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Reconstituting LaDoll and/or Premier Clays

I thought I would write a blurb on here about reconstituting clays in case it might be helpful to someone and save some money. It is pretty rudimentary for those who are already familiar with working with clay, but for the benefit of the sculpting beginners I will elaborate.

Unfortunately I had a couple of whole bricks of clay go dry despite their packages never being opened. It’s my fault for leaving it sit for over a year I imagine. ^^;;; Anyhow, my clay was around in a greenware state. It was cool to the touch with a slight dampness and I could carve it with my fingernail, but other than that it wasn’t pliable at all.

Since these clays are expensive and I really didn’t relish the thought of having to throw out these clays I decided I would at least make an effort to reconstitute them. So far the method I have employed is slow going, but so far successful. Basically what it comes down to is this. I broke off a small section of the brick, dipped it in water, then wrapped it in a wet paper towel and sealed it in a ziploc baggie. After it sat overnight, the surface of the clay started becoming workable, while the core of the brick was still too firm. So basically I scraped off the workable clay and broke apart the brick even further. After I removed the workable clay, I sprinkled the remaining brick with water, re-wet the paper towel and wrapped the clay up again. For the workable clay I kneaded it and wrapped it in it’s own damp paper towel and kept it separate from the drier clays in the plastic baggie. If you keep the workable clay in with the very wet unworkable clay it will only cause the workable clay to become too wet and sticky. So in the end, just remember, keep them separated and you will have no problems.

So, as I said before, it’s pretty rudimentary stuff, and so far I have found no tricks to make the reconstituting process go faster. Basically you just repeat all of the above steps until you’ve finally turned all the clay back into a workable mass. My last bit of advice though is to change out your paper towels every so often because if mold starts growing on your towels it will contaminate the clay and well mold is just bad business! 😉

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Artist BJD Progress

I’ve decided to return to my doll project after having been inspired by other artisans great looking dolls. So here is my progress on “Cookie” who is looking less to me like a Cookie the more I work on her, haha. Anyhow since this picture was taken I’ve made her upper lip a little less thin and have been endeavoring to make the lips look a little less pinched/pursed. I think I am on the right track, but I will see after I post this latest bit up for critique in a doll making forum I frequent.

I plan on adding the ears soon and then cutting off the headcap. Once I am able to do that I’ll be able to drill out the eye sockets and start fitting in some eyes and better forming the eye shape. I’m hoping she will take a 14mm or even a unoa size eye since I have plenty of that size lying around.

I also cut the legs at the ankle last night so now I will sculpt the feet and add the ball joint. I noticed too late that I cut the ankle straight through the joint area so I will need to trim off a few millimeters of the ankle. It’s not a critical error, but it is one that will require extra work down the road…sigh.

You may notice in the picture that I accidentally sanded down to my styrofoam core. I ended up making a patch on the inside of the leg so as to keep the outside shape. Styrofoam cores are a bit tricky to work with when you are dealing with a smaller doll as any thin areas of styrofoam are apt to break, which is exactly what happened in both of my ankles. This in turn caused a drifting of the core so they weren’t perfectly centered…thus a thin side. XP

That’s it on my progress for now. I’ll post again when I have any substantial changes.

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La Dee Da Repaint!

Here’s my first attempt at a repaint of a La Dee Da doll. I confess my paint wasn’t thin enough this time as I was in such an all fired hurry…for what I don’t know. Anyhow you can’t tell from the picture, but if you look at her up close in person you can see my tiny brushstrokes and that makes me sad. TAT It’s exceptionally sad because I think those eyebrows are some of the best I’ve ever done on a doll. Anyhow she’s going to stay this way for a while until I can find the time to wipe down her face and try over again. She still looks pretty cute though despite her flaws, so overall it was a good practice I think. 🙂

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La Dee Da Doll Customizing – Head Removal

I was unable to find very much information about customizing La Dee Da Dolls, so I thought I would go ahead and post some of my findings here. The first thing every customizer usually wants to know is how to remove the head and I am happy to report that removing the head of a La Dee Da is fairly easy. All you have to do is apply some blow dryer heat to the neck joint area until it becomes a little softer and more pliable, then you’ll want to gently pull out the head plug. The head plug is somewhat similar to Monster High head plugs in that it has a prong attached to the top of the plug. You can see this in the picture. Now here’s the bad news, the neck hole is really really small as you can tell from the picture. Because the neck hole is so small I don’t think it’s a very good candidate for rerooting. You might be able to do it using the reroot tool, but I have no idea how you could fit tweezers in the hole to pull out the old roots.

Looking on the bright side though, she can always wear wigs. Here I have her wearing a size 6-7 Kemper wig with all of her original hair tucked inside the wig cap. If you want to cutt off the original hair, I’m thinking a 5-6 wig ought to be a better fit. However I would like to point out that because of her cranium shape which is kind of like Blythe’s in that it’s not as rounded in the back as a normal skull, when you tuck all of the original hair inside the wig cap it can round out her cranium so it will not look weird. You can see the side view below.

So, this is as far as I have gotten with my customizing experiments on her, but I will be sure to post more info when I have it. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone else who wishes to customize these dolls.

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La Dee Da Doll

I’ve come to like the look of the La Dee Da dolls, and with a price cut currently going on at Target I thought I’d go ahead and purchase one of these cuties. They have big heads and oversized eyes similar to pullip and the fashion on this particular “city girl” doll is bright and cute reminding me of something Blythe or Pullip would wear. You can see from the photo above how she sizes up next to Blythe, Dal and Pullip.

So, the clothing that she comes with is a little blue next shrug, a pair of tube stockings, shoes, a hair flower, dress, earrings, and a little plastic pincushion wristlet. The dress’s ribbon is attached with velcro which means you can switch it out with the hair flower as it also has velcro on the bag. However unfortunately the hair flower is initially velcroed AND sewn into the head, so you will have to cut it loose to do anything with it. Also velcro is not kind to plastic doll hair. ^^; Anyhow the other versatile part of this outfit is the dress has a pull ribbon in the back so it can go from being a bell shape to being cinched into to a balloon shape.

As for the doll herself, she doesn’t have nearly as much articulation as Monster High or Pullip. She does however have knee joints and rotating hip joints. Her shoulder joint has more mobility than the classic barbie, but as you can see she does not have wrist or elbow joints.

I thought I would show a little comparison of the feet here, because I have great news! The feet of La Dee Da dolls are tiny and slender just like Dals, which means, yes, they can share shoes. Also they work fairly well on Blythe’s feet, but they will not fit on obitsu feet. On the flip side, La Dee Da dolls can also wear some of Dal’s and Blythe’s shoes as well.

For clothes sharing however you aren’t as lucky. La Dee Da bodies are slender like Monster High Girls, which means most of their clothing will not fit Dal as you can see in the above image. However clothes that would fit Dal will mostly work on La Dee Da, though they may be a bit more roomy. Monster High and La Dee Da can of course share clothing perfectly.

So next up I decided to take a closer look at the scalp of the doll to see how well it was rooted. Sadly I cannot say it is rooted very well. It is fairly easy to part the hair and see large gaps between plugs. The good news is this can be solved with some additional rooting which is easy to do. Also apparently the La Dee Da dolls who are styled with their hair up are worse off in the rooting department.

Well I think that’s about it for my review/comparison. I plan to customize this girl, so I will have a few more posts about those kind of things coming forthwith. 😉