Commission Review - Cerisedolls Constantine

She is teeny tiny for an MSD! The face was not much bigger than a DC tiny but the details were more delicate and specific. All in all she's an amazing sculpt and I'm so happy to have had the chance to paint her. I tend to buy dolls I want to paint even if I can't keep them but considering the price of BJDs there are a lot I just stalk or gaze at from time to time without ever hoping to see them in real life. It's one of the reasons I like doing commissions other than the challenge of making someone else's vision real.

More under cut.
In this case the request was very simple which can sometimes be harder than a very specific request. The requests I fear the most are the ones where clients say do whatever you want. Because honestly, whatever I want runs the gamut from bizzare and ugly to very minimal and usually even if they aren't aware of it, most clients have likes and dislikes. I mostly paint realistically but that's only because I've been trying to learn to be as realistic as possible because the real test of a good faceup artist is to do beautiful bare natural faceups not the overly ornate ones that hide all the inabilities of the artist. Now that I have a handle on natural, I kind of want to go out of control and play but I think most clients expect a realistic and natural faceup from me.

The request for this girl was dark red lips and the owner specifically wanted the character to be haughty with arched eyebrows or spock eyebrows as long as she didn't have a sad eyebrow look. Any small tattoo or beauty mark is up to me. The key to the request here is the haughty attitude, eyebrow shape and red lips. These simple descriptions really give me a concept to work around and I think better that way. In this case the words 'beauty mark' and haughty made my day. The sculpt inspires me no matter what even if the client doesn't say 'let the sculpt inspire you'. I paint to bring out the sculpt not hide it. In this case the specificity of detail and stylization of the sculpt made me want to do a more stylized look than my usual realism. I wanted to use linework to bring out the shading and details so that's what I did.

Before I began working I e-mailed the client to make sure I could use lots of detail lines, turquoise eyeshadow and dark almost magenta-ish lips. Not a combination that everyone would like so I was relieved when she said sure.

Here are the results! I think I got the haughty down. She looks like a high fashion model in a beauty spread. You will notice I kept detail lines very soft but their addition adds depth to the faceup.

I'm in love lol....

Here is her timing chart. Yes, she's tiny but the time it takes to work on a faceup is about the detail in it not the size. All in all, it probably took over 5 hours altogether since I forgot to time some things.