Custom Blythe #5: Boyd The Boy

My next custom Blythe project is something different, as I already advertised in my previous post. That's because he will be a boy. I've now gotten started with him!

Here's a sketch I drew of him. He has in the picture green eyes and blond hair, but that will just be one of his looks. He will be the Ever Changing Boy. All his 4 eyes will be different colour and he can wear any colour wigs I happen to find for him.

Boyd's Licca boyfriend body arrived already earlier in July, but this week his head also arrived and I could get cracking with him. Well, there were some complications... The first surprise was with the parcel he came in. He came as a bald/faceless head together with a posable jointed girl body and, that was thinking of using for some of my other girl Blythe customs. The body/head combo was sent from Pink Fantasy story on Ebay. The seller had stuffed the doll in a way too small a box, so that it was weirdly twisted and mangled in there. The neck, torso and legs, being that kind of soft vinyl type material, had gotten bent into strange angles and I had to boil in hot water each part of the body to be able to mold them back into shape. With the torso parts there was not choice but to hot glue them together, so the body no longer has that twist and turn mid joint. This was nothing out of the ordinary however, the jointed bodies sometimes seem to require this treatment. The second surprise was that Boyd's head was a stark colour of pink, complete clashing with the girl body he was on, which was a mellow yellowing normal skin tone. I was of course alarmed and rushed to try him next to his Licca boy body to see if he'd somehow be a match with that anyhow. Well, to my relief, it was in fact a better match, but by no means perfect. I will need to do quite a bit of blushing on Boyd's head to get it to match the more tan tone body.

The third surprise was with the Blythe head and Licca boy body technicalities. I'd been under the impression that the Licca body would work for his neck without any modding, because the neck knob is absolutely identical to the one on the Blythe Takara body, but that turned out to be very far from the truth indeed. There was just no way it would be possible to rig the Blythe head onto the Licca body without some serious modding. For one, the neck was way too short and the neck mechanism on the Blythe head would not sit well there at all. After carefully studying the neck and insides of the head for a good long while, I came up with a solution. My father helped me to drill a hole through the top of the neck knob on the body. Then I slid a thick iron wire through the hole, bend it into a new knob and put a rubber pad underneath the wire knob and that was it! Here's how the Licca boy body neck mod looks like. It work like charm now. The head turns on the body like it was meant to be there and there's enough neck showing under the head too. I don't anticipate any problems with it in the future either really. Should the iron wire or the rubber pad break for some reason, I can always replace them.

I took Boyd completely apart last night and sanded his head back, face plate and eye lids. I also removed all the eye chips from his eye mech.

Today I then did the carving work. I wanted him to have a mildly mischievous look with a hint of a smile, thinner lips and smaller nose. My goodness, how much faster it is to do this carving with the dremel. I was done in an hour with Boyd, even though I carved all around his mouth and nose areas. I'm still shocked by that. The dremel is amazing!! I love it!

And here's the finished face now waiting to get a face-up! I'm fairly please with how he turned out and this time I got the finish a notch better as well than before.

I also made a collage of all my carving work so far:

It's been so much fun experimenting with different types of lips, noses and expressions. There's much to learn and try yet! I'll want to study loads more different expressions and maybe one day I'll dare to try those teeth for a Blythe as well. Of course every carver has their own style and I probably have mine as well, but I certainly would not want to just make the same face over and over again. I need to learn how to put as much variation in there as possible. Already with Boyd I felt like I made some "safe" choices, did stuff I knew I could do and would not muck up. I suppose it's natural, but that's not a way to learn anything new, nor the way I want to roll with this. I will need to keep taking risks in the future and must keep this in mind now when the next victims, Jessica and Shirley, arrive! (Jess might be here already tomorrow if I'm really lucky!)