month, you see, I ordered silicone mold-making materials and easy-to-pour resin. We'll see how it goes.


For anyone who's interested, the following are the main tutorials, blogs, and images from which I've been teaching myself the mysteries of ball-jointed dolls:
How to make a limb out of super sculpey
How Siru works
Super Sculpey BJD

Emmy and the Ball-Jointed Dolls

(Worst band name in a decade.)

After the completion of Emmy: Self-Titled's prologue, I found myself facing two facts. One was that I loved this project more than ever, and the other was that I had (unsurprisingly) not yet found a puppet I was satisfied with. A previous blog on the matter shows that I finally decided upon a working armature for the Emmy puppet, and I think it worked well for a 3-D comic. However, the puppets/dolls as they are don't stand up on their own and don't change positions fluidly -- two qualities needed for stop-motion puppets.

Although Emmy is an art project in its own right, since the time I decided to render it with puppets and scale sets, I planned to use it as a testing ground for stop-motion puppets. Now, long have I had my eye on the stunning ball-jointed dolls, but their construction looked so intimidating that I never attempted to create one. After trying about a dozen other puppet and doll types, however, I thought I had nothing to lose.

Not wanting to invest too much time learning how to cast in resin before I knew whether or not I'd like BJDs as puppets, my first attempt was in polymer clay. Loosely following this tutorial, I first carved the pieces out of styrofoam.


I then covered them in paper mache...

and finally covered that with Sculpey clay. When baked, the styrofoam shrinks away from the paper mache, leaving a hardened polymer shell.

Ideally.

But yet again, my clay burned and cracked in my toaster oven. :(



(This happens a lot. My oven's lowest temperature is 350. Sculpey and most polymers need to be baked at 275. For the past year I've had this appliance, I thought if I simply baked for less time, everything would work. I was wrong. There's no getting around the fact that you just can't bake polymer clays at a higher temperature.)

So I borrowed my parents' oven. Not wanting to risk an accident involving melting styrofoam, I sculpted new pieces from Sculpey, carefully hollowed them out, and baked them at the proper temperature.


The result was so successful that I then dared to try baking one styrofoam-based piece. It came out beautifully. I think I may have found my new favorite type of puppet.