Requiem Art

Spending most of my long weekend on a customizing binge, I did manage to finish Koi, who will be officially debuting at PUDDLE, and then her pictures will go online after. I’ve been wanting to try a cyber-punk geisha type doll for years (my ‘want to try’ custom list is very, very long) and she came out awesome.

Koi was made from a destroyed doll head.  It was painted, corroded, stained, gouged, etc.  The screw holes in the back had been stripped and broken.  No eye mech, eyelids, etc.  Don’t believe me?  Have a look.

A few months ago I got a large lot of ‘bait heads’ from a teenager who tried customizing. Most people give up after destroying a doll, but I think in total 11 heads were destroyed in a similar manner. I got the 7 worst heads in a trade.

The first thing I do in a situation like this is to strip down the head and see what can be salvaged.  Heads like these are a challenge because you can’t just make anything you like from them like you can a new doll, you have to work around what’s there.

The mouth had been sanded off, gouged out,  and filled with an apoxie.  The face had serious scratching all over it, as well as the eye holes being carved out.  Yikes.   With damage this extensive, I would have to gradually rebuild the head with apoxie.  Most of the heads were this damaged, so I decided this one would be my cyber goth geisha, and kept that in mind when I resculpted the face, giving it slightly more asian features than the original pullip mold.

(first sculpt)

As I got towards the end I used my camera to take pictures and draw a vector map over the face to check my symmetry.  I’m pretty good at eyeballing it, but using the computer is a great way to figure out exactly what it is that’s setting off my ‘asymmetry’ sense.

Final sculpt. The mouth wasn’t gouged out evenly, so I had to keep checking the silhouette shape of the lips from different angles to make sure I was sculpting them on properly. The change in color of face/apoxie can mess with you.

I’d like to say it was a cake walk after that, but I’d be lying.  Painted-face customs are much, much harder than normal customs because if you ‘erase’ the paint of your mistakes, you don’t just take up the paint of the makeup, you take up the paint of the face.  This means you have to get everything perfect pretty much on your first draft.  I never get everything perfect on my first draft, so I plan, plan, plan, paint very lightly and build on each brush stroke, and swear.  A lot.

Even after I finished the faceup, I almost ruined the face by sealing it.  Airbrushing is very fragile, and I don’t like my dolls to be fragile, so instead of just spray-sealing the face (which would be fine, honestly) I go the extra step of applying brush-on, water-resistant sealant to the painted parts before I spray seal.  This makes the faceup much more durable, if it gets dirty from handling you can take a wet cloth to it and not have to worry about the makeup coming off in places.  It’s good stuff, one of my early customs survived a few weeks under toxic water in New Orleans during the hurricane/flooding thanks to this sealant with only a scratched eyebrow.

But anyway, normally this isn’t a problem.  However, the slight tinting of the clear sealant from the paint it’s applied over shows up on a white-faced custom when it doesn’t on a ‘fleshtone’ custom, so the edges of the makeup became very definite edges instead of a nice smooth gradient.  ARGH!

Best thing to do when you royally fuck something up?  Walk away.  Think about it.  Don’t come back until you’re calm and have a plan.

I fixed the edges by re-airbrushing white along the very edges of the teal, something wouldn’t have been able to do on a normal, un-painted head custom.  Success!  Perfection restored, and I didn’t have to sand all the makeup off and start over.

Are the hard parts over now?  Well… no.  No, definitely no.  The kind of wig I wanted for her didn’t exist, so I had to make one.  I used long-pelted tibetan lamb skin to sew together a wig, and added specialty yarn in a variety of styles and colors that looks like doll-scaled dreadlocks to the wig.  Lamb skin isn’t perfect, there are generally spots that are thinner than others, or even tiny holes in the hide.  I carefully added the ‘dreadlock’ extensions to these areas and along the seams of the wig so that the dreadlocks would blend seamlessly with the wig and look like they were growing right out of the head along with the rest of the fur.

Then there’s the outfit.  I knew I wanted something geisha-like, but mostly modern, so I decided on a kimono based outfit that would have a short skirt and show off the doll’s figure (traditional kimono have many layers to minimalize the figure).  I made a doll kimono pattern years ago, so I used that as a base and modified it to what I had in mind.  I keep a pretty decent collection of fabrics around, so I just found the designs that matched the doll best.

…NOW I’m done.  Estimated time spent: 22 hours.

Three bait heads down.  Four left.