Out of the Box: Arne (LoongSoul XuanYan ver. 1)

LoongSoul XuanYan with his standard arm.

I just realized that there's a doll in my header that I've never introduced, so today's the day to remedy that. 

In an HZ uniform outfit,
with mechanical hand.

In 2009, LoongSoul (who were new on the scene) offered the first version of XuanYan, a 63cm doll with an extra mechanical arm/torso piece in a limited run of 100 (they have since created an alternate version as well).  I was quite taken with the doll, but put off buying him until seeing him in stock at a dealer during one of their shop's events (an event that saw him arrive with full body blushing and an extra head).

I was highly impressed with this doll when he arrived - when I ordered him, I'd assumed that the would come with the mechanical arm  only, so it was a nice surprise to find that he actually came with multiple arms and upper torso pieces.  The blushing was also quite well done, although over the years, the metallic grey at the shoulder of the mechanical arm has rubbed off somewhat do to friction.

The body itself is solid with a nice weighty resin.  It's well-engineered with doubled jointed knees and elbows and with fully jointed fingers on the mechanical hand.  I also admire the fact that the hands are in an active/gestural position rather than a neutral one, since that adds a certain dynamism to them (at least to my eye).  The face sculpt has a soft, neutral expression which was painted to have a certain wistfulness to it, but that's clearly specific to the faceup, because I've seen the same sculpt look very different in both version two and with custom paintwork.

Being within the standard body size for SD13-type dolls, he's able to wear a wide variety of ready-made outfits and won't require much (if any) alteration to patterns for the size.  He also has a fairly standard head size and can share wigs with most of the larger-headed dolls in this range.

A better view of the mecha-arm.

With YID Cocori

A side view (also with YID Cocori) and showing off the jointed hand.
I may have been having too much fun playing with filters on this one. ;)

Out of the box: Mmabatho (Iplehouse YID Lt Cocori)

I love how ridiculous this hat is.

This girl was the first female BJD to join my collection, and she was my first attempt at a hybrid.  She was actually my reason for joining the Den of Angels forum - I told a doll-owning friend that I regretted missing the general order period and she told me that there was a head for sale on DoA.

The head wasn't in perfect shape - the original owner had left the head on display in a lit cabinet and it had significant greening, but at the time there weren't any other options for getting the doll (outside of the normal skin pre-orders), so I decided to chance it.  And honestly, the green is apparent in person, but generally she still photographs well.

The second challenge was finding a matching body.  At the time I hadn't done nearly as much exploring into the options, and ended up going with the lowest priced option and put her on a Resinsoul body.  People who love the whole sueding-and-wiring process generally rave about these bodies, but being lazy I honestly think it's way too light and floppy.

Her current wig

If I were buying a body now, I'd probably get an Island doll tan body instead:  I prefer the engineering on that one, and I believe the colour would be equally close in that it would be slightly too dark rather than the slightly too light colour of the RS Coffee body (Island doll tan is actually very close to the newer Iplehouse Lt brown).  But since she's been on the floppy body for nearly 4 years now, I'll probably just leave her as she is.