*le'sigh*

Well, I know in my last post I said that she's greatly improved, and she has, but since then I've found myself aligning one facial structure only to find out it wasn't aligned with another or it wasn't symmetrical, yada, yadda, yadddaaa! Damn, I gotta say, while I'm not giving up or giving any ground on the stress, this is one helluva journey! The past few days I thought I had finally gotten the nose absolutely correct, and I have for the most part, only to find myself struggling to match the nostril openings to both the profile shots and the frontals. The good news is, that isn't much altering. The lips need some more refinement to be sure, but last night, the biggie that I discovered - and I should've known this was coming because nothing is hardly ever perfect the first go around - that the eyes didn't line up correctly in the frontal shot. I knew something had to be up with them and I was slowly working on reshaping them anyway. Most faces, as a general artist rule, have the beginning of the eyes lining up correctly with the very edge of the nose, however not all faces live by this rule obviously as Mother Nature has Her own agenda. Sideshow Collectable's sculptor of Leia, obviously follows this rule as on examination of his sculpt, her eye openings line up with the edges of the nose perfectly. However, Carrie's/Leia's face has the opening of the eyes lining up with the opening of the nostril and not the edge of the nose itself. SO after reshaping the nostrils today I can move onto realigning the eyes and this should fix everything...I hope. I really can't wait to show the perfected product and again, she's almost there. I really see Leia in this face, it just needs some more work. I traced a frontal shot of the basic facial structure and this time I drew lines at where everything lines up with so I should clear up any remaining inaccuracies with this attempt. It's just tough when ya doing an image of someone who lives and breathes. They're going to look a little different in all the shots. I've matched my progress to several photos from day to day and still I find myself changing things *le'sigh*

On a more exhausting note, I've been under some emotional stress from Life issues. This is so troublesome when you're trying to focus on your work. Honestly it's been ruining my focus which, up until these stressful issues came to light, was pretty extreme and driven. But I won't give up. I keep remembering that She could be the pinnacle of my Life's creative achievements thus far. I'll keep on keepin' on.

At any rate, this must be the toughest part of the doll work. It's the most detailed area of the body, especially when it's a likeness of someone real. So at least the toughest part will have been finished first ^_^

On another note, I counted last night and I've designed about seventeen outfits for the doll, and thats not counting the obligatory outfits from the films! So exciting. I Love the textiles portion of this process! I think I'll start posting those designs so you can see!

Anywho, back to work! I leave this post with a fantastic, fifteen minute, disco Star Wars medley from way back when A New Hope introduced the world to STAR WARS!

Massive Improvement!

WELL! The very day of my last post I really turned things around and created what I feel to be quite amazing. It's not done yet, but Leia's face is almost fully finished! I don't wanna unveil her until she's complete and sanded. I gotta say that this is what's really put more jet fuel in my engine because it's such a surreal thing to create the face of one of your heroines with your own hands...She's gonna be so special to me, though I can say she already is! Anywho, onto things I *can* show. Eye selection!

Okay I came across the site Saffrin Doll, and they offer an amazing selection of eyes for BJDs. I've narrowed it down to three that I really Love:





I highly adore the bottom one, so I think I'm gonna go with that at first. It's such a pretty blend of brown and even some reds. It kind of matches a few of the photos of her eyes, but so do the other two eye selections that I like. I should be ordering my choice next week, so I'm excited for that! What I also adore is the option of lashes! I know that there's not really an easy way to hide bottom lashes if you were to attach them, but I've confirmed that I must have them. SO What I wanna do is use some ingenuity and glue them to the bottom lid. Once the glue is dry I'll put a thin layer of apoxie sculpt over the lower lid area to cover the edges of the lashes and sand and paint that area then trim the lashes down a bit. *le'sigh* Listen to me gettin' ahead of myself. I can't help it though, I'm so excited!! Here's one of my favorite photos of her:



Soon...very soon. ^_^!!!

Head sculpting: Day III

OKAY, so this is my third day and third *time* attempting to sculpt Carrie Fisher's intricately beautiful face. My first two attempts became much larger than they should've been and turned out kinda ape-like...lmao. Anywho, despite the set backs I am optimistic and will stop at nothing to create an almost perfect replica of Leia as she appeared in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Why that specific movie? Well when she began with A New Hope, George Lucas asked her to lose some weight for the next films and she got progressively thinner. I really like the medium she had in Episode V so I'm mainly using reference photos from that film.

I feel like if I can create the head sculpt beautifully then that's gonna really give me the massive momentum to push through the rest of the creation process, as I will be so totally thrilled. Plus the face is really the focal point of any figure and it can make or break a piece of art like this. I mean it's where everyone wants to start, I'm sure. I'm kind of meshing a few different approaches to sculpting the face. Yoshida and the online tutorial I read have ya drawing the face on and building it up from there and the AMAZING Andy Bergholtz (who does the sculpting for a lot of Sideshow Collectibles products, including the Star Wars ones) has a tutorial on his web site with a synopsis of his process which is great help. I recommend checking out his work as it is really very good, especially his likeness of Leia, though the nose protrudes just a tad too far in my opinion. Nevertheless she's very beautiful. My issue is the medium I'm working with. It's apoxie sculpt and while I SOOO Love it, it gets a little tougher to work with in an hour after mixing it together, which makes the process of details a bit tougher and more time consuming. I know beauty wasn't created in a day and miraculous feats like this take time, patience, and passion and I have that. I just wanna make sure that I can create this sculpt and have it be so breathtakingly beautiful with an extremely uncanny resemblance to Leia. That is my goal...here's to day three.

Oh and here's a picture that's really also fueling me. It's one of the first looks I wanna create for Leia once she's fabricated and perfected. It's Jedi Knight Leia:

And the journey begins...

I'm finally beginning work on creating my very own ball-jointed doll! I will be using this blog to document my journey so everyone can see this come to fruition with me. It all starts with an idea, which then takes it's shape on paper. I'm both excited and scared. I had started once before with a design but faltered and now I'm picking up the reigns again. I've decided my first doll will have the facial sculpt of Leia Organa from Star Wars. I realized that she was probably the first character I knew in my Life, having first seen her even before I started school as a child. All I know is as far as I can remember I've Loved her, as I Love all of my favorite characters! Anywho, her body is intended to be very natural looking. Here's some pics of my designs! I'm even more excited seeing her on paper. I did three basic images of her nude (front, profile, and rear) and one of her in the infamous slave outfit from Return of the Jedi.





Yeah, it's a tad ghetto that I had to tape paper together, haha! But I didn't have paper that was long enough. I had wanted her to be 65cm tall, but she turned out being a little over 63cm, with a head that is larger than what was aimed for. To me the head fits. I did three test runs with one being 1cm over the size it was supposed to be (too small), then one that was 1.5cm bigger (too big) and finally settled with the head that stretches only an extra centimeter. As it is, from what I counted in photos of Carrie Fisher, she's only 6 or 6.5 heads tall! It's believed that typically (in figure drawing) people are 7.5 heads tall. I think she turned out how fate intended ^_^

I'm currently working on designing the joints by analyzing other dolls out there online and my Sideshow collectables Leia doll to see how to work out maximum posability while keeping the figure smooth and as realistic as possible, which is a challenge but every road has it's bumps. I've rather gotten ahead of myself though by designing other costumes, hairstyles, etc for Leia. She really deserved to be as ornate as her mother in her attire. I just couldn't help it, especially after being enveloped in the hard to find "Dressing a Galaxy: the costumes of Star Wars." That book alone is what sparked my feeling the need to really do this. The amount of effort and detail that went into the thousands of costumes in Star Wars is just awe-inspiring and every time I open that book (which is usually daily) I think to myself "I've gotta do this! I've gotta work at creating beauty at such a high quality." This also comes after the idea that, while I'm only 24, I don't want to waste my Life on meaningless things when I could be creating so much. So here's to the journey and I thank anyone who is joining me! This must be what becoming a mother feels like; Bringing creation into the world and loving every minute of it.

Reading materials:
-"Yoshida Style Ball Jointed Doll Making Guide" by Ryo Yoshida
- "How to Make a Sphere Joint Doll for Beginner" http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkclub.or.jp%2F~oshizaka%2Fdoll%2Fhowto%2Findex.html&lp=ja_en&btnTrUrl=Translate

The second, which is a website of course, is poorly translated but contains *excellent* imagery and in my opinion is even more detailed than Yoshida's guide.