By Batchix
The boys are currently celebrating the upcoming holiday. They will be available in November at Batchix Dolls.
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When I set out to make a large doll, I didn’t set out to make a boy. My original intention was an androgynous form that could be either male or female. However, over time things evolved where I was more interested in focusing on male anatomy and muscle structure. I looked at hundreds of photos, hung them on the walls of my studio, and even took casts of my own hands in different positions so I would have a solid reference to sculpt from. I wanted to get away from the heavily muscled anatomy that has become popular for male dolls lately and try to create something that complemented them without being the same. I looked at a lot of sculptures by Alfred Gilbert as well anatomy paintings from that period of art history. The body I’ve made is still very idealized, but I’m really pleased with how it came out.
Props:
I’ve taken to doing a lot of furniture distressing and prop making to relax. There’s nothing that feels better than attacking an inanimate object with an orbital sander. I’ve also always wanted a huge doll sized library. I looked up scans of book spines, pages and covers, then reduced them to the size I needed and printed them onto cardstock. Then I glued them to the outside of a flattened cereal box (so that the brown side would be the inside of the book cover). I cut those out carefully with an exacto blade and cut down lengths of balsa wood to the size I wanted my book. I glued the “pages” around the edges and then the glued on the covers! I then took stacks of the books and glued them together so that it was faster to stack them up and make interesting shapes.
The bookcase is made from a “tea box” I found at TJ Maxx. I removed the glass cover, filled the holes left from the screws, and then added on some trim from home depot- where I also got some furniture paint in their mis-mixed paint section. I glued the trim down, painted the new trim, sanded it to make it look worn, then ran a glaze of brown paint over the top to further age it. For the legs, I really wanted to have some clawed feet on it. I modeled some feet in Maya, printed it on my very simplistic 3D printer and filled in the loops with apoxy paste. That made the surface more level, so I could then prime it with black and rub on bronze rub and buff. The legs were glued onto the bottom and I finally had a nice book case!
The last thing I did was create some spooky bottles. I’ve been happily collecting miniature bottles for a while now and these are from various scrap-booking and jewelry sections. I painted them down with a little watered down brown paint, let that dry, then dripped on some glue and “rust” embossing powder. I use mineral and mica powders for doing special effects when I cast, so I used the various colors and some talc powder to fill the inside of the bottles. Let’s just hope no one tries to uncork these!
Orpheus & St. George by Batchix Dolls are 52cm tall. The boys fit in SD girl shoes, Iplehouse JID shoes and Souldoll Vito clothing. Some SD boy tops and jackets will also fit. For the photos, St. George, Orpheus and the skull girl are wearing clothing mostly made by Batchix. Orpheus’s white shirt is from Dollheart, and the skull girl’s rabbit hat was made by Alison Wonder. St. George wears Soul Doll SD girl boots while Orpheus wears a pair of JID boots. Both boys are shown in handmade alpaca wigs. The skull girl is a custom skull encapsulated in clear resin on a Lagoon body.
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Props:
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The Boys:
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