Tag: ken 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.)

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.

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. 

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.

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!

I haven’t done it at all lately, but seeing recent and nostalgic stuff from @oak23 and @dollsahoy has given me a serious itch to start doing/posting some more dolly stuff lately. (Just, like, with lower production values from somebody with less free time who’s too lazy to set up photo backdrops now.) I know this has been a drawing-only blog forever, so if this bothers you I can always move to a side blog. 

Anyway! My main project I’ve wanted to do for a while was improving my OC dolls (shocker). M characters based on dolls no longer look that much like the dolls, which is weird but okay. Tennant here is definitely the most strongly linked to the doll but he really needed a body upgrade because I hate the awful shoulders on the 1999 poser Kens, plus I wanted a wrist on him. I thought about changing him out to the newer Fashionista Ken body with a hip mod but I only have two and felt kind of bad about chopping an arm off a perfectly good one. I saw the shoulder mod @dolljunk did on one though so I thought, hey, I’d try it out on his original, already-broken body and worst case scenario, I don’t like it and do the new Fashionista. 

So, this was the result. Cracking the torso open took 80% of the time and was awful. I don’t know what kind of glue is in there, but all but ONE peg broke clean off instead of coming unglued ever. Half the outer seam just had to be dremelled open, so his sides are a mess now. Thanks, Tennant. I also chopped off the hand and drilled in a Dragon one, which was super easy (although only like 2 out of my big eBay lot of action figure hands were even close to a color match), and tried dremmelling the elbow joint, which made no apparent difference in posability. (I tried.)

The shoulders were pretty easy. I expected to have to make new shoulder wells but I didn’t. I just dremmelled out the outer part of the shoulders and put the arms back in deeper. The leather twine (which is just what I had on hand) makes it a tight fit that can hold poses. 

In the end I added some hot glue sueding to the shoulder and torso joint which made it even uglier but works fine. I’d like to pretty the rough edges up sometime (and I made a mess of some things I didn’t have to, like the left arm, oops) but for now he looks way better in clothes than he did before. 

Re-repaint coming up next.