The Process of Sculpting a 2" Doll Head Out of Polymer Clay

Hello everyone, welcome to my channel. My name is Roxie Darling and I make videos of things I create. In this video, I'll be making a two-inch polymer clay doll head out of living doll sculpey. I started off with some tinfoil, shaped it into an egg, and then I used a round sculpting tool to press in where I wanted the eye sockets to be. I decided to use living doll sculpting clay because it's supposed to blend smoothly and that's very important when you're working in such a small size. I did roll out my clay with my pasta roller and now I'm just adding it to the little egg-shaped tinfoil ball that I created. I'm spending a good bit of time blending out my edges because I need it to be very smooth and at this point I'm noticing this clay is super, super soft. So, heads up on that. It can be a positive and a negative. Once I get the clay smooth, I will add some marks on the little egg-shaped buddy I got here to indicate where the eye sockets and the middle of the face are. The eye sockets in the middle of the eyes are directly in the middle of the sculpt. I did add a little indention for the nose and I'm going to slowly throughout this entire video add clay to the top of the head, forehead, and chin and jaw area. I'm doing that in stages because if I add too much clay at once it will crack in the oven and I say this out of trial by error because this is not the first sculpt that I did for this video. The last one I did ended up being too large and it cracked from the top of the head all the way down to the jawline. So, heads up on that. I am sculpting this piece to end up making a mold of it because this will be the sculpt that I'm using for the next, I would plan to make. So, stay tuned. I will be making art dolls all throughout this year. I'm kind of obsessed and you cannot stop me now. So, as I'm smoothing out the clay for the jaw area, I'm checking to see that everything is even and leaving little indications where the jaw will end like we're back in that area where the ear will be. That makes sense, right? Yeah, sure. After I press in the little eyeballs, I'm going to start adding little crescent moon-shaped clay buddies to start adding the lower eyelids. I do want to preface that I end up smoothing and blending the eyelids into the eyeballs at a later point in the video. I thought they looked absolutely awful and so, yeah, I wanted to leave it in here because I wanted you to see the process just in case you are also wanting to start sculpting your own doll faces. I know a lot of people use ones that are already made from, you know, Mattel or MGA and I think that's really awesome, but for some reason I just wanted to sculpt my own faces. I'm not sure why, but if you do, this is part of the process. Like, I spent a lot of time on these eyes just to hate them with a sheer passion and blend them out. So, yeah, if you start this journey as well, please let me know because I want to know about a fellow traveler along this way and I also want you to know that if it starts looking like a horror show that, hey, mine started off like that too and I think it turned out pretty decent in the long run. As you can see, I just added a triangle shape for the nose. I added more clay than I planned to use because I am going to blend it out into the forehead and the forehead does protrude a little bit in real life, but I know a lot of people prefer the anime style nose, so you would just add an essence of a triangle, but I like a substantial nose, I'm not gonna lie. And here I am just blending it into the forehead and I am also going to use a lot of this clay to form the nostrils of the nose and then I do end up cutting some away. So, I like to add a little more clay than I need so I can remove clay later. For me, I can get the edges to look better and more blended if I add too much clay and I cut it away as opposed to, is that what I'm looking for? As opposed to adding clay later on. And once again, the nose area, the bottom of nose is directly in between the line for the eyes and the bottom of the sculpt. This process is just me smoothing the clay onto the face and getting a base idea of the nose and how large or how small I want it to be. I'm going to be refining the nose and eyes and lips and everything all throughout the whole process. So, I'm not looking for perfection, I'm just looking for a base shape. And now I'm just doing some little indications for the nose and then I will use a pointy tool to slowly start pressing the clay outwards to form the nostrils and then using a similar tool to press inwards for the sides of the nose just to give an indication. I do apologize if this voiceover seems a bit wonky. It's a very cold Saturday and I am hopped up on a lot of coffee, so I do apologize. It is at this point I am freaking out about how awful this sculpt looks, so I'm going to take a break from the nose and start filling out the cheek area. It's looking like an alien and I figure if I just focus on adding some like meat to the cheeks it would look better. Yeah, and I'm continuously trying to make sure everything is even and everything is smoothed out and continuously refining the jawline area and trying to make this not look so awful. But yeah, this is why I almost didn't post this video, but I just wanted y'all to see that the process is a process. So I give up on adding stuff to the cheeks and chin because I really needed it to look somewhat human, so I started focusing on the lips and the chin. I'm going to add a little bit more to the nose and the lip area, and once again I'm adding more clay than I need because I need to fill out the whole area around the mouth, not just the lips. And I will be focusing on making a cupid's bow. I know a lot of people have an arched upper lip on their sculpts, but I love a cupid's bow, so I'm sculpting one. So there, take that. Take a break from the upper lip and decide to start focusing on the bottom lip, and once again I'm adding a lot more clay than I want to form the lip because I'm forming the entire bottom of the mouth, and I am contemplating throwing this piece out the window and starting over for a third time. Yeah, but I don't. As you saw in the thumbnail, I persevere, but yeah, I'm hating this piece with every, every ounce of my body. Um, yeah. So, I don't even know what to say here, but I just keep fiddling with everything. I'm trying to focus on building all around the mouth, starting an indention for the chin, and not that. I realize that my video sounds sad and forlorn right now, but I just really wanted to focus on letting y'all know how this process went, because this process was a journey. I feel like a lot of people, when they start a new technique or a new skill set, it's not a pretty process, and a lot of YouTube videos are like, oh, and this is how you do it, and it was so easy and perfect, when it's not. A lot of times it can be messy. I mean, look at this piece. It's messy AF, and I just accidentally made it look like the Joker. I do end up putting it down and coming back to it, and I didn't bring my camera, because I was so upset, but I did end up adding some clay to the lips, and just really focusing on refining those, adding clay to the chin area, and blending out those horrific eyes. So, right now, I'm at a place where I like it. I finally like it. I'm blending everything out, smoothing everything out, because I'm going to put it in the oven and just save everything, and that way, when I come back to it, I can just focus on building up the forehead and the top of the head, removing cat hair, and just refining everything. So, I'm sad that I didn't get all that on camera, but I was really upset and having an existential crisis, so that's why I didn't get that on video. Yeah, so just keep going, or start over, especially if it's important to you, because I really want to make art goals, and I really wanted to learn to sculpt my own heads and hands and feet, and I wanted to bring y'all on the journey with me, just in case somebody else feels overwhelmed and like watching videos, and it seems like everybody just does it, and it's an easy, amazing, joyful process. This was a roller coaster, and it ended up on a high note, and I just wanted to share that with y'all. After she baked in the oven, I went through with my little sanding sponge and still focused on refining areas and sanding out any lumps or bumps that I couldn't get with my sculpting tools or my fingers, and this is the first time I'm using this sanding sponge, and I'm obsessed. I love it, and I highly recommend anybody sculpting things to use these little sponges, because they're much softer than just regular sanding paper, and they don't leave like any scratches from like the edges, if that makes sense. Now I'm focusing on adding some clay to her brow bone, just to bring it forward, because when I look at her profile, her forehead seems rather flat, so I'm just going to, since the clay is not as sticky as it was before I baked it, I'm just using some liquid Sculpey as glue and blending everything down, and then you'll see me using a brush later, and I'm using clay softener to blend out my edges, so I'm just going back and forth and using whatever feels right in that moment to get the clay to blend as much as possible, because sculpting something so small, those areas where the clay meets clay, those blends have to be seamless, or they will show, like even like a fourth of a millimeter is big on this piece, so after I had the brow bones like enhanced and baked, now I'm going in and softening out that upper lid, because the the deepness of that lid was giving Disney villain, and I do plan to make some creepy villainous type sculpts in the future, some of them are also going to be softer, and so it's going to be easier for me in the long run to soften out that upper lid, and then just for my creepy sculpts, deepen that upper eyelid with eyeshadow, so I'm also trying to pay attention to the eye shape, because when I put that upper eyelid on, it does shorten the eyeball area, and so I'm still trying to keep that even as well. Now that that eyelid is done, I'm going to do the same thing to the other side, and off camera, I am just going to add extra clay to the top of the head and jaw area, and make sure the back of the head is round and smooth, because as I mentioned earlier, this piece is going to be the mold base, or what I'm going to make the mold of, and I'm not going to do ears on this one. I saw a video where a dude sculpted the ears separately, and then added them later, and I want to do that, because I don't want my ears to not cast properly, and end up with like a bubble or anything, and then I don't always put ears on my pieces, because I kind of want to do some like bunny, cat, deer, fox style ears at some point, and I don't want to have to file off the ears. So she's done, she's ready, she's sanded. Yeah, so I'm pretty happy with this piece, and I will grab the piece I did in the last video, so you can see a comparison in size, and hopefully you can notice that my skill set increased. I don't know, I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments below, but this is the plaster of paris cast from the first one, and this is the second one. The reason the first one is much larger is because I did a series of busts, and this one I'm wanting to do full bodies, so she's smaller. I only have, what, 16 inches of height on my shelves, so I got to work within that parameter. Thank you for sticking with me on this video. I know it was kind of a hot mess, but so was this process, so I thought it fit, and I will see you soon with ears, feet, and hands.