How well did you doll fit the initial blueprint/sketch of your character?

My doll hasn't shipped yet, let alone needing to make his 100% custom clothes/blue dye. DX
But I did hold a pic of him I painted up next to the doll I chose before I bought him, and I'd say he's REALLY CLOSE. I might chin/nose mod him a little to be "sharper?" Longer maybe? IDK but overall even just the way it is, it's almost perfect. D:

 

Frankly, when Lavinia arrived I was planning to use her doll for another character, but when she and what I intended to be her temporary wig showed up, I realized that she was Lavinia, a character from my novel THE HIEROPHANT'S DAUGHTER coming out this May. You have to go with the flow when a dollie tells you who they are! Another doll will have to be found for Sophia, which is ironic, because Lavinia is a Resinsoul Sophia.

Similarly, the doll I am waiting on, Miracle Doll Melanie, so resembles my villain character, Ophidia, that I was actually shocked to see her. I felt completely compelled to get the full set...here by April, maybe?

I have a couple of other characters in mind for dolls, and I have found their dolls now, but of course I must wait until I can buy them! It is better to spend some time with a dollie before introducing a new one, anyway. That's what I tell myself until I'm rich, anyway!

 

I have three pretty much complete dolls shelling preexisting OCs of mine, and I'm happy with all of them and feel like they all look very closely like my mental images of the characters. For the most part, the only things they're missing are a few accessories here and there.

Aramy (Mystic Kids QingChen) I feel is the most "incomplete" - the sculpt is absolutely perfect and he has a gorgeous faceup, but I've hated his body from day one. It's too muscular for him and poses badly. I'm hoping to replace it at some point in the future, though that's very much a long-term plan. I also had to replace its hands with Soom female long nail hands, because the original hands were these awkward yaoi clunkers. I'm also on the hunt for some cuff bracelets for him, as those are a significant part of his look, but they've been surprisingly hard to find in the colors and style I want (silver with red gems).

Kestrel (Angell-Studio Ty) I'm pretty much satisfied with. I was worried that his skin tone might be too light, but thankfully AS tan isn't as pale as I feared. The first pair of boots I bought for him were too big, but his new ones just arrived and fit him like a dream, so now he's 100% complete. However, I would like to get a more casual alternate outfit for him as well.

Heron (Asleep Eidolon Fay on a Camellia Dynasty body) I'm the happiest with because he's the most complete and looks the closest to my mental image. I did struggle with shelling him - I originally meant for him to be an Sio2 Little Prince, but that didn't work out. Thankfully Fay is perfect for him, and his outfit is complete including all the jewelry and accessories. I might get him more in the future, but for now I don't feel the need to work on him anymore.

 

Mine tend to be about 50/50---either it works exactly as planned, or they end up being very different.

 

Sigrid was the only fully planned out character I had. I used the Skyrim avatar maker at the beginning of the game to get a rough idea of how she’d look, since I was too short on time to draw it out. She turned out 100% great! However I have a doll right now I’m trying to develop based on a drawing and an old character of mine. We will see how she goes, but I’m pretty confident she will work out great.

 

I only had plans for two of my dolls my girl Chomby is really defrent from what I had planned she was suppose to have red hair and green eyes she now has black hair and white and red eyes she was suppose to have a lot of energy but she much more of a clam presents I love her so much though!

 

My Holland (Switch Waseon) went both ways. My initial mental image of the character was the bare bones of a sketch. The sculpt I chose felt closest to the vague impression I had of him, in terms of the shape of the eyes and lips, and the potential expressions he could have (from gathering various face-up references), and how the head sculpt could express his gentle and sometimes reclusive character. However, the sculpt also filled in the missing details. He arrived via the marketplace with a face-up which really shaped the character in more meaningful ways than I had originally envisaged. I had no clue what eye colours and hairstyle would suit him, having left it deliberately open since his style would change canonically depending on the project he was working on, but a serendipitous choice of wig (the white he currently has on) ended up perfect for him. I'm still hunting for the right shade of grey/blue eyes for him, but right now I'm very satisfied with the way he has turned out so far. In retrospect I'm glad I did not pre-determine his character and appearance too much, and instead had the sculpt and its progress shape him organically. It avoided much potential disappointment.

 

I never have a 100% solid vision of my OCs, they're usually kinda anime style in my head and even then it's vague, so I don't tend to get a true idea until a doll seems to fit. I guess my best example of this is my Homme Ducan, his OC is quite jovial and laid back, which I used to envision with bigger eyes etc, but when I saw that sculpt I just felt that was right. I now try and give the character more of the dolls look when I draw him, I guess in a way the dolls have helped the characters complete themselves!

 

Well, I'll talk about my most important OCs. First was Andromeda (Dreaming Doll Judy), and I didn't have the character when I bought the doll, so it was slowly developing around the doll, and I guess it doesn't counts. My second, Daniel (Iplehouse Dexter) is just a bit more serious than the character, but facial features are almost perfect for him. The one that fits the less is Christina (Withdoll Margery), because the character is chubby. But I've never seen a chubby SD, so I focused on other features: big eyes, cute lips. Sometimes it frustrates me some, but hey, it happens.

 

I tended to have a vague idea of how the character looked for most of my dolls. The two most recent were the hardest. They were impossible to shell partly because I was being much more picky than normal. When I did find the dolls, it was just THEM! My drawings had gone through several iterations over the years so the dolls mostly matched, perhaps about 70%. Once I knew what sculpts I was going to get, I started doing drawings that combined both my original concepts and the sculpts' features. Those came out looking the closest to what I ultimately wanted.

 

When I was looking to shell Anthea, my main concerns was a young waif in mini form. I found a doll with the right face, but with bullet breasts. For years, I made do with over sized clothes or things cut to disguise her chest, though I eventually found a customizer willing to reduce her chest to something age appropriate to the character.

I have one character who is very much in progress as the body has the right shape and the face mold is close enough to what I want. I knew going in she'd need to be heavily modded to fit the character, so it helped to have only a few guidelines when looking for a doll.

Character number three remains a concept as I'm being super picky about face and height. I've given up on searching for a realistic, athletic, but not idealized body as those seem to be rare to nonexistent.

 

All of my dolls are fan-art; some of my floating heads are based on Japanese licenses, which I mind a bit that they are not as accurate as I would like. However, I do own officially licensed figures, that tend to be more or less accurate looking, so I can put up with my custom dolls/heads not being perfect (although I would like them to be), or not having bodies nor character accurate clothes. The ones based on OC, belong to my BFF and most don't look anything like her original art. Most just kind of aesthetically resemble some, but proportionately and physically, don't really look anything like any of her OCs.

I didn't mind with the first three dolls, because all that was available at the time I purchased them were hyper-stylized facial sculpts and bodies. Later, I got a more realistic BJD, and I didn't mind when I purchased the doll, because I was mostly interested in stealing its body for my then favorite BJD. When that didn't work, it started to bother me that he didn't look anything like the OC I based him on, because he was the more realistic looking of all, and I kind of wanted him to look like his OC. Then I started to make it my goal, to modify him to get him to look as close to the OC as possible. I don't believe I'm far ways off, but I'm getting older and kind of keep putting things off. I'm planning on modifying him again this year, but that will only help me see how off his body is (proportionately). Still, I want his face to be as close to the OC as possible, and that's all I'm willing to mod -- he's already super heavy for scrawny-weak-old-me, I don't want to add weight to his body (he's an unpopular discontinued doll, so it would be a huge pain in the gut-hole, if I ruined the body). (:

 

Vince really changed a LOT when I found the sculpt I wanted for him-- once I fell in love with An, I started tailoring my plans and changing how I drew him. Pete and Billy... well, they were less about shelling OCs and more about I had come into unexpected money and I found the two of them to be very cute, and I decided more about them once I had them. Party Martian was another case of seeing him and NEEDING him and letting him tell me who he'd be, and Marigold was very much designed because I saw the cute resinsoul deer and wanted to come up with something to do with one. I then accidentally created a LOT of world around her, but any drawings were done with me already knowing what her face would look like, and just sketching different wigs.

Jack, meanwhile... I didn't plan on shelling him UNTIL I found the perfect match, and while no one really had the nose of my dreams, Tedros came really close on the whole. One of the others from his story/crew that I plan on getting some time in the future is basically the same-- I gave up on finding a girl with the aquiline nose I wanted who would be in scale with Jack, Deanna, and the future others, and started looking for someone who had the right eyes and lips to pull off the vibe I wanted, who could be styled to mostly look like the character. And with Deanna... it was the faceup more than the sculpt that really sold me. Not that the sculpt is far off from how I'd been picturing her, but that the company faceup really had her spirit and I could instantly imagine how I would dress her, different wigs I could try to complete her.

 

Mostly commenting because hearing the different stories here is interesting to me; so far the only times I've tried shelling an existing character is with sculpts or versions that are meant to be more representative than actually align with their features. For instance, the Zuzu Delfs I have are meant to be characters that are actually human, not anthro, based on animal associations that they have in-story. From that perspective there wasn't much of a difference between the planning and the eventual fit, since those associations weren't about to change dramatically in transit or anything like that.

If I ever end up shelling anything that is supposed to have a more closely matching look, things might be different, but I don't have any major plans for it at the moment.

 

I have two proper, fully realised characters that I have shelled. I have a really hard time visualising faces in my mind, so I didn't really know what either of them were supposed to look like, if that makes any sense at all. Because of that, I didn't really spend a lot of time trying to find the right sculpt, and instead focused on getting their body types, hairstyles and outfits right, since I had a much clearer vision for those things. It worked out pretty well with both of them in the end.

As for my other dolls, they were all based on loose, abstract ideas, and their characters didn't fully start to take form until the dolls themselves arrived.

 

I'm way more of a character sheller than a "buy a sculpt I like and see what happens"-er so I've had this happen both ways. I'm also a comic artist so I have set character designs that have been drawn several dozen, if not several hundred times over as opposed to them being a vague idea of what I want.

Part of the fun in shopping for me is in finding a sculpt that would suit a character how they're drawn. When it comes to character shells that I've spent that time pouring over sculpts looking for and then coming to a decision, I've unanimously been satisfied with the end result, that this is "the right" sculpt for a character. It's when I've tended to force it, the "well I have this impulse buy/head from a body I needed, what if I turn this into x character" that it's been less suitable.

The one outlier is a character I was certain was perfect for a sculpt, absolutely suited, this would work out fine, and then came to realize...... he really needed an SD sculpt So now he's waiting on an SD as I figure out what to do with his old MSD head.

 

So, my doll is a shell of my character from Ffxiv. So I spent ages finding the right sculpt, finding an artist to do her faceup, right eyes, etc. She will be perfect once she's done.

 

While I haven't done her faceup yet, my first doll is based on one of my oc's that I really love, and as far as i know I'd say the face sculpt fits her pretty well! Before picking it, I painted over the photo of it to check how it'd look. It'll definitely be a process to get her looking like herself though, because I had to choose a male body sculpt to get the proportions I wanted, so I'd say its probably around a 70% match at the current moment.