Tag: custom doll

Another doll head I’ve had forever: High School Musical 2 Troy. This is honestly one of my favorite faces Mattel’s ever done. The eye paint is unusual and gorgeous; even with slight wonk as this one has, it has a lot of spark and personality. The face mold is nice and doesn’t have that “celebrity face mold” look at all. But it’s a small head because they apparently decided that the best way to make teenagers was just to shrink down a regular Ken. 

I found a Hunter Huntsman and I really wanted to put this head on his body using @dolldirt‘s bread tag trick, but I carved the hole a little too big. OTL I want to try using some hot glue in the neck rim to get it to work, but for now, he’s on a Fashionista Ken body. (No, the clothes really don’t fit.)

Also in the garage sale action figure haul: plain ole single-jointed, no-molded-clothes GI Joes. I kind of prefer this to the super-articulated one to be honest, if only because two of my three SA Joes have had their elbows disintegrate while sitting on my shelf. At least these guys are sturdy.

Anyway, Kocoum here is another “didn’t have a color match for a long time” head. The body looks a lot closer in real life than it does in this photo. OTL He seriously needs paint and styling (look how frizzy that top part is), but I’m way more inspired to do it after @dolljunk‘s great Kocoum. 

*insert meme here*

I got ahold of some awesome early-mid 2000’s action figure stuff from a garage sale recently ad have been looking to the best ways to put it to use. This Blaine head is actually one of the very oldest dolls in my collection, but he’s the tan version and darker-skinned posable Kens are in pretty short supply. One of the garage sale finds was the later 21st Century body, though, and it is a perfect skintone match. I really like the body too; it’s a lot more natural than other playline 1/6 I have, except for the hugest double hinge joints on the elbows and knees. Can’t win em all, I guess. Anyway, his neck’s short and I’ll probably space it out somehow but for now I’m content to finally have him be able to sit on my shelf.

Scary Mary! She’s a Kurhn knockoff that has apparently had all of the color fade out of her vinyl. She was also on a weird little Breyer body. This is an Apple White body that has Catty hands for some reason (thrift stores, haha) but I think it works for her. It’s not as green, but, y’know, nothing is. The neck opening is very shallow on this head so the bulge at the top is very apparent, but I really can’t be bothered about it.

I’d almost forgotten this repaint to be honest, her head was too light for any body I had, including her original body, so I had experimetally stuck her on a tiny Breyer body, which was kind of cut but just not expressive or self-supporting in any way. And it still didn’t match. EAH has enough dolls in the super-white range that this one (Poppy?) is a great match for her though. I like her as an uncomfortable Cupid.

I had a big head-swapping session and finally came up with the idea of putting my Bratz heads (none of which I have jointed Bratz bodies for) on MH/EAH bodies. D’oh. Way nicer proportions than Barbie/Liv bodies.

Medusa here is my first real doll repaint and she’s been on a click-leg SIS Grace body all this time. She’s slightly lighter than the Grace skintone and slighty darker than Clawdeen. I have one Clawdia, but that’s too dark plus I only have the one, so, Clawdeen it is. She can sit now! And bend her wrists! It’s great.

I should try giving another dolls gelled curls like hers sometime.

Not-great photo of $1 doll show Janay head. She has some mystery debris on her face I can’t get off with rubbing alcohol and a magic eraser. Maybe with Windsor and Newton? I’ll probably repaint her eventually.

I got Freddie at Target (was hoping for other dolls on clearance, Descendants and EAH were the only ones at 70% off though… ) right before wisdom tooth surgery so I didn’t get a chance to unbox her for a while. She’s really cute and feels much nicer quality than I expected, having acquired some EG dolls at thrift. I actually like her face mold, but I noticed her reddish skintone was a really good match for Janay’s, and the body proportions seem okay for a regular-sized head, so they’re probably getting swapped.

Thank you all for the very nice comments on Clawdeen when I posted her! I feel very awkward that I don’t know how to respond to reblogs without reblogging my own post a bunch of times. @oak23, I had acually originally planned to put the ears on the side of her head cause I love your Blaine but I decided I wanted her to be hyooman.

Anyway, seeing as that post was my most popular ever (!) I figured I should get a couple pictures of her dressed for y’all. She has a BFC Ink shirt, Ken shorts, a mystery sweater, Avea’s leg guard things, and her original boots which I cut down.

Frightfully Tall Clawdeen custom! Fun stuff. I promise her head and body match in real life, I didn’t change the color of either. That’s just the camera being weird.

Anyway, I did the very obvious eye surgery thing using an exacto knife and diamond files. The head glue was, as others have noted, super weird but at least less gross. I positioned the eyes up considerably higher than the painted eyes so she looks pretty different. The eyes are 16 or 18 mm – I don’t know and I honestly don’t remember where I got them? It is a mystery. I did her faceup BJD style, it was fun.

The wig was also a fun experiment, and it hides the fact that she has no ears. It’s a very lazy plastic-and-painted-masking-tape hard cap with glued-on tibetan lamb that I got from the trim of a $1 skirt from a rummage sale at the local children’s theater, which is probably the weirdest possible source of specialty craft supplies. I have no idea why that skirt was trimmed with that.

A few pictures of Tennant all put together outside. Thanks to @oak23 and @dollsahoy for the nice comments on the WIP (I don’t know what the best way to reply is, I’m awful at Tumblr.)! John, I’ll try the lighter next time I mess with him, and Andrea, that made me actually laugh, he is VERY my style, huh? 

Anyway, outside and dressed. Now that his shoulders are narrower he looks much better in the Rosie O’Donnell suit jacket. I cut apart his finger and tried to heat shape them but they’re soft and it didn’t take. I’m going to wire the fingers with pins, but I can’t find my metal cutters, bleh. 

@oak23, you’ve put these hands on this body, how do you get rid of that ridge on the wrist? The plastic’s so hard and brittle. 

Bonus Kid Kore repaint from when I did Tennant. I basically had just been testing all my strokes/colors on her, so when I was done with Tennant I felt bad and gave her a ~30 minute repaint using the colors I had on the palette. Could be a lot better, but, ::shrugs::

I like this face mold and her huge hair, though. I stuck her on a handless EAH body because apparently the ball at the top of that neck is close enough to the ball-joint neck she originally had to work. The neck looks hilariously thin, but it kind of did on her original body too.

Finished up Tennant-doll for now! First two photos are him finished, third is the WIP where I left off (although I’d glued his hair down between that and the last time I posted him), and the fourth is his original repaint from… 2010, whoa. I still think it’s pretty funny to be painting a doll to match a character that was based on the doll in the first place, but, either way, I think it’s an improvement!

I got some Golden Fluid Acryllics for my birthday, which I used to finish this repaint, and they are awesome. Passable out of the bottle, and mixed one drop paint to one drop water, they actually feel a lot like using a pencil – a light, even line that dries super quickly. I also love the little dropper bottles, I don’t feel like I’ve wasted a ton dropping the colors onto the palette.

As for the paint job itself, I mostly tried to soften up and even out the eyes. I didn’t like the look/color of the brows I’d blocked in before, so I wiped them and started again. Whatever mix of paints I’d used, it was apparently terrible because it stained the area yellow despite only being there for like two weeks.

I also tried to cover up all the stress marks from prying open the torso with some bruises, but in my attempt to actually get the paint to stick to the slick plastic I definitely overdid it. For now i’s fine though, since I don’t leave him sitting around shirtless, heh.

Also, can I just say that this face mold looks 10 times better with the hair slicked back like that? It’s also smirking, which I hadn’t really noticed.

Sculpt-y project, I dremmelled up a broken Moxie Teenz body I had wondering how much I could push the range of motion. Apparently, quite a bit! I like the size and proportions of this body so I thought I’d try using it as a base to sculpt on. I chopped off the hands and chest, strung up the neck so I could actually put a head on it, and substituted a Liv head as a base cause I much prefer the proportions of it.

For surfacing I thought I’d be clever and mix some paint with my white gesso to match the skin tone. I got a pretty good match, but, alas, the paint mixed in totally ruins the sandability of the gesso. I might still use this for my final layer, though. It’s durable and feels nice.

Another (slightly older) WIP dolly, hodgepodge OC Myr! The body was a Monster High Howleen and the head was a very discolored Disney Store Elsa. I tried @oak23‘s method of dyeing the parts with iPoly. Uhh, the dye was working really well on test pieces, but the steam from the pot started coloring my stove hood before I could put the parts I actually wanted to dye in – lesson learned there. I took the pot off the stove, then decided to go for broke and toss the parts into the warm water. I used a tiny amount of black dye going for grey but they still came out really dark in a short amount of time (except for the lower legs and joint pin parts). If I did this again I’d definitely not use a color I wanted a weak tint of – it dyes too well! I think the color would be very even if I could’ve left the parts to sit. 

In the end I did paint over most of the body and all of the head for consistency, but the dyed color is extremely close so I’m not so worried about chipping. The color is darker than I really wanted (it looks lighter in the photo, there isn’t as much contrast in the stripe in real life) but it still looks pretty good I think. 

They still need hair, ears and antennae, but it turns out I don’t have any golden-blonde hair, somehow. 

PS: Painting yellow scleras on black is awful. 

Before and WIP after plus a character drawing for comparison.

Remember when I painted doll-Tennant originally and my concept was just that I wanted him to be a nicer guy than my other characters? HAHAHA. Anyway, I’d fallen very much out of love with his repaint, so, time to do him over. It ended up being way too late to finish his face in one sitting so here’s a WIP with eyes + rough brows + slapdash pastels so he doesn’t look nakedfaced (these fade like hell without sealing so I wasn’t fussy).

Mostly I can tell that my style has become very very different over the years! It pretty much matches the way I digitally paint eyes now which is… predictable. I think I want to paint some more soft in-betweens in there though, they just look like solid cartoon eyes unless you’re right on top of them and the light’s bright enough to differentiate the brown and black (which it only is under my painting lamp). On the bright side, look how I was patient enough to get a nice smooth white this time!