Commission Review - Kim Lasher Lottie & Dollshe Bernard

This is the fourth Bernard I've painted and all within two months! I'm a bit Bernarded out lol. I'm looking forward to other Dollshe commissions but maybe an Orijean, Pabo or Rosen next time. Yes. Curiously although I am an admirer of Cheryl Dink's work and her Saints are beautiful, the more I look at the sculpt the more I feel the mouth is too small which is why he's turned out to be my least favorite Dollshe boy.

More under cut.

Weekend update

I'm finally catching up a little on outstanding commissions but I still have a lot on my plate.

I have mailed out JanetT's heads! She makes great costumes so I'm interested to see how Pet and Maddy turn out.

I need to do final touch-ups to MayWong's heads as well as sand and prep some action figure heads. (sanding and prepping are terrible but necessary chores if I want a good canvas to work on.)

On Thursday I was stuck in Chinatown since my sister was really worked about the 20 yo cat. He's actually not so bad but since he is having a not so good reaction to the penicillin for his UTI he's been having some issues. (I've had him since I was super little so he's impt to me.) I have to take him to the vet again tomorrow for some follow up on the UTI. I've spent a ton of money the last two weeks on vet bills. My sister has no income and she is paying for her alternative medicine school and her mortgage from whatever savings she has so I can't really ask her to handle any of the expenses.

At any rate since I was stuck there I brought the watercolor pencils I had lying around to try them once again. I initially really didn't like them because of the graininess of the lines but on the soft vinyl the grainy look is not there. I think it is because the point sinks in more. However that also means getting fine and dark lines is harder. Overall I like them a lot more and will be adding them to my arsenal. I still finish with paint tho.

Petrucchio for JanetT

He took forever. Hah...That's what comes to my mind when I look at him. Mainly it's because there were many thin layers of paint and because of the facial hair and wrinkles. It's easy to paint a pretty face. It's much harder to paint a not so pretty face. Overall I'm pretty happy with him. It was hard because the face sculpt is for a child but he is in his late 30s to early 40s and has led a hard life.

Well, here he is....the one concern is that Maddy's  huge eyes and makeup overpowers him a bit.  We'll see what JanetT wants me to do.

Commission - MayWong update

So, I finally e-mailed the airbrush supply company I had ordered from since it's been two days and they still hadn't shipped out the part even tho they said they would ship it within 24 hours. They sent me a tracking number a few hours later.....I'm a bit upset about it because I had expected to receive it today or tomorrow. It looks like I won't get it until Monday.

Since I have other commissions I worked on those instead.

I don't use airbrush on the soft vinyl heads yet because I haven't tested out the varnishes. I'm afraid they might not take well to squishing so we'll see. Luckily I still have some ZM spray. The stuff is truly vile.

At any rate, here is Kagura. She is one of the main villains in Inuyasha. As such I gave her a grim mouth and evil slanted eyes much like what she has in the manga. ^___^. The request was for red eyes, red lips and magenta eyeshadow. I kept the lip color a more magentish red so it won't clash too much with the magenta eyeshadow.

Peeks in - Commission Updates

Yes, it's been a while. My family is blowing up, everyone is stressed to high heaven. My body has been so tense that it's been aching for two weeks. Volatile sister (read crazy and sometimes violent) + high stress mom + dealing with my dad's estate = barely a pinprick of light to show the end of the tunnel. Maintaining some sanity through work and painting heads.

Here's a photo of one of Maywong's heads. It is Inuyasha's mom. I've read quite a bit of the manga but we only see her in passing and most of the time she is just sad so I'm not sure how to paint her so I just left a pretty neutral expression. The request was for light brown eyes, blue eyeshadow and red lips. The eyeshadow looks more blue in real life. I wasn't sure if i should go bright but since I prefer not to clash with the red lips I used a darker royal blue.

I will be making an effort to post more and work through these commissions. As I said, after this round is done I will only be accepting BJD commissions. 

Amethyst - Obitsu Mini Haruka

Another commission update! Meet Amethyst. She is a mini Haruka head belonging to SophieOuch. Let me tell you, applying those lashes was super difficult but I believe I can apply lashes to any doll now lol.

Eye See

A look at a little nano Haruka I was commissioned to do. This is mainly an eye comparison and I'm not sure if the owner wants more shadowing around the eyes. On the left is the eye that I was sent which is a pair of 8mm high domed lavender glass eyes and the right is a pink 6mm volks acrylic (probably from glib). I like the size of the 8mm iris in the photo but irl there is major gappage due to the shape of the eye and it's not pretty. I would recommend 8mm acrylics instead of glass just so they would fit better. I actually quite like the 6mm size but then again my preference is usually for smaller iris size for a slightly more realistic look.

Commission updates for MayWong

MayWong was one of my first customers but it has taken me a while to getting around to her heads. The main reason is because I am behind on all my commissions but also because I was trying to read up on the manga Inuyasha so I can do the characters justice. These are the only two heads from her that are not based on Inuyasha characters as far as I can tell but I have gotten to a point in the manga where I feel I know the characters fairly well and will be starting in on them soon. 

Light of Day

Hah! I took awful awful pictures last night thinking I could function at four in the morning. I took some new shots outside for better lighting to show the faceups better.

Commission updates

So Audry is completed and approved but I don't have a return address to send her off to since the owner had ordered the head from Volks and had her sent directly to me!!! I have sent an e-mail to the owner but have not had a reply yet. Hopefully she will be claimed. This is a photo of her glossed. Her banks keep falling into her face so I didn't put her on a body for a photo.

Commission #5 - BJD style 1/6 head

I didn't post this head in the W.I.P. because I just went ahead and finished it in one sitting. I wasn't told the name for the character but I was given and idea of her personality. She is kind and motherly. The challenge was that she has down turned eyes but she should not look sad. I was given reference to follow, and while I think I managed follow the reference fairly closely I think perhaps I followed it too closely? I would say this style ended up being more of a manga style than a BJD style. I will ask the owner whether they want anything changed.

The base is a normal skin Volks Dollfie head Type A head with rooted brown hair . For the coloring, she specified purple eyes, versatile but not too plain makeup with a sweet smile and rosy lips.

Here is a photo without gloss. I will take a better photo after she is glossed.

Commission #4 - Selene

I was a bit surprised when I got this head since the hair was molded into the resin and the whole thing was just a deathly white. I should have asked the commissioner if it was a tinted resin or not and if the hair was molded in since it is a lot more work to paint in the skin color and the hair. The head was unprepped (ie. had dirt smudge on it's nose). However, since I had already accepted the commission I just considered it a learning experience.

The steps required included

1. Scrubbing the head with a mild detergent. (If you check the BJD commissions page, there is an additional fee but since I did not expect a 1/6 resin head this was not included on the 1/6 commission page...until now.)

2. Priming with a white primer using airbrush. The type of paint is different that what I normally use and is a lot more sturdy and will withstand more rough handling since it is a base coat.

3. Base skin tone and a little shading using airbrush. Again I used an alcohol based acrylic which will withstand more handling than liquitex would.

4. Hand painted the hair using alcohol based acrylic. Several coats required and a little bit of shading done though it doesn't show super well since the colors were very dark.

5. Finally painting the face and adding a little more depth with pastels.

Yeah...it was a ton of work.

Something I discovered while painting her is that because of the way the hair is molded on the right side of her face, it was very difficult to paint her lashes because the hair mold was blocking my brush. This is the reason why a lot of garage kits have the hair as a separate piece so that it is easier to paint. In terms of likeness, the sculpt has fuller lips and a longer face as well as smaller eyes. I find that overall, action figure female faces tend to lean toward a more masculine look and this one is no exception.

Here are a few pictures of Selene for reference.

I had a decision to make whether to make her deathly pale or a more normal skintone. Considering that the blue images were lit and color corrected to make Kate seem paler than she really is I decided to go with a more normal skintone since it is easier to color correct a photo to make the head look pale than to color correct a pale head to make it look more lifelike.

Here are the results:

As you can see the likeness is not bad but her eye are definitely sculpted smaller. I painted her eyeliner on her lower lid a little way from the edge leaving the pink edge of the inner lid showing to help make her eyes look a bit larger.

There was not much to do about the lower face being longer but the likness is still there so it was ok. The lower lip is a fuller shape then the really are and since it was sculpted in it would look odd if I tried to paint it the shape of Kate's so I just let it be. (The philtrum, the groove above the lip is also supposed to be wider in real life but yeah I'm just being nitpicky lol.) I took a gamble with the lip color since the color is different in every reference image. Selene normally has very dry looking lips so I gave her dark lip creases as well as areas of pale dry light lip color. (note the two specks at the top of the lip are not really there.)

I think she came out nicely in the end. Would I paint more casted resin heads? Yeap. I really enjoy painting different sculpts and her eyes were sculpted beautifully so I was happy to paint them. Even though it seems like I am complaining that the likeness isn't perfect, I am not. I am simply stating a fact and I think she looks quite like Kate. Her teeth and lips were really fun to paint as well. Her lower teeth were not moulded in but her upper teeth were.

She has not been approved yet and I am wondering if he wants more distinct painted highlights in her hair. I tend to leave stuff like that to the sculpt but everyone has different preferences so we'll see what he says. I think for me the most stressful thing about faceups is that I'm not sure if the owner will be happy. It is different when I am only painting for myself but even then I'm not always happy with my own work lol.

(NOTE: lol...doing commissions has had me rewrite the commissions info several times. This is not the first time and it is not the last. I received another commission with a surprise in the box that has brought up another redraft of my commissions page. This is just part of the process. I'm still very new to this so one day I think I will have most of my bases covered except for the really obscure things that crop up.)

EDIT: So yes she has been approved! I will be sending her off soon and my fellow sculptor/painter friend looked at the head and pretty much repeated what I said about why it doesn't look like Kate. Sometimes I think I'm too nitpicky so it's good to hear that other ppl think the same thing. To be honest though, it's rare to see a 1/6 head with extreme likenesses except for those from Hot Toys. They do some amaaaaazing work and the paint job is great too.

Commission #2 - Tankini & Bloody Rose (onesixthwarrior)

Meet Tankini and Bloody Rose, two lovely (soon to be lovelier) belonging to Gdamron (onesixthwarrior). Tankini appears to be a normal skin side part factory painted Obitsu 27HD-F01 head. Yes, I know which sculpt it is by looking lol. It's pretty easy esp since i've worked with so many Obitsu heads. The request is to keep the basic features but make her look more realistic and get rid of the neon pink lipstick. She can have some light makeup as she is a bikini model!

Bloody Rose is a Takara CG head. I'm not sure which version she is as there are several but neither Gdamron nor I are very fond of the factory faceup. I have nothing against dramatic makeup but there is no nuance to it. Her character is supposed to be a sophisticated assassin with a masters degree in forensic science (very useful degree for an assassin). As you can see, blue eye shadow and gothy lips do not spell sophistication. From what I can tell she does have a very nice sculpt. The sculpt itself looks a bit East Asian to me but I think her character is Caucasian.

Since these are factory faceups, I will need to clean them carefully with acetone before I can take a good look at the sculpts. I'll update again tomorrow...probably with sketches. Tankini needs to be done first to participate in a contest.

7/17/2011- So I have cleaned both heads twice with a little bit of acetone using q-tips and a small brush for hard to reach places. When using acetone, make sure to quickly wash off the acetone thoroughly after you get the paint off. Leaving vinyl in acetone can damage the head.

The Obitsu head is indeed the 27HD-F01 and cleaned off very easily. I like her side parted hair and I wish Parabox would sell those as well. Bloody Rose is an amazing sculpt and as you can see she definitely has an Asian look to her. (she actually looks a lot like me but with a bigger nose lol.) Because of the fine detail in the sculpt it was harder to get all the paint out. There is some residue left after her water and soap wash but I will get it off in a bit. (the streaks of white are not scratches. I don't use anything hard to clean the faces. Only q-tips, brushes and cotton pads.)

One thing I noticed about Bloody Rose other than the red tone of her vinyl is that there are some defects to the sculpt or casting under the paint. I will point these out later but they are small enough that they will not affect the faceup at all. Her skin is really pink which I noticed when I first saw her. I think this may be from age? Looking at the underside of her head I notice that there is a slight un-eveness to her color as if parts have bee faded. I'm not sure why this is or why the head would be pink since red pigments are usually a lot more unstable than yellow pigments so things usually turn yellow with age, not pink.

Anyhow, I will paint Tankini first since her design is more straight forward. BR will need to be rewashed and sketched out before I start on her.

7/19/2011- Heads are now completely cleaned with one last wash using Winsor Newton Brush Cleaner. I have made up some sketches of the direction I want to go in and am awaiting approval.

In a previous conversation, the owner had said it would be nice to keep Tankini's big eyed cute look, so here she is with softer more realistic look. In general the direction is toward a natural minimal makeup look for both. I decided to give Tankini darker lashes to make her eyes look even bigger and to fit her role as a bikini model.

Bloody Rose is a sophisticated and (in my mind) cold assassin. I've toned down her makeup a lot. If the owner wants a softer look from her, I will change the eyes a bit.

7/23/2011- I have finished painting Tankini. I want to send her out as soon as possible because I've taken so long on this commission. I think she ended up fairly close to the sketch. Her eyes are bigger than my usual style but I like trying new things. I prefer slightly smaller eyes though lol. More realistic in my opinion.

I have tweaked the sketches a bit to give BR a softer look since the customer would like ppl to feel empathy for her.

7/24/2011- BR is now finished as well but I have yet to take finished photos. During cleaning, I noticed her neck hole had a tear in it and dicoloration. GDamron has confirmed that she is an older head that is showing signs of age. Her vinyl has stiffened and dried a bit. Because of this there are slight imperfections in her sculpt which I can point out later. They aren't very noticeable unless you're the painter. For now here are a few shots of her after her paint but before glossing.

EDIT: lol..one of my friends saw the picture of the factory face upped BR and said "wow the doll on the right really looks like you! Is that a self-portrait."...

-___-

I did say the sculpt looks a lot like me...but srsly....I remind her of a blue eyeshadowed tranny!!!

EDIT 2: I tried to take some better photos, but I lost the day as I was busy cat sitting and working on take home work. As such I wasn't home all day and I only ended up taking these bad photos of BR before packing her up to be sent out tomorrow. I was too tired to set up lights and such so I just turned up the ISO....baaaaaad idea. Well lesson learned and I won't do it again.

First half of July

Phew! July's been such a bomb. So many terrible things have happened including a minor physical assault ( I walked away with a few bruises but it's still disruptive and makes you feel bad. I didn't start it obviously.) and my dad getting really sick. He has been sick for a while and is undergoing chemo so of course there are complications. I hope the rest of July and the summer will be better.

So on to better things. I have many things to show but as usual I am behind on taking photos and blogging. I made a mini-me or rather two..kinda, to enter the JunkySpot contest for an awesome Doll Leaves doll. I was late to enter cause of stuff that came up and I ended up throwing stuff together two hours before the contest ended. I literally snapped a few photos and quickly composited in Photoshop between 10PM - 12AM last night. Things happen and in the end a contest is not very important. It was still fun to do and I see a bunch of mistakes in these that I didn't notice before but that's ok. I'll fix it later if ppl really mind.

So here are the three little obitsu faces painted on the 21HD-01N. Cute right? My friends all say the third one looks the most like me lol. I tried to make the mouths big and plump but still keep a nice balance to the face.


This Junky Spot poster is my favorite out of the bunch. I think you guys can tell why. I love the baby bitsus. Not very clean photoshop but on limited time that's to be expected.

Not my favorite. but bitty bitsu is sitll cute! Chie looks a bit weird though. She's my newest girl and hasn't had a proper shoot yet. She's on a 25cm body. She doesn't look like me because she isn't supposed to. There's no way I could fit my lips on an Obitsu sculpt anyway lol.

I made both of the little white dresses for the girls and my mom made the white dress I'm wearing for me a loooong time ago when I was 19.


Lol. Kinda hokey but lil invie looks like she wants a hug. Can you tell I don't live anywhere with a good view? I would have taken the picture in a nicer setting but since I was doing this all in my basement at night, this is what you get. I had to drop the background out since the ceiling is literally three inches above my head and it doesn't look good.


I'm embarrassed by the last two and I don't like them that much but I'll just throw them up. Shame be damned. Oh so photoshoppey with gradients lol. It is a nice picture of Chie though. I like the colors in the lighting.



I will do a better post about Lil' Invie and Chie with better photos. I hope everyone enjoyed these though.

Tough Girl

My monitor pretty much sucks, so a lot of the photos I upload look washed out and there's not much I can do about it until I get a new monitor. (It's not a calibration thing.) Anyway, I haven't had time to check what these photos look like on a normal monitor but I hope they look ok. Until I can fix them these will have to do.

This is my #13 head and I'm calling her Kat. She's another tough chick like Ace, and I finally have a body suitable for them. I decided not to do scarring or a frown on this one so as a result she's not as scary looking but trust me, she can still kick your butt, lol.






Yay! I really like the F03 head type. I've seen it painted really badly though and it's not as popular as a girl. A few ppl have made them into boys but I really like my F03 girls. I'll be doing a decent photo shoot for Ace soon.

EDIT: Oh, this is the sketch for her. Now you can see that the sketch --> final product usually isn't super similar...mainly due to the sculpt...and in the photos the lips look a lot darker than real life because of the gloss.



And for those interested, I only used a Rekab red sable brush in size 0 for all of the work. I know smaller brushes exist out there but the line weight when using a brush with a good tip on it is as much due to pressure on the tip as well as to brush size. I will eventually try to get a smaller brush since that should help with finer lashes but for now this is working for me.

And one more pic at a more straight on angle.

#12

I have a new Obitsu head painted, but honestly I'm not that happy with her. The reason is that I was trying to emulate other artists whose works are popular and in the process while I think the head is good technically, she is sort of soul-less. Anyway this is what she looks like. She is my 12th head using an F02NC03 which is a F27-02 sculpt prerooted with brown hair.

I am looking forward to doing a kickass blonde on an Obitsu F27-03 head soon as well as redoing that one Obitsu male head I did. I'm not satisfied with him so I'm going to wipe him.

I realize I never did a good photo shoot for #11 ACE! The reason is that I still don't have what I feel would be an appropriate body for her. Perhaps I will be able to get it by the end of the summer. We'll see. She's one of my favorites so she's not for sale lol.

Currently working on:

1) Moogle

2) Modding my RS Wu's body

3) Fixing up my Volks Megii

4) Dreaming of clothes for Oun (RS Yao) and Zi'li (RS Li) who I hope to bring to my first Doll Meet in Manhattan!