人形カフェ: FrankenMiku

The above photo has a bunch of Volks, Obitsu, Parabox, and miscellaneous parts.

Back when Culture Japan was still selling standalone bodies, a friend wanted to buy one. His idea was to combine a Smart Doll body with a custom Miku head. He then looked for someone who does faceups for commission and request it be done using a Volks DDH-07. He never went through with that idea and decided against buying dolls in general. Expense was the #1 deterrent. While he decided against buying a doll, he loves Danny Choo's philosophy and wanted to support his business in some way. He instead bought a Mirai umbrella (which isn't available at the online shop as of this writing) and I don't remember what else.

My friend doesn't like the officially released Dollfie Dream Miku's faceup design so he didn't bother with that either.

Said friend has been very helpful to me over the past 20 years. (Wow! That long!) I've never met him in person but we've kept in contact by e-mail frequently. We "met" at a video game newsgroup and we've been rambling to each other by e-mail for the past two decades. He's hit a bit of a rough patch (not related to marital issues). While I can't make his life not suck, I can make his life suck less. While this isn't a Smart Doll, buying FrankenMiku's parts and clothing cost about 40% of what a fully clothed Smart Doll would cost.

While assembling FrankenMiku cost a lot less than buying a Smart Doll, the total still wasn't cheap. I didn't want to buy everything pictured in this post at once so I looked for parts secondhand over the course of many months. Some parts, I didn't have a choice but to buy new but those were mostly inexpensive.

While FrankenMiku is very flexible due to her custom spine and Sexy Legs mod, because of the expense, I used less than highly flexible elbow joints. The elbows will bend about 90 degrees. They will bend a little more if you don't mind what they look like:

My friend will have to live with this unless he's willing to fork over his own money to buy more flexible arms.

Her clothing is a bunch of different pieces cobbled together. With the exception of the shirt, there isn't much significance. The shirt is a now-discontinued outfit from Culture Japan. My friend found its quote to be inspirational. I found the shirt at an independent doll shop in Tokyo so I bought it. Now he'll get a doll wearing the said inspirational shirt.

Now for the faceup. Back when my friend originally thought about commissioning someone to do a faceup for him, he wanted it done on a DDH-07. This is a doll head for creating mature looking female characters (or boys). Since this was the head he wanted for his theoretical version of Miku, I decided to model my faceup design on Miku Append. Most other versions of Miku have a young or cute look - and that's not what the DDH-07 is for. I felt Miku Append would be the best version of Miku to use as a basis.

I can't reproduce what a professional faceup artist can do with various pastels or even an airbrush. I'm going to do the best I can with my usual tools: Gundam Markers, brush pens, color Sharpies, color pens, and a mechanical lead pencil.

Start: