another in the long-running series of ~ooh look, the human behind the dolls~ photos that I’ve done in my time in the BJD hobby

Liesel is a Soom Cass, and Alfie is a modified Migidoll Ryu

trying to do more color studies because I avoid color too much (also name a more iconic duo I’ll wait etc)

a quick Spencer doodle from the same image as last time, this time in color

another quick Reid doodle because by golly I am dead set on learning how to properly draw this face??

This one’s a bit different for me - it might be the first thing I’ve made all year that qualifies as a good faith attempt at a full on illustration. It doesn’t feel incredibly finished to me, so it’s something I may revisit, but I think it needs to sit for a while before I do, so I’m sharing in its current state.

Walking home one day, I was doing my usual “dodge everyone around me and keep my eyes fixed on the ground” thing and I looked up and saw something I haven’t really been able to get out of my head. One thing I’ve noticed while living in a big city is that that the speed of experience changes based on your mode of transport. On foot, the city swallows you up under air conditioner units and scaffolds and subway grates too, if you’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes. Exhausted air screams up at you, seething from the ground. Sometimes, the a train conductor’s voice carries up too, and the city is rather literally screaming at you. The city is undeniably faster on foot than the suburbs ever are. That day, I was packed four deep in a puddle-ridden bottleneck next to a construction site that encroached onto what little sidewalk there already was. I just wanted to pass and get home.

But there was this girl - a woman perhaps? I would hazard that she was in her late twenties or early thirties, but I don’t know that she ever got to be a woman. I don’t know how much of her had been present for the passing of biological time. Her skin was sallow, but perfectly even. She had bones - I could tell because she sat upright quite easily, with her hand fixed with what I’d call poise if it wasn’t so deathly still. She was the color of translucent yellow wax, dripped layer over layer onto a human armature, and her limbs had a puffy, amorphous quality you would see if you tried to obscure a sculpture by pouring layers of the tallowy stuff over it. I thought she was a doll at first. There was something wrong with the way she was dressed - her clothes were neat and color coordinated, but not quite of this era, not worn in quite a contemporary way. She did not dress herself this way of her own volition. She might not have had much in the way of volition at all, as she stared through all the stimuli one New York city block has to offer. She was very much not there as she was wheeled by. I don’t remember who she was being pushed by. A man, perhaps. I don’t remember the wheelchair either. It’s odd, but as I walked home, I thought to myself that I had glimpsed death.

Again, the city is fast. I couldn’t have seen her or her caretakers for more than a second. It’s been more than a month since the encounter, and it’s gotten away from me completely as I’ve re-accessed and rewritten the memory from too many playbacks, but this is what I could put to paper. It doesn’t feel real at all. It feels like an exercise in failure to try and capture it, but perhaps this combination of text and image arrives at something of the feeling nonetheless.