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.

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

Read the Instructions!

I decided I needed a toaster oven for the polymer clay parts of my puppets, because heating up the kitchen oven for such small pieces was a waste (not to mention the health warnings against using the same oven for food and clay). So I bought one. I set it up. I read the directions. I re-read the directions. Then I put my pieces in to bake.

They burned to a crisp (see "after" in the image below).

After grieving over the hour or so of work I'd lost in mixing the clay to a matching shade of gray, I decided that the oven must be broken, or have some bad wiring. I mean, I'd put it in for less than the recommended time, and it was burned to the point of complete discoloration. I decided to return it.

Before I did, though, I re-re-read the instructions. Not surprisingly, when I'd read the numbers before, I'd switched the times between the different temperatures--despite my foreseeing such a thing and trying to prevent it. Sometimes I really think I must be dyslexic.

[And now, the power of MS Paint allows you to see what I'm talking about. The large "before" piece is the color that the smaller pieces were before they went in the oven. I decided to paint them rather than make new ones.]