Here's the sequence of events, as I remember them.
When I was a kid I had quite a few Barbies and other dolls around the same scale, as I grew up I slowly phased most of them out of my life. I remember even in my earliest days of Barbiehood, I preferred dolls with better articulation and more varied and interesting face screening over dolls with stiff limbs and bland B&B features. But it was the late 80's to mid-late 90's and pickin's was slim.
Around 12 to 14 years of age I stumbled on the world of action figure customizing. At that time Star Wars toys had replaced my interest in Barbies and barbie-likes for the most part, thanks to the influx of new SW toys from the rerelease of the Original Trilogy in theaters. I'd been a huge SW fan since as long as I could remember, but I was born after RoTJ and most of the toy options had dried up long before I was old enough to not choke on them. Anyways, I had a bunch of 4-inch figures and a few 1/6th figures. They were bulky and clunky, but I liked the articulation they had, for what it was. (I did keep a reddish haired Barbie around to fill the roll of Mara Jade, aka teh kewlest Extended Universe character EVER.
)
But yeah, customizing. Around the same time as all that, we got the internet. I can only barely remember what search engines existed then, but somehow my nerdbaby searches for SW things lead me to gallery after gallery of CUSTOM SW figures! WOW! People DID this?? My little preteen mind was blown away. I saved hundreds of photos of my favorites, probably none of which I still have on any accessible media, and probably none of which are still online.
There either weren't any tutorials on customizing action figures online back then, or I just never thought to look them up, but my interest in customizing stopped there for the moment.
At age 17 I went to college and got a workstudy job. Suddenly I had money to play with, and I found things I didn't even consider they made figures and dolls of! Between 18 and 20 I ended up collecting 1/6th scale Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows, Char Aznable from Gundam: 0079, and an Italian issue Rezo from Slayers, to name a few. But sometime in my last two years of university, my old interest in customized action figures, and my new interest in 1/6th scale dolls, would collide.
So, I'm a comic artist. If you know the various ways Obitsu's have been hocked, you already see where this is headed. Sort of. See, I saw the "manga mannequins" in blick catalogs for years, but they didn't really make an impression on me at first. It was only after I stumbled on something called a "dollfie" that this mysterious world of doll customizing slowly started coming into focus. I started seeing custom dolls everywhere. Original character dolls, fan characters, characters that never get merch from official sources. I had to know more.
There was a character that for years I'd been trying to get merch of, with very little success. But if I could get one of these strange blank dolls, maybe I could make my own version of him! So a flurry of research later, I pinned it down to two companies. Actually, the only two companies making blank 1/6 doll parts at the time. Obitsu and Volks. I spent days agonizing over what parts to get, but eventually settled on Volks for their prettier sculpts. Not much later I got parts for another character doll from Obitsu via Parabox and Junkyspot. Those two dolls became Rau and Ghaleon, and I was in a whole new world. I was no longer a slave to companies who blatantly disregarded making merch of my favorite characters. I could create any character I wanted, no matter how obscure.
I justified most of my purchases as "I can use them as drawing models, too!"
Yeah, that hasn't happened.
So I made a bunch of my favorites from a bunch of things, all the while learning more about the history of doll collecting and customization, as well as being opened up to more possibilities from playline dolls. Concurrently, I got interested in bjds of other scales and started collecting and customizing a few of those as well. But I was mainly focused on and inspired by the 1/6th scale.
Then I kinda got burnt out on the 1/6th scale. It happens when you focus on one specific thing for too long. You think it wont, but it always does. Seven years is a good run, I think I've made all the characters I care to make in that scale, and I could stand to weed a few out. For now I'm out of ideas for the scale, and my interest has moved on to sculpting, customizing and sewing for larger scales. And at the same time, I find my interest turning back to much smaller scales as well. I might actually get into customizing action figures one of these days, coming full circle. We'll see what the future holds.
And that's how I got into (and eventually lost interest in) 1/6th scale dolls.
Glad to see another big time anime dork on here. XD (I know, I know, we all collect some of them but somehow my collection has ended up being basically 99% anime related dolls!)
I'm so boring. I have a good reason for it though! Pets and dolls don't make the best combination! I can just imagine Roy Mustang's tiny pocket watch becoming lost because the cats decided it would make a good toy. But yeah, as I said in my other reply on the other thread, I have mostly male dolls. I have....mmm okay more than I should, but for official dolls that I haven't commissioned my definite favourites are both Medicom! Roy Mustang from Full Metal Alchemist also the brother pair of Naoto and Naoya from Night Head Genesis. (Medicom did a really good job on those two, they 
) from the anime Kyuuketsuki Hime Miyu. I've been a fan of that series since the late nineties and I was absolutely surprised to learn that there were even dolls for this series! Miyu was a bit more expensive due to being the title character but Larva is like 14'' and I scored him for about $40. With all the accessories and stuff he comes with, he should really cost around $150 at least.
