We are back for round 2!
LONG before I felt that my first doll was finished, I gave up and started on a Monster High doll instead. Things went WAY more smoothly this time, but I still hit some bumps along the way.
The lucky lady receiving this new faceup is none other than Clawdeen Wolf! The first thing I did in my makeover of this doll is fix that horribly frizzy hair of hers by boil-washing it. It was like night and day! Unfortunately, she also had the greasy glue-hair problem, but I decided to wait until after I had done her faceup to tackle that issue.
Off comes her paint. First thing I noticed was her factory paint was much easier to remove than the factory paint on the Moxie Girlz doll. It took a lot less effort to get it all off! Still, I think eventually I’d like to get some pure acetone so it comes of even more easily, because I did have to put quite a bit of elbow grease into it.
I was still waiting for the Mister Super Clear to arrive. It took darn near forever! Or at least it felt like it. In reality it was probably just around a week. For now I had to stick to Testors.
2 coats, waiting at least 30 minutes or an hour each, and we were ready to go! After sketching in her eyes (which holy crap looked SO much better when I had the sculpting as a guide, just, wow so much better), I started blushing her face with pastels, and already something began to feel off. The pastels seemed to be sticking more than they should have, and on her right cheek I noticed a giant line where some of the sealant had gotten concentrated, and I tried to lift some of the pastels off using my kneaded eraser. Except it wasn’t working.
I realized too late that with the Testors needed FAR more time to dry than MSC does. I got impatient and started too soon, so those pastels were going absolutely nowhere. So I kind of just had to stick with her looking like she has a bulging vein splayed across her face…Luckily it doesn’t show up in pictures really so I’m conveniently leaving a picture of that out 😉
However, after that, I learned to wait a few hours after sealing to start doing my next layer of colors. At this time, I was so, SO ready for my MSC to just frickin’ get here already! It was a pain to have to wait so long between coats when all I could think about was finishing her faceup!
Then, finally the MSC arrived! Yay!
I actually started working on my 3rd doll after this using the MSC, but she’ll be in my next post. I continued to work on both of these side by side now that I had the MSC in my possession. It was such a relief. I could tell after spraying my 3rd doll that the MSC was going to work so much better. It dried looking much more matte which is what I wanted, and the colors even seemed to go on much more easily with MSC than with the Testors.
Eventually, I got to the point where I was happy enough with her face to do the eye highlights with gouache, the final seal, and the gloss varnish for the lips. As for the hair glue problem, I washed her hair with dawn dish soap two times in cold water – it didn’t get rid of all of it, but I could definitely tell an improvement. Eventually I may decide to try a couple other things to fix it. All-in-all, I think it’s pretty darn good-looking for just my second doll. I threw on Catrine’s Shriekwrecked dress & shoes (because they were the only ones I had that I somewhat liked on her) and called her done.
However, I still have a lot to learn – my biggest struggle right now is being able to seal correctly. I have a lot of trouble getting it evenly sprayed across the face, so sometimes it still feels like parts of the face are more resistant to the colors sticking. But I suppose these things just come with more practice. So more practice it is! Look out for my next post when I talk about my 3rd doll repaint – Draculara!
TTFN!