BJDs as artist reference?

I use dolls as mannequins for designing clothes and costumes, I am excited about designing for the bjd - I have a new Dollfie Dream body and it makes me want to just grab the colors and sketch!

 

Hi~ ive been having lost of issues with body for past year...
so far my dollndooll, elfdoll,migidoll,happyhouse WERE TERRIBLE BODIES...
not even being able to stand straight, not talking about hold hands and posing :/

my Soom and Souldoll once are close to perfect

SO IS IT ONLY 2 bodies from bjd companies that good with modeling?
or there is other good once?
please recomend~

 

hi, I recently got an angel of dream girl. they're company isn't the best with faceups and head molds but her body is nice-- good quality, heavy and thick. she is pretty kicky but that can be fixed with sueding. she does stand well and her joints are steady- other than her legs being kicky i have no complaints. but their company resin color pics arent very good the normal pink skin looks really pink but in reality she is really pale. I assume the white skin must be pretty gohstly. anyways, happy hunting .... oh and her body is somewhat mature- not ridiculouse boob size but curvy like iplhouse or impldoll.

 

uh ive needed to mention that i am looking for boys >___<
but thank you....and i think its even harder to find good girls body.....
my friend has like 7 of them, and only her soom girl stands.....
maybe because you cant make big fit for a girl...so its soooo hard to get them to stand

 

I really like how well Dream of Doll boys hold their poses. Also, fantasy doll is amazing for holding poses well. I have 2 boys on fantasy doll bodies (Luts Wintery 08 head on one and K-Doll Kamyu head on the other) and they both pose extremely well and hold their positions great.

Also, are your dolls sort of floppy? Is this what you mean by can't stand straight? They may just need a good restringing with some new elastic or even a new elastic with more tension. I do get what you mean though by saying some company bodies do seem to pose better than others but by saying the part about can't stand straight I'm also wondering if it's problem with the elastic? Also makes me wonder that for the fact that several of your dolls and your friends girls you say can't stand at all. I have 8 dolls currently, and I don't have any mega huge problems with any of them standing, save for one, and that's because he does need a restringing and I just haven't gotten to it yet. The rest of them, although they might not all pose amazing, they stand without problem and hold their stances very well. But out of them all my dolls on the fantasy doll bodies pose the best.

 

Interesting that you should bring up fashion drawing as fashion drawings generally use an 8 1/2-9 head scale for their drawings as opposed to the 6 2/3-7 1/2 anatomical scale. Incidentally, most modern comic books use and have been using the 7 1/2- 8 1/2 scale, which is generally the range that BJDs fall into. Manga uses this scale OR an even more severe scale as well.

So, realistically, true to life pictures wouldn't really be possible when referencing a BJD for anatomy. It's in the wrong head scale.

BUT. If using BJDs as a basis to form a manga/anime oriented style, or even a western comic-book style, BJDs are perfect. (Especially Iplehouse for the Western Comic-book style.) They're even quite valuable for getting poses for fashion art.

As someone who has incredibly stylised art (I fondly refer to it as my 'lollipop legs' style due to the extreme 9/10 head anatomy I actually use when free drawing) BJDs as pose references are great for me. My drawings always have over-long legs, long arms and long-ish torsos, but they look aesthetically pleasing to -me- and I get enjoyment from it, which is all I want.

 

I can evoke a tremendous amount of "almost" human poses out of my Dollshe DSAM35s bodies. The DSAM32s body gives a more pleasing line through the hip but has less lower torso movement.

 

Heh. That's one of the major reasons why I bought my first doll, Kyouko. I had her limbs replaced with double-jointed resin limbs for the better flexibility, so she can achieve more human-like poses. I even got her jointed fingers to help me learn to draw hands better. Her boyfriend, Adlewyrchiad, is also an excellent aid. I've been trying to draw a bishified version of my husband for a long time, but I found it difficult. So I found a doll that looked like a bishie version of him, and using the doll to study has really helped, a lot. There seem to be a lot of artists on DoA who use their dolls as models for their artwork, and it seems to work really well for them.

 

Interesting. While I intended to make known the inspiration for my drawn artwork due to pride in my dolls and the hope that, if people know about the dolls and the companies they come from that they may want to get into the hobby, as well, helping to keep these companies and sculpts alive and well, copyright infringement had never crossed my mind, as I thought of using dolls for my artwork no different than using artist mannequins (sp?). Then again, since I deliberately looked for sculpts that resembled anime versions of both myself and my husband as closely possible, I suppose my thinking of the dolls as tools to achieving the look I want for my artwork comes as no surprise. But it's good to know that it's only fair to remember that these doll sculpts are the result of talented artists and deserve credit where credit is due. Thanks for the this very important piece of information to keep in mind!

 

That is actually the purpose I got my boy for ^_^ Oddly enough. I'm an art major at my college and I work quite heavily in cartooning and manga type drawing so I use my boy for pose referencing.

 

They can be used for art models, but there's no really proper substitute for a live model.

 

I'm gonna be honest, I think the only real applications BJD's can have as art models is to either quickly go through a variety of possible poses (and be able to look at them from different angles by simply turning the doll) or as a last resort foreshortening aide, or as a reference for other minor, quick things.

I simply do not believe that BJD's are good for anything else related to art modeling. They are NOT anatomically correct. They are stylized as per the sculptor's tastes; I've even seen a few dolls that showed the sculptor's lack of understanding of human anatomy (and yes, there is a difference between this and individual styles, contrary to what many amateur artists like to claim). And even the most beautiful, realistic sculpts are still made of hard, inflexible resin which cannot show things like deformation of flesh and muscle movement and have limited articulation (compared to a human body), which will only inevitably produce a stiff, life-less looking result (even if it appears "natural" at first, attempting to pass it off as a human will be rather difficult because other viewers, who did not spend hours looking at the doll will notice something amiss). This is for full body drawings anyways, this may be slightly less important for close-ups and stuff.

I have used my dolls as references in the past though, especially since they're based on my characters. I frequently pull them out so I can study things like how certain lighting plays off fabric, limbs/body and hair, how fabric folds when the wearer is doing various things (remembering to compensate for the fact that doll clothes are a lot lighter than human clothes), some foreshortening and a few other things. I really want an Iplehouse boy so I can finally have something more realistic to throw under my table lamp when I'm having lighting issues.

ETA: Also agreeing with everything Rosslyn said.

 

I use them quite a bit for drawing. Obviously (as it's been said many many times) hard resin does not move or look like real fleash and muscle. But for a quick sketch to figure out an idea, they are great. My minifee is so much better then the wooden manikin.
Here's a link to a drawing I found that the artist used a minifee as a reference: http://yuumei.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=60#/d2heubs

 

They're no substitute for a real human model, but I've found my Ivy to be far superior to the wooden mannequin I bought years ago.

 

Interesting thread!

I've been planning on purchasing an Iplehouse EID woman for posing reference in my oil paintings. Their sculpts are certainly not perfectly proportioned, but they are human enough for my purposes. Coming up with and arranging interesting poses takes time for me, so it would be a great timesaver.

Sure, ideally I would have a model come in and paint from life, but for now my art is part time, so I usually work late at night, so you see the attraction of working with a BJD. Also I have experience with sewing, so costumes are a bit easier to create on a smaller scale, and as someone else said, BJD's will hold a pose for hours -- and not complain!

I will probably still shoot a photo or two of a model just to get skin color and other details right, but when it comes to long poses, shadows, prop placement, etc, i think BJD's (especially Iplehouse ladies) are a great resource...

 

I absolutely have and I plan to continue doing it, here's the still life I set up, I did modify her face though http://loupgarou752.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d33lhoi

 

Sometimes I use certain BJD photos for color ref. I have a whole folder of different dolls because I like the color and composition.

 

I use my smaller pure neemos for pose reference sometimes - but due to the small size they arent ideal due to the difference in how the fabric physics work. I'm really looking forward to getting some bigger dolls that can help with my drawing because clothing folds and the way fabric drapes is one of the most absurdly difficult things for me to draw!
Sometimes I even use friends' doll pics as reference - it can be really good for seeing how certain things like body parts, shoes etc look like from different angles. I'm really bad at visualizing things in 3D in my head so this is invaluable.

 

I'm a sequential art (comics, essentially) student, and I use my bjds for basic reference all the time! They're obviously pretty stiff, and the proportions are all off (most bjds seem to have super-long calves, for instance) but they're great for when you need a quick reference of some weird foreshortened pose. I also tend to draw characters with head-to-body ratios similar to bjds already, as mentioned above, so that works out pretty well for me!

I also love some of the most bizarre, stylized body sculpts, and I've done studies of some just because I think the way they interpreted the human form is interesting or beautiful. Doll Chateau is fun for this, obviously. But one of my favorites is the Peakswoods FOC Dandy body, which isn't even close to naturalistic either, but it has a lot of visually interesting things going on - those curved, weird legs! The elongated hands (the elongated everything)! The unique, hourglass-y overall shape of it! I'm still working on how I stylize humans in my art, so looking at dolls can be interesting and inspiring. It's also fun to do portrait studies of bjds, just for the sake of practicing capturing a likeness or exploring certain kinds of features (though like I think someone mentioned here too, maybe be careful about copyright with that).