Manhattan Toy Groovy Girls: Verity and Kami

Look who I found in a box in my closet today! These are Verity [left] and Kami [right], two Groovy Girl dolls by Manhattan Toy. [Incidentally, they are sitting on a sofa made for 1:6 scale figs by Andrea. It's made out of a tissue box.]

Anyway, Manhattan Toy launched the Groovy Girls line in 1998. They are a series of 13" plush, unarticulated girls and boys that are supposed to be between 9 and 13. Every single doll has its own unique name, skin tone, hair color, hair style, embroidered facial expression and outfit. Goorvy Girls' outfits characteristically feature bright colors, large patterns and a cheerfully flagrant disregard for coordination.

Groovy Girls are clearly made with love and attention to detail. Look at the different shapes of Verity and Kami's mouths, noses and eyes. Look at the pale pink undertones in Verity's skin as compared to the light brown undertones in Kami's. Look at the slight blushing at the ends of Verity's smile. Look at the "dyed red" sections of Verity's hair and the dark brown [but not black] yarn ringlets selected for Kami's. Finally, please note that Verity has three silver studs in one ear. While Groovy Girls are definitely mass-produced toys, each one is clearly designed as an individual character with her own personality and her own style. I can tell that the Manhattan Toy designers have fun thinking up designs for new Groovy Girls. ^_^
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Also from my closet: my custom hippy-dippy, New Agey Hillman Minx

Once upon a time, my sister and I created a paracosm centered around the Kings, a family consisting of the most powerful, magical and 51% evil individual in the universe and his three half-alien, half-Earthling daughters, the younger of which were a set of Mary Sue self-insert identical twins. The Kings regularly traveled through space and/or time, meeting fictional characters, ridding the world of menaces and going on sarcastic, parodic tangents.

Back in 1996, we did an adventure for them called Operation WAWBAB. An egregiously obnoxious family, the Wallis-Budges, moved across the street from the Kings. Offended by their egregious obnoxiousness, the Kings employed many creative, non-magical devices to evict the Wallis-Budges from their neighborhood. The Wallis-Budges did not budge...

...Until the Kings threw a dinner party on par with that of the Rocky Horror Picture Show [which, incidentally, we didn't know about at that time]. Each of the Kings decided to embody the stereotypical fashions and mannerisms of a different late 20th century decade. The patriarch, for some reason, targeted the 1960s, as interpreted by New Age sensibilities. To complete the characterization, he included in the driveway a VW MicroBus and a Hillman Minx, both decked out in, uh, weird paraphernalia.

Now, as far as my sister and I were concerned, the Hillman Minx was the funniest car in existence, thanks to its immortalization in a Dave Barry column as "a wart-shaped British car with the same rakish, sporty appeal as a municipal parking garage but with not as much pickup." Therefore, at some point, I decided to make a custom scale model of it. Since I could not find a small-scale Hillman Minx, I had to make do with a Volkswagen Beetle. Just pretend it's a Hillman Minx, okay?

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God forbid your BJD look messy!

I know I've pissed and moaned about this before, but it irritates me to no end that the Asian BJD aesthetic requires fanatical devotion to every single detail.

God forbid you use your acrylics, watercolor pencils and brush-applied matte varnish to create a schematic, suggestive faceup. Nope nope nope! You have to go through this nitpicky, time-consuming process of waiting for appropriate temperature and humidity, spraying everything with extra super special sealant imported from Japan, then letting it dry, then applying a few brush daubs of delicately shaved pastel, letting it dry, etc., etc., etc.

While you're at it, you should be doing the eyebrows individual hair by individual hair with an expensive, microscopic brush...same with lines in the lips.

Let's say you want to mod your BJD: thin the neck, let's say. You can't just scrape it down to size with an X-acto, plop the head on and call it a day. What were you thinking?!! You have to smooth your rough shaping down with a series of successively finer sandpapers until no one can tell that you've done any work on the doll. We do not accept jerry-rigged solutions constructed with sweat and hot glue. We demand perfection in all areas.

Oh yeah, and if you want to make a hybrid BJD of a body from one company and a head from another and jointed hands, say, from a third, we'll be watching to make sure that you follow the correct protocols. First you have to ask online about proportions and fit because we can't have your doll being aesthetically offensive. We'll let you know if your proposed hybrid looks good enough.

Just as important as the proportionality of your hybrid is the hallowed concept of resin matching. You need to find out the relative colors of your hybrid parts. If your desired parts don't match perfectly in tone, you have two options. First, you can choose other options that do provide a perfect match. Second, you can do body blushing, which is like a faceup for non-facial parts [see excruciating process above], so that no one can ever tell that the hybrid parts were originally different colors. We do not allow BJD hybrids with "paper white" heads, "fresh white" hands and "beauty white" bodies to exist without their colors being evened out. Too many shades of white make us implode.

Guess what? My faceups involve no super special Japanese spray sealant whatsoever and, instead, lots of watercolor pencils, Prismacolors, acrylics and improvised tools [Q-tips, X-acto blades, toothpicks] to direct the pigment. Sometimes I haven't even bothered to seal the heads before scribbling directly on the resin. And then... I don't even wait for paint to dry. I use -- wait for it! -- a hair dryer.

My mods avoid sandpaper. I prefer instead to do exactly as much hacking with a craft knife or saw as is necessary to make the mod functional. It doesn't have to look nice; it just has to work.

As for resin matching, I don't really care. I mean, once I put a WS Elfdoll Kathlen head on an NS Soom Uyoo body [=Absinthe], and the world didn't end! Later, I stuck some NS Dikadoll jointed hands on an Angelsdoll massive girl in "Volks compatible normal" [=Janvier Jett], and the planet remained on its axis! Shortly after that, I decided to stick a rose grey Iplehouse Luna head on a B&G Dolls grey body [=Lura eventually], and the sky did not fall!

It's mind-blowing, isn't it? It's almost like there's another aesthetic option besides that of the minutiae-obsessed, anal-retentive facsimile of reality.