Doll Chateau is another one of my favorite companies. I know I have a lot of favorites but there are a few companies I never look at aside from one or two head sculpts or their body engineering and sculpt but Doll Chateau has some incredible body designs and facial sculpts in their arsenal.
First impression is that the resin is very smooth. I'm familiar with Dollzone resin (old and new) and since Doll Chateau is just a branch off of Dollzone, the resin is the same. The WS (Hugh) is a creamy white, the PS is a very pale pink without any hint of peach (quite an unnatural skin color actually) and if the YS is anything like the Dollzone YS, it will be darker than most NS, almost a yellow based tan. The YS is one of my favorite resin colors actually. I've never had the pleasure of seeing a tan DZ or DC doll but one day.....
The casting is perfect as expected and the sculpts are adorable. My favorite is Hilary. DC likes to produce dolls in pairs that are very similar sculpts. I didn't get to see Hilary and Jodie at the same time because Jodie only arrived after I sent Hugh and Hilary back but Hilary and Jodie were released at the same time and are very similar but not identical sculpts. The main difference is in the nose and the lips. I'm a bit more inclined towards Hilary with her slightly wider nose and cuter profile. I really wanted a Hilary at one point but I am happy to live vicariously through commissions. The sculpts are so cute that I giggled through Hilary's faceup.
Here is what the requests were:
Hugh - Androgynous faceup. Delicate vine/leaf tattoo on one side of his face to represent growth. Colors should either be green and gold or silver.
Hilary - She's quirky, bubbly and bright. Her tattoo should be small golden circles with stars on the opposite side from Hugh's tattoo so that they can be a pair. Her colors should be yellow and pink and maybe a touch of blue. She represents hope.
After I finished H & H, Kathy proposed Jodi
Jodi - She is the one that binds them all together. She should stand out form the other two in that her faceup is brighter and more colorful. Some sort of swirls should be incorporated into upside down eyebrows and the lip design should take up the entire lip. A design on the cheeks would be good too.
Here were my designs.
I ended up using a gradient of iridescent and shimmering colors on Hugh for his vine tattoo. I think it turned out beautifully. The yellow arrows on his eyebrows reference arrows on the inner corner of Hilary's eyes. I kept the cheeks and lips a peachy color with a more minimalistic look as was requested by Kathy.
For Hilary, my little impish one. I went with a clean minimalist design on the basic faceup. While it's not very visible in photos much, I used iridescent colors inside the gold circles to give a look of bubbles. The three blue dots help give her a cute quirkly look and reiterates the golden circle theme.
I was also commissioned to give her a manicure to match her faceup. Her hands are so tiny! Each one is the size of my fingernail. I was still able to do something that worked out nicely tho.
I would have preferred to have H & H with me when I painted Jodie so I could see how they look next to each other. However I did what I could and I hope they are a cute cohesive trio in real life.
I chose to do a symmetrical design on Jodie because she is the one who binds them all and should be the center of attention. Since both Hugh and Hilary are already fairly colorful, they only way to make jodie more colorful is to use more colors and choose one brighter color to stand out and in this case I chose a flourescent orange to be the main color accented by blue and green. In the end I think she ended up looking like a super cute baby dragon with her swirling forhead tattoos and her fluffy green eyebrows. With the purple eyes, she's literally all the colors of the rainbow.
I had another design for Hugh and one for Jodie that I intend to use on my own time. I had a lot of fun with these guys and I hope to get more commissions like these in the future.
Here are the time charts. I didn't include the time it took me to actually design the faceps but it takes me about 2 hours (when I say about I mean it takes 1 hour and 53 minutes to 2 hours not 1.5 hours to 2 hours) to do mockups for each. I know I haven't charged for the design phase of any tattoos I've done thus far but I will in the future because it just takes too long for me not to. If I get tattoo requests with a mockup already drawn by the client I will not charge for the design phase. If a mockup is requested, there will be an additional charge.
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