Batchix is best known for her unique Machina series of dolls, two of which are now available for pre-order from the artist. The artist recently released her first human doll, the charming 1/4 size girl Lagoon.
By Batchix
I can’t say that I always wanted to be an artist because as a little girl I thought, “That’s not a real job. No one would pay me to make art.” not realizing that just about every item we use in life was designed by an artist at some point. It took me even longer to decide that I wanted to do 3d work rather than 2d work. I’m the sort of person who, when presented with something new and exciting, I want to do it too. Most of the time I found that I was really bad at whatever it was I encountered. Sadly that didn’t stop me, but eventually I would get disgusted with how much work I was doing without getting any satisfaction in return. Something about dolls is different. There’s something about them that inspires me to push myself beyond what I’m comfortable with and go past that point.
Kit-bashing action figures and gluing my fingers together aside, I started sculpting dolls in the ball-jointed style while I was still in college. I had briefly been a sculpting major- but we’d mostly gone over using power tools and making bronze casts. I wasn’t exactly encouraged to pursue something that my professor found girly or so bourgeois as a doll and eventually quit the major and started doing computer art instead. I barely had the money to pay for the Apoxy Sculpt I bought. I sat there in my freezing, heat-less Kansas apartment surrounded by make-shift tools and worked. The end result was something slightly short of hideous. I’d failed to even give him enough cranium to keep his wig (also homemade) on his head. I was disheartened and stopped sculpting for a while, but every now and then I’d try again.
It took me three years of sculpting dolls on and off to get to the point where I liked my results enough to even consider casting. My first dolls weren’t well received, which was just as well since they turned out to be very hard to cast since they were so large. I moved cross-country to California and found myself isolated in my apartment with no friends and not a lot of business to work on. That was the point that I picked up a small, lumpy looking cast-off that eventually was reworked to become Machina Alpha.
Machina Alpha was the first doll I’d made that I was really satisfied with. The others (many of which live in a cabinet at my mother’s where I can’t throw them out) I saw as too flawed. There was something different about Machina. I proved to myself that all that hard work was worth it. I’d leveled up. It was extremely satisfying for me.
Lagoon, who was released earlier this year, is the sixth doll I’ve taken to the casting level and the first for which I have handled all the distribution chores. She was born after I’d been working on robots so much that I wanted to challenge myself to do something different. I love working in the 42cm style, it’s so portable. Sometimes the larger dolls are very intimidating, and you run out of space for them pretty quickly. The molds, casts and parts for a 42cm doll like Lagoon take up an entire shelf in the closet.
I think I have one of the strangest pools of inspiration, although it’s probably more common than I think. I grew up with an older brother and while I was certainly a girly little girl, I loved anything my brother loved. In the end there was this strange amalgam of She-ra, Labyrinth, Transformers, and Robotech running around in my head. I have books about classic illustrators like Leyendecker and Arthur Rackham sitting down the shelf from a collection of Gundam blueprints. I know I’m not the only one who’s pulling from this kind of imagery, but it’s still kind of ironic when you think about it. Knowing that, I think you can trace what comes from the different sources when you look at my dolls.
When I released the original Machina girls, pro-casting was a completely new experience for me and the other American artists who were involved in the process. Casting costs were extremely high. They forced the price of the doll up, and I was making almost no money off the dolls. The relationship with that company ended abruptly, during the middle of the production of the Machina boys Gamma and Epsilon. I was left trying to find someone else to cast them, but I wasn’t having any luck here in the states. I ended up contacting Jpop Dolls when I found out they were in contact with a casting company who focused entirely on ball-jointed dolls. The new casts are wonderful, some of the nicest dolls and resin I’ve seen. Each doll is completely sanded and strung, and their posing out of the box is perfect. The cost is still very high for me, but low enough that I’m able to bring down my prices. Most of what I make from sales goes right back into making more dolls- covering either production costs or the cost of raw materials for my artist casts and new sculpts.
Since releasing Lagoon and the Machina boys almost back-to-back, I’m going to take a break for a while and just sculpt and play. Right now I’ve been working on and off on a mini-machina girl who’s about 11 inches tall. I wanted a doll I could use to interact with Rement and other 1/6th size toys. She’s coming along well, but she’s pretty far from the final casting phase. After that I plan on turning to making a boy companion for Lagoon. I find that I like sculpting boys the most, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so. I’m also working on a few projects for myself, including a head based on one of the alien designs from the game Mass Effect. I am also working some more accessories for the Machina Boys and possibly re-sculpting the body I made for my tiny BJD, Nan Sook. I swear I’m never still, I’ve always got something on the back burner. If I’m not working my day job, I’m sculpting or casting. If I’m not doing that, I’m drawing pages for my webcomic or sewing. Sometimes the workload gets to me, but if I didn’t have a hundred projects to keep me busy I’d go nuts!
Photos above: Custom cast and painted Machina cast by the artist.
