Making Dolls based on shows, games or art

Seeing dolls based off of other media used to be far more common than it seems to be now.

There was a company called Doll in Mind that used to have a “Minimee” service where they would sculpt anything, up to 10 copies. Group orders for these were super common and you’d see sculpts made after all sorts of characters and famous people (usually meant to be a character from someone favourite piece of media they starred in). The first Minimee I ever saw in person was David Bowie as he was in Labyrinth.

Searching for Minimee or DIM Minimee should yield you some results (though many will have broken images). You might have fun looking through them

Sadly DIM closed some time ago.

Then there were, of course, all of the many projects where someone would just use a base doll as it already existed, maybe doing some modifications.

I was on hiatus from the hobby for a long time and when I came back I heard that the younger generation of BJD collectors aren’t into customizing as much. Not really sure why that is if it’s true. It definitely seems like there’s a higher ratio of custom projects on here than there are on IG.

 

It's fairly common on DoA, yes. Here's a discussion thread. People also share pics in the Photo Reference forum - you can either do a search for "cosplay" (limit the search to Title only), or look at the "Theme" category (it's the little orange-coloured tab in front of the thread title) to see threads for people's media-character dolls.

I think there's a lot of media-character BJDs still being created, I don't think it's decreased over time. They're now generally called "cos dolls" (for "cosplay dolls") - I believe this name came from the Chinese BJD scene. I follow Chinese soc med and cos dolls are prevalent there: I understand that Chinese hobbyists tend to make cos dolls a lot more than OC/original-character dolls.

What media characters are popular is subject to change over time, of course -- I do think there's a generational difference here. There are some franchises that are perennially loved, eg. Final Fantasy (all games), Link from Legend of Zelda. As for the current hot franchises: I've already seen a Kpop Demon Hunters doll on Instagram. I see a good number of Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3, on DoA and elsewhere. Love & Deepspace has been hot for a while in China, with wig and eye servicing, and even head sculpts that are definitely inspired by the media character but stop short of naming it outright. Oh - nearly forgot about MDZS and Heaven's Official Blessing -- two danmei series that seem super popular. Ringdoll made official franchise dolls of them.

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I personally am not interested in making cos dolls, but I do have a couple of dolls who are heavily inspired by existing media characters, mostly in their appearance with a bit of personality. But they are firmly OCs, and I don't think you'd know which media character they're inspired from if I didn't tell you (and my fandoms are not popular).
I once made one of those dolls cosplay their media character. I commissioned a wig, but cobbled together the eyes and outfit from pieces I bought. It wasn't a good cosplay, but it was the best I could do as a newbie. Now that I have some actual sewing skills, I want to revisit this cosplay someday.