Inspiration for a Character?

I know a lot of people who specifically get dolls to fit certain characters. My best friend has a Lotor and an Allura from the Voltron mythology, and on that note I gave her a blue BBB Pixie to be a Doom Girl for Lotor. (A sister.)

My first Asian BJD was a Lavender BBB Pixie. I got her because of a specific character from my own original stories. The character is named for the Genesis Song "Sussudio", because I really liked both the song and the sound of the name. So my first Pixie is Sussudio. (I had other OT BJDs before her.)

What I have found, however, is that I can't predict the actual personality of the doll. Every doll arrives and wants a unique personality, not a character that I already created. Even Sue the Pixie is really not the character I intended for her. I've even considered changing her name to avoid confusion.

Each of my dolls has manifested a personality to me. Sue is sweet, and a little bit quiet. She's friendly and with the exception of a single dress, she shares with the other dolls. This is very much NOT the character I envisioned for her originally.

Absinthe is my Green Pixie. I had her name picked out before I got her because I loved the idea of having Absinthe, the Green Faerie. Absinthe tends to be all the things that Sue is not; Sassy, outspoken, randomly selfish, and kind of a troublemaker.

My tinies and my Yo-Sd sized dolls are children, and show elements of childlike behavior. Kitty is my ImplDoll Aimee, and she's a little bit bratty and catty. She's very "Id-oriented" and easily distracted.

I'm also discovering that some of my dolls have a specific personality of their own, but like to "Play" other characters, like I do on the stage. I have the identical doll to my best friend's Allura. I already had her for a while before my friend got hers, so when my friend started her collection, Ariana immediately said, "Oh, I get to play Romelle from Voltron! How lovely!" So she's one character who plays at being another one.

I have a tiny bat anthropomorphic doll who insists that he is Batman. He's not Bruce Wayne, he's a little kid who idolizes Batman and plays at being Batman.

So obviously my dolls and I lead an exciting and rich fantasy life. I love posting picture stories about our adventures.

 

I wrote out a roleplay, not how she looked or anything, just about her past and what she is doing now. Then I found the perfect doll, which took a year or so of looking, then the rest sort of fell into place by looking at a million different bjd sites.

 

My dolls character always comes after I get them, I usually try a bunch of stuff on them and let them "speak for themselves" on who they are.... I have one doll I wanted to be darker and more "rock and roll" looking but she ended up being a little candy princess in all pastel colors and loves happy/cute things

 

My dollies already had characters, LONG before they had resin bodies. Matter fact, all of my characters are based on imaginary friends I had as a kid [I had a lot >.>;] that just kinda stuck with me.

 

I just got into the hobby because I realized that bjds are great representations of my original character. I wasn't too sure about this before I was given my first doll by my cousin. I'm now very happy about this because he really is my character. When I was away last weekend I got my second doll from my best friend and she's perfect for her character. I realize that this will not always be the case with future dolls, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do if it happens. I probably would keep them for a while and see if they have a personality of their own that can be developed into new characters or even new stories. I'm too new to bjds to know if I ever will fall so hard for a non-character doll that I need to have it no matter what, but I think it's very likely to happen considering all the amazing dolls out there.

 

My dollie started as one character when I first got him, and he's now going through a total change! I found his first character rather boring and I want to give him a lot of personality. I can't really say his sculpt spoke to me as another character, I think it was really just I picked a totally wrong one at first. However, i'm now really happy with where he's going as a character and he is also based on a pre-existing role-play character, but I find as the doll develops more, he gets less like my role-play charrie. On the other hand, the other three dolls I have planned for have personalities based on their sculpts!

 

My dolls inspire me for their characters. It comes to me gradually the time I spend with them. I like it that way.

 

Currently, I'm doing mundane, random vignettes, and having my characters interact within them. I feel that if I have them in somewhat tedious scenarios, I can get a better feel for how they will be once they enter the main story.

 

I've actually answered this already, but I wanted to update!:

Most of my dolls are chosen to suit characters. However, sometimes I see a doll that inspires me, and then I buy them and change them into a character. Usually, when a doll inspires me, I quickly figure out which of my characters look like the doll, then buy it. But not with this boy:



Limhwa Mono would stubbornly not become a character already existing. I bought him without having an idea for his character, and my imagination took off with the doll, catering to his desires of wanting to be an entirely new thing all his own. Somehow, a purple-skinned, dream eating, nightmare giving devil came out of it. It's been an amazing and valuable experience, since it's normally not that way for me at all!

(He wasn't finished in that picture, and that doll actually was too pink to dye the right way, so he's going to be modified from my newer Mono to be the right purple. In the exact same way, too.)

 

Ave and Sasha have been in my head since high school, but they've kind of evolved into different people since, so maybe talking about that process might help. They started out in a sci fi setting, under different names (Sasha used to be Seiya; Ave's surname used to be Nova, but it changed to Risinger when it came time to be less blatantly star-bound). At first I thought I was just changing the genre/setting, but when I did little things about their lives started to change as well, and now they both have wildly different backstories than they did when I first started writing way back when.

The process I used making the changeover was basically this: I had a few key things about their personalities I knew I wanted to keep--Ave's music, Sasha's medical background--and focused on re-situating those in the new setting. So look at your boy, pick out a few things--what should he like, what should he like to do--and make up reasons for it. The reasons become the story, and the character grows out of the story. Try new themes and eras, alter the details to fit them each time and see what really speaks to you.

It's interesting to find this thread now, because my solution to writer's block has become finding a doll that fits the character I'm having issues with and staring at it for long periods of time, making up stories until something clicks. (The trick for me is going to be not getting so attached to the result that I feel compelled to buy each doll!)

Just don't get discouraged if you have to go through several versions before you find the "right" Kayden. You'll be even more proud of what he's become in retrospect when you think of the mass of inspired guesses he started out as.

 

My characters are already created, solidified and mostly written down long before I even got into the BJD community. For me, now I'm searching for the perfect moulds for them, just because I know what they already look like.

 

Songs and just music in general seems to help mold my dolls. I have the general idea of a charater in my head but if I hear a piece of music or a line from a song somtimes I get a idea that helps fill out a spot I might be tring to work out in my charaters development. It also help when deciding to dress them music can make me want to put them in certain outfits and wigs,

 

My characters are already picked out, and I've found the perfect doll for all three of them--I just can't afford them right now.

With regards to the question, the characters came way WAY before the dolls (I had said characters developed before I even knew what ball-jointed dolls were). Like EcchoKat, I rely heavily on the musical world--both on the songs and on the artists themselves. I take what I know about each artist and fill in the blanks with my own perceptions of what said person would do or how they would act in a given situation. I also add in lots of little quirks, which are usually my own little quirks--my own little sprinkling of myself into the personality. With regards to looks, I want the doll to look vaguely like the artist I'm trying to portray--I try to match an expression or an eye color or a hairstyle. I say vaguely because I don't want my dolls to be an exact clone of the person they are based on.

 

I also want to update mine, even though it was a few days ago that I posted.


When it came to actually formulating characters, in general I think of scenes first, people second. Most of my writing is done for me rather than to be published (so it doesn't see the light of day, except for the word doc it originated in), so a lot of my characters and storylines are awfully cliche.

That being said, none of my characters had me compelled enough to create doll-forms for them, but I was compelled to create a character for my doll.

Emma (my first doll) went through three or four different stages. I first thought she'd look the part of someone who would fit in Versailles during the time of Marie Antoinette. But then I didn't like that idea, and thought that maybe she'd fit in Tudor England. Same thing happened, and I didn't like it. Finally I really wanted her to be part of the Regency period (partially because I got the idea for her name while watching the BBC adaptation of Emma). Third try, same thing happened, and that's when I decided to scrap the idea of having her from any far off time period. Part of it was because she didn't fit, and part of it was that I was not finding a lot of information when I did the research.

When she finally arrived, and I could see her in person, I decided to just see where things went. She was going to be someone from now, but I didn't want to give her a "character" until I could see how she was as a doll. I liked to pair some of the dolls movements into the character to give a better feel of things. I did photostories to sort of help me plot out the character I was sort of getting some sense of, but they really didn't help me at all. Maybe it was because I didn't have her character fully planned, so I wasn't sure of what to do. I was also not one to take my doll out with me, so her character ended up sort of looking and was generally different from the doll. I ended up scrapping the personality, and kept the storyline. Things are still shakey.

Through one of my photostories, I ended up mentioning her brother. I wasn't even intending to get a second doll, but I went by the notion of "If I'm going to mention her brother, he has to show up. It wouldn't be right if he never did." So, I decided in her story, that her brother (who wasn't named until last minute) would be pretty deceitful. In her story, he had written her a letter saying he was mugged of his money, and couldn't buy a plane ticket to visit. His explanation was flimsy, and poorly thought out because he was supposed to be telling a lie - one poorly developed because he figured he could get away with it because she was so young. She (at the time) was pretty cynical, and could see through it.

As I formulated Stephen's story, he was supposed to be an addict, with a few friends who were also addicts. They would get into trouble, and generally be bad guys. They all went to a prep school, and wore uniforms... However, when I finally ordered him, I had a change of heart. I just didn't feel good about having him be so bad, so I decided to make him a recovering addict. Then, I later decided for him to be a hybrid of the first and second rewrites. He was going to be cynical, a ladies man, trying to get over his addiction, but had failed a few times. He was going to be rough around the edges, but not someone that was always going to be that way.

 

Kinda like this ...

The dolls I got - the three "big boys", Luken, Morgan and Tharesion (and soon, Celaran, too) - are something like "3D-images" of characters from stories. Morgan, I got just for fun. Luken-doll, e.g., helped me figure out Luken's actually left-handed (not a big deal and probably not even gonna mention it in the story but it gets me closer to the character). And it also helps when I can picture my characters in my mind - I have to know EXACTLY what they look like. The greatest moment about getting Celaran was getting Denny's pics of the sculpted head. All of a sudden, that unto then faceless elf had a face! That was just - wow.

What's much, much more important, however, is to know what the character SOUNDS like, so I can get the dialogue right. So - the dolls help with getting "into" the characters but actually, voices help me a lot more.

 

I try to get a basic idea when I've picked the doll, then I photoshop the crap out of it to try wigs and eye color. In terms of character I used the things around me, then things start falling into place. People (friends or people in the street) things I see on tv. Then I'll write the story of how they meet and fit into my group. It's always really fun.

 

It's pretty simple for me with most dolls. I know this is going to sound silly, but please don't laugh at me too hard. This is how I go about it. I simply go with the first thing that struck me amount that mold and build a character based on that! For example, I see a mold of a doll on a website and think to myself, "She looks like a very smart girl, I bet she likes books." and it's from those tiny little thoughts that the character slowly starts to grow in my mind as I ask myself questions about her, as if wondering about a real person.

It follows up to things like, "I wonder what kind of books she likes? Romance novels, fantasy stories, fiction, non-fiction, ancient mythology, perhaps cultural and language types of books?", "If she likes cultural books, she probably likes art too. Maybe she wants to be a writer or artist herself someday, I wonder... Maybe a novelist who does her own illustrations?". Then before I know it, it's a fully fleshed out character in my mind. I find they become really solid characters in my mind when I get to know them in that respect, then I start thinking about stuff in a way of how each one would react to something.

Say I was about to bring home another doll, a younger sister to her. I'd think, "How would Annie react to this? Would she be happy to have another girl at home with her? Would she be less lonely, would she read to this new sister, would she get annoyed with this sister if it touched her books? Would she be disinterested in her at first and the sister would slowly grow on her? Would she be jealous of her, afraid she might be replaced?" and of all of those, the one that mostly says in my head, 'That's how Annie would react!', ends up as her reaction. At that point, I know that I really have this character for a doll and really know the character.

Short answer: I base most of my characters around the first instinctive impression I have of a mold. "He looks like a kind of wild boy.", "She seems very gentle and ladylike.", "This little tyke looks like he's up for anything."

 

My inspiration are religions of the world and fantasy, like vampires etc.

 

How did you develop your doll's character...did you try different wigs/eyes, did you role play or write about them, did you simply wake up and notice "oh, this doll would be perfect as ___"

There's one who appeared in my dream quite frequently as creepy as that sounds so I pretty much don't have to develop much on his eye colour, personality, hair and such since those had already formed for me in my dream.

Alistair is inspired by my art exam piece and Kagaya's <<Starry Tales>>. That is probably why Alistair is the constellation Libra.

Slowly, all my characters had a zodiac assigned to them and such.

So I'd say..music is my inspiration for my characters

 

Well mostly, the character comes first, and the doll second.