How to make Noah's BJD Doll

A couple of days ago we featured a BJD tutorial on a Russian website, this is another BJD tutorial showing you some additional techniques.    Noah's Doll is sculpted with an air-dry clay stone clay (most likely LaDoll clay).

This site is in Japanese but has been translated to English.
English version.  

What is BJD you ask!

The following description of a BJD was taken from the Noah's Doll tutorial:
It is a kind of a doll with ball-and-socket joints in its body, arms and legs. Limbs and head are joined together by loops of elastic. There are many variations in the way to join each part of a doll.

The drawing at the right shows the basic construction of Noah's doll.
Arms are attached by elastic running through the armholes and torso.

Each leg has its own piece of elastic.  Loops of elastic run from the ankle up through the knee, through the leg-hole and up to the head.  Both loops being hung on a hook inside the neck.

Other ends of the elastic are attached to small "S" shaped hooks  inside the wrists and ankles respectively.

If constructed properly and is well-balanced, a BJD can stand on its own.

Of course, to have this type of joint stringing, the doll must be hollow.   There are several different methods for accomplishing this.   Noah's doll uses a combination of Styroform, sawdust clay and stone clay (LaDoll).    All air-dry products. 

If sawdust clay is not available to you, Celluclay (an instant papier mache pulp) or  an air-dry clay such as Paperclay could possibly be substituted for constructing the base form over the Styrofoam.    Do not use polymer clay for base layer because the Styrofoam armature CANNOT be placed in oven.

I think the main reason for using the sawdust clay is that (1) it's the traditional way and (2) is to keep down the cost and the weight.  The Styrofoam armature will be removed after the "core" layer has dried....then every part will be hollow.   This "core" layer will be the base for applying the final layer of  LaDoll  and the detail modeling.   LaDoll dries very hard and durable and can be sanded and polished to a fine finish.  

Hope you enjoy this tutorial and try making your own BJD.   For future reference, I will be adding this tutorial to my Air Dry Clay Tutorial Directory.