Little Rebel Seven – Face-up!

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I finally had a chance to give my Seven a face-up. It actually took 2 tries since I bungled the first iteration of this face-up and had to wipe it off. ><;; Anyway I just feel excited because I feel like a "leveled up" in the face-up department with my last two dolls (Zaoll Luv and LR Seven). I still have a long way to go I think, but I am starting to feel more confident. This face-up is also my first time painting the face of a boy doll. I was really nervous about attempting this, but as it turns out it's not much different from painting the girl's faces. I still need to get my Seven a proper wig, pair of eyes annnnd yeah, even a body. ><;; I'll be tackling the wig and eyes first since they are less costly and I'm still trying to hold onto my savings since I'm also still hoping for a Supia event with a boy re-release. Oh well, it gives me lots of things to look forward to in the end. I just hope I can get him a body before the end of the year.

Zaoll Luv Face-up!

I finally had the time to give my Zaoll Luve a face-up, and I must say that it’s the best face-up I’ve done so far! It’s always nice to have a breakthrough art-wise and also I am very much smitten with my Luv now. X3 Actually this wasn’t the first time I attempted to give my Zaoll girl a face-up. I attempted it when she first arrived, but my liner decided to smear and frustrated I wiped her and put her away for a little bit. Then when I came back to try again I had another goof that I had to completely wipe her face again. After two failures I started to wonder if maybe the Zaoll sculpt and I weren’t going to get along, but then the third time worked perfectly, so I guess it was a “third times a charm” moment.

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Anyhow I think she’s just s pretty as can be now, and I am so very happy to have her. :3 Next up I still plan to make her a custom wig, but I do really like her in the monique wig I just bought, so who knows what her hair will be like in the future. I am thinking I also want to change her eyes. I really love the blue glass eyes, but I think they may be a bit large for her. I’m probably going to go get a consensus about good eye sizes on DoA. Well that’s it for now, but I will have a small photoshoot to share later!

Finally, Mio is here.

It was a long wait, but finally I got my Mio head. I was so excited to finally have her that I set about doing a face-up as soon as I could. I ended up staying up waaaay too late in the end, but I just had to finish her and get her put together. I am super pleased with my Mio/Zaoll hybrid. I love the Zaoll body and I was able to fit the Mio head right on the body without any trouble. Zaoll’s skintone is a little more pinky than the current Dollmore resin, but really it’s not by much. The first thing I did was do an all over pinky blushing to match her head with the body, and then I just started on the face-up. Really this hybrid was super easy to do and required no modding. Anyway here are a couple shots I got today

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I wanted to give her a really natural almost no-makeup face-up. I’m still really happy with how she turned out, but I’m thinking that perhaps I like her better with her brows showing rather than covered up. It’s easy enough to slide the wig back a bit. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos with her brows showing, but I’m sure I will in the future because I think she’s super adorable! I may have to tweak the face-up a bit though in the future because somehow one of the corners of her mouth that I penciled in, the pencil wiped off a bit after I applied the gloss. I don’t even know how that would happen since I sealed before I glossed. I also really like the For My Doll wig I bought for her, I think it’s a very good quality wig and I didn’t feel there were too many stray hairs I had to trim. It’s also a nice smooth fine fiber and really just excellent quality overall. Despite liking the wig though I think I still want to experiment with other wigs lol…I have an old red k-starr wig I’m going to try on her and I may order a mohair wig to see what that would look like.

Unfortunately the 16mm eyes I bought for her just look too big to me in her head. I ended up stealing Zaoll luv’s 14mm acrylic eyes to borrow for now. However when I removed those eyes I realized that somehow they had become cracked and broken. I am hiding the cracks the best I can, but the acrylic is pulling away from the printed iris which causes her to have a milky eyed look depending on the angle. I have never had a pair of acrylic eyes crack and break so badly. I have no idea what caused it since Luv was sitting in her box for the past month. In any case I probably won’t be trusting Dollmore’s acryclic eyes from now on. Their glass eyes are great, but I don’t want to run the risk of more broken acrylic eyes, even if they are cheap.

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And here’s a quickie group shot of Mio on her Zaoll body with my two MSD girls. I like how Sona’s proportions lend her to looking like she could be a little sister. Luli’s proportions though don’t suit her for that, so I guess she a “friend” doll, lol….

Well, that’s it for now. I actually have other dolly news and dolly finds to share, but sadly I just haven’t been able to find the time to blog much this fall…been super busy! D: It’s ok though, I’m kinda happy to be busy, especially where it involves incoming dolls. 😉

New Face-up for Luli

My Unoa Lusis had been in need of a new face-up due to the fact that somehow I had managed to accidentally chip off some of her blushing under her chin. I imagine it happened when she was being changed in and out of clothes. In the future I am going to have to be more careful, and I should probably remove her faceplate before fitting new clothes on her. Sadly her body blushing is much worse for chipping, so eventually I plan to just remove it all except for non-problem areas like the bust and tummy. I’d really like to have some blushing on her hands and feet though so I guess I’ll just have to be sure to topcoat it really really well.

Anyhow back to the face-up….I wanted to keep her similar to what she was previously, but I ended up lining her eyes a little more darkly, and I don’t think I got the blush vivid enough this time, but I still think she looks very pretty overall. Below is a shot of her faceplate before I glossed it and put it back on her head.

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And here she is, all ready to go….

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While I was doing her face-up I also thought I would try to do my Zaoll luv’s face-up as well, but I ended up screwing up the lashes, so in the end I decided to wipe Zaoll’s face. Actually I felt that working with the Zaoll Luv sculpt to be kind of difficult, and it made me realize just how much I enjoy working with the Unoa sculpt. I’m not giving up on my Zaoll Luv though, I will conquer her sculpt eventually! Though I need to get some more sealer. I think I may try to go see if my local Hobby Town USA carries MSC, if not I’ll probably pick up some more Testor’s Model Masters. I’m really curious to try MSC though since everyone raves about it.

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Well here is a comparison shot of the two face-ups, the old one on the left and the new one on the right. I kinda miss her lazy looking eyes in the old one, lol….but I do like her new face too. 🙂

Monster High Customs Progress part 3

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So, now we move on to the face painting portion of my customizing process. In order to keep the hair safe from the matte sealer you have to wrap it up in something. I noticed some people use old latex gloves for this, so I thought I’d give it a try. I ended up cutting out the tip of the thumb in a glove and shoving the head down from the hand portion of the glove until the face was properly exposed through the hole in the thumb. One of the drawbacks to painting the face last is naturally you wind up messing up all of your hair styling. It won’t ruin it completely obviously, but you will probably need to do some additional steam ironing after you remove the head from the glove. Some people paint the face before re-rooting, but for me personally I have found that if I do that I normally wind up damaging the face in the process since re-rooting is a little rough on the doll’s head. In the end you should do what works for you. Oh, and I should also mention that before I do this I commit myself and glue in the hair inside the head. You basically want to use a non-water soluble glue like a fabric glue.

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So, I started by painting in the shape of the eye whites as a canvas. I had seen other people start with white before and thought I would give it a try. I think I prefer starting with laying out the eye in watercolor pencil first because I just find it easier to work with dry materials. When you start painting the face it’s really important that you thin out your paint well enough. It takes some practice to get it right, but here is a tip to help you: If you see any streaking, or rather you can see brush strokes in your paint, then it is too thick. Your paint should be so thin that when you apply it you see no strokes and the liquid like paint self levels itself. You will also have to apply many layers this way slowly, as you should wait for each layer of paint to dry. In the picture above I have probably applied over a dozen coats of white paint to make it opaque. Also I should mention that on Catrine I decided to blue the corners of her eyes before beginning so this way I could see my paint since it would be white on white.

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Next I start blocking in some base colors and I started adding a lid line around catrine’s eyes.

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After getting the base color solid on Clawdeen’s eyes I started working on darkening the pupil area and around the edge of the iris. I like to go for a more manga sort of style I guess when I paint the eyes. It’s what I’m familiar with since I draw manga style comics.

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So now that I have Clawdeen’s eyes about how I want them I started applying highlight dots and have moved on to doing some blushing and drawing in lashes and brows. This was the first time I had ever worked with a “tan” doll before, so I found it a bit of a learning curve to figure out which colors would look good and show up on her. Red shows up best for the blush and lip colors.

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And here I have fully finished Clawdeen and started to focus more on Catrine. So, you can see about how messed up the hair becomes after you remove the head from the glove. I just adjusted Clawdeen’s hair with my hands for the picture. It’s not terrible, but you always feel a little sad that your perfect hair is not longer perfect. XP

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So here is my finished Clawdeen with my very first Draculaura custom. I have yet to finish Catrine because we had storms and high humidity the following day so I have been unable to spray any sealer. I will be trying to get her finished up this weekend since the humidity has dropped greatly. So, in the end I learned a little more while doing this custom, but I’m not 100% happy with Clawdeen since I think I made her eyes a bit too big. I still like her overall though and I had wanted to make a sweet innocent looking Clawdeen and I think I was at least successful in that. Well, that’s it for my customs progress for now. I’ll be sure to post some pics of Catrine when I finally finish her. 🙂