Formatting in any Microsoft program makes me FERAL

The Making of Fubuki

((Reposting from Den of Angels workshop thread because I wanted my friends to be able to see~))

After years of pining after dolls I couldn't afford as a broke teenager, my first BJD was a Bobobie Sprite I purchased for my 18th birthday. Unfortunately, she didn't live up to my expectations and I never really bonded with her. Her face was cute enough, but the Bobobie body lacked the grace and posing ability I imagined for the Unseelie faerie I'd been daydreaming of for years. Sueding and wiring didn't help, blushing and tattooing highlighted her blockiness, it was a mess. I packed her away and tried not to think about my disappointment for 12 years. In the meantime I learned to build and paint resin garage kits, inherited one of my sister's dolls, bought some others, took anatomy & physiology in college, and did a couple extensive restorations and full-body modifications. I was sure I had thrown her away at some point as a failed project, but last weekend I found her tucked away in a doll bag I thought was empty. Having just finished substantial mods on a Dollshe body, and awaiting an unfinished Unoa kit for my birthday in September, I decided that I owed it to her to try again. Doll nudity below the cut, looooong post--

My Sprite was originally going to be a pooka with golden eyes and extensive woad tattoos. The golden eyes are incredible, so those are staying, but she's now going to be a blue oni to fit in with the rest of my collection. My plan is to do extensive additive epoxy work, and then to use Krylon Fusion to give everything a unified finish. The goal of the project is to reduce the... idk, STRAIGHTNESS of the old Bobobie body. I was never going to be happy with it, the lines were all far too rigid.

Head: Modified mouth for a wider, smirking smile. Magnets added to headcap (old Bobobie used an S-hook iirc; I did this part back in 2008). Forehead drilled for 3mm brass rod armature, and epoxy used to sculpt horns over rod. Bust: Substantial subtractive modifications to breasts, which involved removal and readdition of nipples. Addition of epoxy clay to back and shoulders to give a more curved body line in profile. Deepening of shoulder sockets with 18mm eye bevel, followed by sanding to make shoulders narrower. Waist: Reshaping of upper torso joint into sphere for smoother range of motion. Subtraction of resin in back and addition of epoxy in front to enhance lumbar curve. Hips: Substantial reshaping of lower waist seam to more naturally follow the pelvic girdle. It reminded me of granny panties before  Added epoxy to butt, again for lumbar curve. Thighs: Suwariko joint mod (cut the thigh and added a PVC insert to enable swivelling at the hip). Added epoxy to make her thighs look less straight. Calves: Removed 1cm of length at the ankles and rebevelled the socket. Removed resin at the ankles to bring them in, and added epoxy at the calves to make them curvier. Feet: Sculpted little claws, which were cute, and then decided the feet needed to be 5mm longer. Cut across, drilled and pinned with brass rod for structural strength, gap filled with epoxy clay. I also modded her feet to have defined arches and balls back when I first got her. Alas, spitting into the ocean. I added S-hooks, but did so by drilling the ankle and inserting brass rod to form the axle for the hook. Arms: The proportions on her upper arms BOTHERED me! they were so SHORT! and I only just figured out that's what I hated about them last week! I added 5mm to the upper arms by cutting them in the middle and using SteelStik to make a structural repair (plumber's epoxy putty has a shorter open time but far greater structural strength than artist's epoxy clay). Sanded the heck out of the wrists to give them a more delicate taper. Hands: Beyond salvage. The hands were my least-favorite part of this sculpt. I tried to bulk them up to look less spidery but it was just too difficult... I've ordered a different pair of MSD hands which will have claws added, and then when everything is painted it'll all match. Thanks for reading this far! Here's a preview of what her golden eyes look like next to Krylon Fusion in Antique Blue.

((first progress post)) I think I'm mostly done adding epoxy clay (at least where it'll show; presumably the wrist sockets will require tweaks to fit the new hands), so now it's time for finish sanding. I start with 60 grit for shaping, then switch to a 120 grit sanding sponge. To check for scratches, pinholes, and inadequately feathered edges, I apply a wash of diluted acrylic paint. Once the paint has dried, I scrub the piece with a nylon scouring pad. Paint remains in the surface irregularities.

All sanded with 220 grit. I don't think I'll be going higher than 400 because I want there to be some tooth for the paint.

Any pitting in the epoxy clay that can't be sanded out is marked with a Sharpie and will be patched with Tamiya spot putty.

I did a test spray of the Krylon Fusion on the headcap and it's fantastic! Holy cow is it *poisonous* tho, I'm used to working with volatile chemicals but this was something else. Get OUT OF THE AREA between coats and leave it outside until it stops outgassing, not just until it's ready to handle.

This test piece is four light coats sprayed 1 minute apart, allowed to cure for 4 hours, and then wetsanded to remove the spray texture. It's pretty sturdy but I will wait several more days to see how it continues to cure before experimenting with matte sealants. ((progress update 2))

Haven't done much but sand-and-fill-and-sand-and-fill, but my 14mm beveller came in today so I can start deepening her elbow and ankle sockets. Added some epoxy clay to the insides of the eyewells so 14mm eyes will fit with no gap. I need a needle file to clean up the corners of her mouth... Monster feets! Nails on the right came out better than the left, still need to feather-sand everything.

Elbows progress. The early Bobobie elbows are I guess /technically/ double-jointed because the joint is a sphere with two slots, but I thought I could do better than that. You can see epoxy clay spliced in to make the sphere into a peanut: this isn't a structurally sound repair unless you pop it apart and drill/pin/glue-epoxy it back together.

View from the back. By keeping the joint heads spherical with no elbow-shaped detailing, there's some rotation as well as flexion, which I like.

Touching her face with one of her old hands. I hope the new ones come soon!

((progress update 4))

In good news, these parts are all ready for paint! It's really hard to do prepwork with no filler primer, hope I didn't miss any spots...

In less good news, her new hands arrived and they are... very smol ;u; I forgot that the new trend for slim minis means that everyone has TINY LITTLE HANDS.

They are, however, beautifully sculpted and a good 3D reference for what needs fixing and how. Bobobie palm is very short relative to fingers: I made a transverse cut behind the knuckles and added epoxy to lengthen More curved volume across the back of the hand: Not necessarily realistic, but looks a little cuter, plus it makes the transition into the cylinder of the wrist look less stylistically jarring. More defined joint angles: Some of these I did via cut-and-thermoform repositioning, mostly I'm aiming to fake it by building up and carving away at the weird smooth curves. The fingers are just TOO SKINNY: But obviously I'm not going to squish rice-grain-sized blobs of epoxy to the fingers, right? It's too fiddly, it doesn't want to stick. What's the solution? Brace for a truly hideous WIP image--

"AAAAAAGH WHAT IS THAT DARK GRAY MESS" it's JB Weld epoxy! It's like load-bearing, slow-curing modeller's putty! Slathering putty onto an armature and then carving it away to refine the shape is how anime figure artists make hands and detailed hair.  I was thinking about it from a polymer clay technique/perspective so I missed the obvious solution. Hand in the foreground has more layers than the hand in the background, every layer gets the shape a lil closer. ((progress post 5)) Parts set up on sticks so I can handle them without touching...

... and after 4 light coats!

Closeup of the head, lil' glossy because it's still drying. For the deeper areas like the joint slots, mouth, and the crannies of the ears, I'm going to have to decant some of the paint into a jar and apply it with a sacrificial brush.

((progress post 6)) I return from Depression! I finally finished sanding-and-spraying the Krylon Fusion coats, gave her a last polish with microfine to even out the texture, and have started blushing her. I'm using a mixture of Tamiya X-series acrylics applied via airbrush for basic contouring, then I'll go back in with pastel to add warm tones and details.

Fun discovery: in an attempt to cover some accidental overspray, I tried spraying the Fusion directly into the paint cup of the airbrush and using it to "erase" back to the base color. I'm NEVER using this product straight from the can again, it goes on so smooth and gorgeous from the airbrush! No orange peel or bubbles to sand away. I'm seriously tempted to get a can of pink and try blushing with it.

((progress post 7)) Doing a faceup over a spray-painted substrate is HARD I want to CRY. I talked about sanding out the spray texture to get an untextured surface, right? Welp, didn't/couldn't sand well enough in the corners of the mouth and the folds of the eyelids, so it's crusty-looking with pastels over it and now there's nothing I can do about it that doesn't involve stripping down to resin and starting again.

((final post)) Sueded and strung!

I didn't take pictures of the sueding process because I was using Barge Cement and it is messy and time-sensitive. I used masking tape to make templates of her joints, transferred to some thin gray lamb suede I found on eBay, and glued it fuzzy side out. The suede was thicker than real pliver, more like the thickness of silicone KIPS discs, but I think it worked out without too many fit issues. The trim store had 3.5mm elastic in a beautiful slate-blue color that I thought would look nicer in the joint slots, so she's strung throughout with thicker elastic. Some more poses to show off the functional mods~ Suwariko joints let her sit crosslegged, and more mobile wrists let her put her hands into the pose.

A more ball-and-socked shaped contact surface at her waist lets her slouch at a full range of angles instead of being locked into two.

With longer upper arms, she can reach the ground in this pose! You can also see how the modded waist joint lets her cock her hips.

She could always stand with locked knees. I think she needs some wire in her legs to let the suwariko joints hold their rotation against gravity, but I'll see how the elastic tension settles in first.

A parting shot out the snowy window. We've been having a hard time picking between a few names for her, but I think this settles it. Welcome back, Fubuki~

Ugh, today was fine, even good, I'm just tired and in weird head space right now likely the result of me fucking up taking my medication last night and stopping (or lowering) the Xanax intake, but HEY I didn't fall asleep somewhere between 10:30 and 11 am today so we're probably correct there, which is good because we were at a placement at that point doing an interview and that would've been hella awkward. But anyway. Alarm at 7:40 because we were leaving straight to go to an interview which shifts time a bit so I was supposed to meet my boss outside the courthouse at 9:30. Last time we were set to do this I FUCKING FELL ASLEEP ON THE BUS and missed my stop so I was especially worried about being late, which is dumb because she is chronically late. So I was there at 9:25 ready to go, lol, she however took some longer time to get there (more like 9:50 but she at least texted to say she was gonna be late) but whatever at least it was nice out at that point, it's back to fucking freezing now and I'm so not happy about it. So we were going to what's called a TLP, or temporary living placement, which are basically DCFS controlled placements for wards who are in between 18 and 21 (since Illinois can keep kids in the system until they're 21, which, for all the system's issues, is a much better plan that dumping a newly minted 18 year old out on the street with no resources) where it's somewhat like a dorm, there's a staff person but they can come and go as they please as long as they follow rules and such. We were going like, super far south, like down to 111th street (and if you're familiar with Chicago's street system you know the numbered streets don't even start until you're south of the loop and I live way north of the loop) and yeah, basically the further south you get the worse the neighborhoods get (I could've sworn they filmed a few scenes from APB at the park across the street from this place. I don't want to be too loose with personal details for obvious reasons, but this girl had very good reason to want out of the neighborhood for her and her 2 year old son (whose father was shot and killed at the end of April). Her son was very cute though. And she's honestly doing better than a lot of "kids" in her situation would be, she has a decent amount of her shit together so it'll probably be just a question of following through. So after that interview we stopped at Potbelly for sandwiches and so my boss could get her Mountain Dew fix (she's like addicted) and then she got upset that their syrup to fizz ratio was messed up on the fountain soda machine and complained and I was laughing really hard because I was very amused. From there we went back to the office where I finished off the DCP summary I was working on then started digging into the case file for the permanency hearing I'm doing on Monday. I started with the DCP packet since that's generally the start of the case, and it came in as a lock out but at trial they ended up getting no-fault dependency findings (what we refer to as dep-c) meaning she was taken into care because her parents couldn't handle her mental problems, not because her parents refused to let her back in their home (which, for the record, is abuse and neglect when your kid is 13). We tend to argue against these findings a lot since they're generally not in the kids best interest so I was kind of irritated to find out they got only a dep-c finding at trial when her parents fucking locked her out, like that's not a dependency case IMO. But anyway. That was several years ago, since then she'd gotten to return home and then was sadly brought back into the system. I'll have to read the attorneys notes to figure out the logistics of why (other than her parents couldn't handle her behavior again), I was going through the orders on the case to see the legal status when my boss showed up and asked the lady with the office across from mine if they were allowed to bring law clerks to psych hospitals for interviews, so of course my ears perked up at that, and pretty soon after we were going off to interview a 17 year old boy who had been on run for like, a year (the system SUCKS and teens literally just run away and don't get found for months upon months). The report we got said he had told a police officer he was having suicidal ideation which brought him to the psych hospital, however upon arriving he had a different story which I won't get too much into for privacy reasons but he really did not want to be there anymore and was like "I told the cop I was slightly depressed but I wanted to go to a shelter to get back into placement" which I'm sure he played down some for our sakes but while he was kind of worked up when we got there for the duration of the interview he presented as rational and really not struggling from any immediate signs of mental illness, so I really don't know if he did need to be there. He kept saying he doesn't feel safe there because he watched the staff have to restrain a kid and he described it as them just beating the crap out of the kid, and like that's a fine line because you're generally brought to a psych hospital for your own safety, but by doing so are also surrounded by individuals who could compromise your safety. They're having an emergency staffing for him on Monday though and hopefully they can get him into a TLP (and if not probably a residential facility, but that's where he went on run from so that'd be less than helpful). He seemed fairly determined to get his act together so I hope he succeeds there and doesn't lose it on any of the staff there in the next few days (which yes I know all have challenging jobs, but there were a few comments I overheard that I did not feel particularly comfortable with). But after that we headed back and I just had my boss drop me at the loop because I had to grab my prescriptions from target (my high dose acid reflux med and the new one my psychiatrist just prescribed) then I was meeting up with my roommate being that she works downtown too. Not gonna lie, sitting in the hallway of the psych hospital was a weird feeling for me. It feels like a lifetime ago that I was dealing with my best friend being locked in one for a week with no contact and me 500 miles away and completely helpless. The story doesn't hurt as much anymore, but sitting there today it just felt a million miles away from where I was now. The girl from this morning was 20, I mean, I'm only 5 years older than her....that's not a lot. Idk where I'm going with this, it was just weird I guess. I never really got close to getting psych hospitalized (mostly because I didn't tell anybody I knew would get me in one that I was suicidal) but I have had multiple friends in them over the years and I know they're not great places to be in. So all of this was kind of playing in my mind as I picked up my psych meds. From there I walked over to the building my roommate works in since she didn't get off till 5:30, so I chilled in the lobby of her office for like 15 minutes while guys in suits walked in and out and made various jokes, lol. She's a receptionist and she says she doesn't do much except watch tv and process bills sometimes but it sure as hell pays a lot better than Starbucks and she's got some acting stuff in the works so hey good for her. When she got off we took the train a few stops to right where my old apartment was and went to a pizza place by there that was pretty good. From there we caught a bus a few streets over and took that down to the movie theatre to see guardians of the Galaxy 2. We were almost the only ones in the theatre, but a couple other people showed up once the previews started (I don't think I've seen any of the planet of the apes movies, but I'm kind of awed at their ability to keep coming up with new ones by just adding two words in front of the title) and then we were going. It was good, different than I expected but I don't really know specifically what I was expecting, probably just something that would tie in more with marvel's infinity wars end game here with the infinity stones and such, since they seem to be pulling that end of it into the final battle for the universe they're gonna wind up in. The weird gold people they end up making enemies of were odd, and it kind of had my wondering if whatever that douche who's a top guy at marvel that did all the hydra captain America nazi shit (Nick Spencer? Is that his name? Idk) had something to do with their characterization as his vilification of people being overly politically correct, but I doubt that was actually how that happened. It was a lot more emotional than the first for obvious reasons, and the general type of story was different. I liked Nebula and Gamora's story arc, as awful as their childhoods had been I'm glad they were still able to find reconciliation with each other (even if Nebula is still out to kill Thanos, if that's a possibility). The whole final battle sequence was pretty good, obviously weird setting but I think they did it well. FUCKING BABY GROOT WAS SO DAMN CUTE and they better be making stuffed animals of him because I want one immediately. I really couldn't get over though how the ravager that ends up staying with them was Kurt from Gilmore Girls and that actor has obviously aged quite a bit but he still looks JUST like Kurt and I placed him immediately, and then I felt kind of bad for the guy that he'll probably never have another acting job where people don't immediately think "oh, it's Kurt from Gilmore Girls). It's probably good his character ended up being a little nutty. I can't fucking remember the blue guy's name (my life, even though I was trying to commit it to memory) but I actually really liked how they did his redemption arc which I didn't really expect because I really wasn't a fan of his character up to this point, but they managed to paint it really well in the comparison of oh you think he kept you away from your great dad to help you steal things to oh he was protecting you after knowing what happened to the other kids. DAMN THOUGH, Kurt Russell (not gonna lie, I thought that was Jeff Goldblum up until looking it up on IMDb right before writing that) was so good as being the great and powerful god at first and then he turned so quickly and DAMN was he a creepy as fuck villain. The moments Nebula and Gamora find the caves full of bones and then when Mantis (who btw the only thing I could think about while watching her was how minus the weird buggy things her costume was totally the female version of the smallville green arrow costume) said they were his children it was such an OH SHIT moment I was like getting chills. I think that's most of what I wanted to say. I'm sure they'll make it mean something in the continuity of the marvel universe, but it didn't seem to add much to the infinity stone centered plot at least (which was pretty much the entire plot of the first). Also, when they were in the battle scene and Gamora and Nebula kept getting like, whipped back and forth, all I could think was well this is not the same marvel universe where Gwen Stacey dies because obviously their physics are on a whole other level (that was mostly a joke though, I don't know enough about that series to make an actual comment). When we got out of th movie it was back to being COLD AS FUCK but we ended up in an uber pool because it was cheap, so it was the two of us and some college kid (or maybe grad, idk I wasn't paying attention to his conversation) and a driver that was pretty good with conversation up until the end it got a little ermm but he got most of the way at least. And then I got ready for bed because my head still feels weird but I clearly had to get all of this out or I wouldn't be able to sleep. I think I realized the headspace thing somewhere during the movie because at first I just thought that like we were sitting too close to the screen or maybe I was developing eye problems because it was like hard for me to track their movements and bring it into focus, but I'm at least glad that my eyesight is still ok. Okay, I'm done now. Yay for tomorrow being Friday. Goodnight pals. Happy Friday.