) air dry clay before I set out on this adventure. Anyways, her name is Lizzette, and I hope you all enjoy the photos of her creation.(This is not exactly a "tutorial" but I will explain what's going on through each step.)
She is made out of DAS air dry paper clay, wooden craft balls, and painted with acrylic. Her outfit is handmade out of random scraps.
This is a picture of her armature against my "blueprint." It is wire wrapped in paper towel and covered in clear tape (so as not to stick and be easily removable from the inside.)
This is the first layer of clay hanging to dry. I worked the clay with my hands and a little water, then rolled it out with a simple dowel before laying it on. I forgot to take a picture of the head (hanging upside down) before covering it in clay. The head is a wooden craft ball with a projecting cardboard faceplate. I taped the cardboard to the ball, then covered it in clear wrap. I tied the clear wrap and molded the clay all the way up to it (intending for it to be the neck hole.) I let it dry for two days, then went to the next step.
This is what the pieces looked like cut apart. Since I'm not good enough to have identical pieces, I labeled them to keep them together. I cut them apart with a sharp new box cutter. I was very surprised how easy this step was. (I also had the second layer of clay on her torso at this point.)
Her face after some detailing.
I wanted to see what she'd look like together, so I set her up on wires in this picture.
Testing a strung-up arm.
More string testing. Haven't attached the hands and feet yet.
Back view string testing.
Here's Lizzette trying out sitting for the first time. (Lookin' a little creepy with no eyes...)
Checking arm posability.
Doing a little stretching. -^.^-
A little assisted posing. Her joints aren't slotted, so she can't hold this position alone.
Standing on her own!!!!!!!!
These are her eyes, painted with acrylic. I molded clay into an ice-cream-like shape, so they could dry in this wire setup I bent up for them. I just cut the cones off the bottom when the paint was dry and put them in. I just covered the back with clay in the socket to hold them in.
Here she is with her eyes in, skullcap shut, and ears on.
Here she is painted! It's all acrylic. I didn't really feel like she was good enough to go down to small detail, like nipples and stuff like that. So she's just flat skin tone everywhere. She's kinda got a Jem thing goin' on. ^.^
Wig on for the first time. It's just simple yarn that I tied in the middle at the "part." I then hand separated all the strands of yarn and back-combed it a little to fluff it up.
Here she is in her full outfit! I'm an ultra beginner at sewing, so I know it's rough. I didn't hem anything, or make a pattern. I pretty much just made some fabric and legging scraps into something. I think it is pretty cute though. The shoes were a nightmare though. I'm really going to have to work on that more. They're awful. (Also, I think her hat kinda makes her look like Smurfette. Hee.)
Here's a cute pic of her standing on my kitchen counter.
Showin' off her hair.
Touchin' her hair. (Don't look at the terrible hand sculpt! It will burn out your retinas!)
Showcasing holding up her arms. As I believe I said before, I didn't slot any of her joints, so any good posing she can do I'm proud of. The only reason I did not slot was simply because I didn't have a good tool for it. I used craft balls rather than sculpting my own, (which I WILL do next time) and my cheap dremel had a REALLY hard time getting through them.
To end it on a high note, here she is looking cute with a crap guitar I sketched because she looked like she wanted one. Hee. (Also you can see the plushie moogle I made when I was 8 behind her. He's been around a long time. Oh yeah, and the shiny black thing is my awesome pendant ocarina.)
Anyways, there's Lizzette. I hope you enjoyed her. She's my VERY first BJD, but I hope she's one of many.
(Sorry about the different sizes of pics, I did that to try and shorten the post a bit.)
