How I made my first custom doll
Hello guys, I am a first-time customizer and I just finished my first customized doll. I think as a beginner, I did a lot of advanced stuff because I wanted this doll to be perfect. I made her as a gift for my professor, and I wanted to make sure that this doll was as perfect as possible.
I was really hesitant about all of this because I wasn’t sure if I was talented enough to customize a doll. I mean, I’ve been perfecting my digital art for almost eight years, but I didn’t think that would reflect onto a completely different medium. However, I beat the odds and perfected her.
Luzvimindas is a cartoon character I developed for a movie idea I had about Filipino culture. This movie idea was very important to me. I shared it with my professor because she was a Filipina as well and she taught Filipino-American issues. I shared my script with her and she was estatic!
Her appearance is derived from a serious of different cultures across the Philippines. Since she is the personification of the country, I wanted to make sure that her appearance was not affiliated with a specific tribe. Rather I designed her outfit based on a variety of different elements of tribes.
For people curious about all the tribes of the Philippines, I suggest visiting this link from LinkedIn about the various types of indigenous Filipinos.
https://www.slideshare.net/PennVillanueva/indigenous-peoples-of-the-philippines
She has very strong Maranao influences as seen by her cropped-shoulder dress and long-talon nails. In the Philippines, there is a dance called “pangalay” that is performed by “jangaay” dancers. These dancers are women who adorn their hands with long finger jewelry and most of the performance derives from the playful motion of their arms and wrists.
I made her shirt cropped, because I wanted to show off her indigenous Filipino tattoos, reminiscent of the Visayan regions such as Cebu, the first island of the Philippines encounter by Ferdinand Magellan. That is also why their is a slit to show of her left on her sarong.
A lot of Filipinos, especially down south wore lots of gold. It was very common for Filipinos to wear gold accessories before it was seized under Spanish colonization. She has golden-hoop bracelets on her wrists and ankles. Her outfit has gold trimming, but I chose not to put that on the doll to prevent myself from making a mess with gold paint.
For her headdress, I was inspired by the Igorot tribe of Luzon, but also wanted it to match with the rest of her color scheme. I also added a gold Filipino star in the middle to make it painfully obvious she was Filipina. I also gave her basic disc earrings and a jewel necklace also similar to the star.
Luzvimindas was made using a combination of different materials. Her head mold came from a blue-dressed wonder woman I found at a discount on Mercari. The doll had a stain on its brown from the gel in the doll’s hair, so I removed that along with her factory paint with acetone. I had so much fun, wiping her clean, and removing the remaining hairs with a tweezer.
As for the rest of her, by the time this doll was completed, she was pretty much three dolls put together. When I bought her, I wanted Luzvimindas to kneel, because I thought that would be the most natural way of posing her without having to use a stand. Little did I know that her knees only bend at 90 degree angles. For a little while, I tried forcing her legs to pose at a kneel, but it wasn’t working. So I went back to Mercari and purchased Antiope’s legs from a friendly seller.
I had to go through the trouble of drilling out that plastic bit inside the doll’s hip and tying an elastic band back into the doll’s body.
It was pretty fun, and I was happy because she could finally kneel. But the problem know was that Queen Antiope and Wonder Woman 2018 dolls have different body-types. I did not know that the Wonder Woman movie dolls used a “fit-barbie” body type and that it was different from the kinds of bodies they used for the more higher-quality dolls for the movie’s release.
Because of the difference in size of the thighs, you could see inside the hip. Since this was a gift to my professor, I thought this was unacceptable. I didn’t have any epoxy sculpt. I was going to buy some, but then I realized how expensive that would probably be. I was doing a polymer clay project the previous year and had various materials I never used. I hade this black premo sculpey that was supposed to be hair for my figurine, but I never used it because it was so hard to knead. But since I didn’t want to spend so much money on epoxy, I struggled my way into forming the hips until they were similar enough to a fit barbie’s figure.
Since they don’t air dry, I picked up a method for baking polymer clay without using a baking-oven. I dumped the doll it boiling hot water for 3-4 minutes and it got the job done. However, it backfired and the left side of her body encaved into itself. I was wondering why this happened.
Apparently, if you boil a doll in hot water, you can get a nice corset figure. Unfortunately, this accident didn’t reap me any benefits and I had to dispose this body and buy a new doll from a WWE Diva of a similar skintone to Wonder Woman’s and place the legs on that new body.
This new body had articulated wrists, which was a MAJOR plus for me. I picked up the dye methods from people DollMotion to color change my doll so I didn’t have to deal with painting her. Unfortunately, it only made her joints brown, and I was left with a monster high doll. Oh well...
I picked up a method from Hextian’s video for his Jessica Rabbit Vladonna doll and mixed modge podge with a reddish brown and yellowish orange to get her to become the correct color.
https://youtu.be/KwbTd-oiw0k?t=109
When it came time to reroot her it was a major mess. I never dealt with a rerooting tool nor fake hair before and I didn’t completely understand how rerooting worked. I stuffed my rerooting with thick strands of hair, and whenever I punched it into the existing holes, it would fall immediately out.
I got really frustrated and boiled wash the hank of hair, which resulted in it becoming incredibly frizzy and difficult to work with. I had to comb it several times in order for it to become even again.
After she dried, I made her a Filipino flag and placed her head back to her body. I thought it was really cute.
Unfortunately, the shoulders kept scudding, and it would constantly reveal her true skincolor by peeling off the paint. I couldn’t accept this, especially as a gift. I took my dremel tool and exacto knives and started shaving her shoulders. I was okay with this, because Luzvimindas isn’t a wrestler.
I had to remove all the paint and paint around her body, because it started to chip. Apparently my formula wasn’t strong enough for the entire body. In the end it still chipped only a bit, but not to a point that it was unacceptable.
This was when I started MSC’ing her and worked on her tattoos. I worked at one side at a time to create as much symmetry as possible.
In the end, I thought she was beautiful.
Consequently, the MSC she took made it difficult to do her faceup.
At first, I thought I had the crappiest watercolor pencils in the world.
Then I had to remove her head from her body again, which actually created even more problems. I tried using a sharpie to draw her eyes, but I knew by looking at her that this was just unacceptable.
I wiped off her face entirely and placed it back onto her body to start working on her dress. I found these fabrics that were very close to the doll’s actual patterns, and used them to make her dress. I trried using a sewing machine, but it would constantly eat up the materials, so I had to do everything manually. I bought a pattern DGRequiem for an off-shoulder tunic and modified it slightly to fit the needs of the character.
https://www.etsy.com/transaction/1619681023
I made the sleeves look more like bells, and I extended the back fabric to fit her large muscle body. I then took an orange string and started tying it around her waist to conform it to the shape of her body.
I wrapped cloth around her waist and secured it with an elastic to create her slit sarong. It is very difficult to take of and put on, because of the size of her hips versus the size of her waist. Fortunately, due to the elastics that connect her legs to her hips, I was able to pull her legs downward to give the sarong more room as it went up her legs.
I then wrapped her body in a zip-lock bag and used scrap fabric to protect her hair. I painted the face to match her skin and then MSC’d her again. This time it worked and for a while the watercolor pencils gave her a face. But after a while, they still weren’t opaque enough.
I then used small tubes of oil acrylic to paint the rest of her face. I added fake eyelashes and glossed her eyes and lips with modge podge.
This was before I added her final accessories. I made her headdress by an orange ribbon I found at Walmart, tied it, and pinned it to her head. Then I hot glued feathers that I dusted with various pastels to match her artwork. The bracelets were made from rings made for ear piercings at Hobby Lobby. The rest of her jewelry came from a local 3D print shop.
I painted them gold. Hot glued the star to her headdress. I hot glued the pendant to her necklace chain also made from more jewelry. I hot glued a gem onto her pendant. I pierced a hole through the earrings, hot glued them with pins, and inserted them into her ears.
And that’s how I made Luzvimindas, my indigenous Filipina Baybalan and beholder of the Bayanihan Spirit. I hope you found this post helpful and that it inspires you to make your own custom doll for the first time. Thank you.
