Like the other members of my family I have a tendency to fall down art/maker/crafting rabbit holes hard, fast, and frequently. When I first fall down one, I always think that I'm just going to observe others' work from a distance, until I end up giving in to temptation and trying it for myself. This pattern has happened to me with digital art, comics, cosplay.... and most recently, doll customization. My parents are as baffled as I am enthusiastic.
Doll customization is a fairly niche art form that generally consists of taking some sort of pre-produced doll base, often one that is or was mass-produced as a toy line (Barbies and Monster High dolls are especially popular), and turning it into a new "art doll" character. Common techniques for this include repainting the face/body, replacing/restyling the hair, creating new outfits and accessories, and even modifying the body of the doll itself. It sounds a little bit silly at first, but with skill these dolls turn out absolutely gorgeous. I find that like cosplay, it's a really cool way to bring a character that would otherwise only exist on paper to life.
I have been wanting to try customizing a doll for several months now, but college applications meant that I didn't really have time to sit down and learn a new hobby. With the last of everything finally submitted last week (hooray!) I finally was able to take a stab at it! Reader beware: I will now proceed to document my process working with her in far too much detail because I am very excited, and also I will want it for reference when I inevitably want to do it again.
I ordered a Monster High Draculaura doll off of a used doll seller a few days ago, and let her process through the mail system while I was incapacitated by wisdom tooth removal post-op. In an extremely lucky twist of fate she showed up today, the first day I had bandwidth to work on her. The past few days I have been very regimented with my ice/heat pack schedule to control swelling, which kept me from doing much of anything and has been driving me crazy. Today, my schedule was less strict, so I finally had bandwidth to actually make something!
Here she is, straight out of the sleeve she was mailed in (I immediately wiped her down with Clorox wipes to disinfect her. The seller also took precautions to keep her clean, but there is no such thing as being too careful in the current "Plague World," as Mom as been calling it):
Since I'm creating a new outfit for her anyway, I didn't see any reason to spend extra on any clothes for her, so she came nude. She'll get some cool clothing later, but it's rather awkward for now. Oh well.
I chose this particular model of doll for a number of reasons. Monster High dolls, at least these older ones, are fairly high quality for their relatively cheap price, and are well articulated, making them very posable. They've got anime-like proportions that I find appealing, and are a good size - not so small as to be tedious to work on, but not so large as to be hard to store. Most importantly, most of the doll custom tutorials I like use these dolls, so I am much more familiar with the tools and techniques that work well for them than other dolls. Draculaura in particular is a fairly common character and therefore relatively cheap and easy to find, and has a pale, warm skin tone that is similar to the character I am planning to create. I'm not familiar enough with the original production lines of MH dolls to be able to tell you which line she's from, but the copyright date I found on her implies she was originally produced in 2008. Haha, she would be in middle school!
Many doll customizers create new, original characters with their dolls, but for my first doll at least I wanted to create a pre-existing one. I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender (the animated TV show, not to be confused with James Cameron's live-action film Avatar) a few months ago and thought it was great, so I wanted to create a character from it. I decided on making the character Suki in her Kyoshi warrior armor, mostly because I think that Suki is a cool character and that that particular design for her would translate well to a doll. For someone more experienced, this design wouldn't probably be too difficult, but as a total newbie I'm expecting to find it fairly challenging (though not as challenging as some of the other designs I was considering...). In any case, it'll great opportunity to learn new skills. Heck yeah!
First things first, though, I had to "prep" the doll. I'll be completely painting over her face when I do her makeup later, but since the majority of the makeup will be white, I still wanted to remove her original paint to keep it from showing through. I tried doing this with nail polish remover at first, but I didn't have very much and it wasn't going very quickly. I had avoided using pure acetone right out the gate because I was afraid of using the nastier chemicals, but I ran out of nail polish remover pretty quickly so had to switch to it anyway. Turns out that it went way faster with the pure acetone, so next time, I'll use it from the start.
Here she is with her face removed (that's a very fun sentence out of context):
Next up, I had to remove her hair. Suki's hair is brown, not black, and even if it was black, this doll's hair was in terrible condition and had to be replaced anyway. I started by cutting it off close to the scalp, incidentally giving her a classic "Dad haircut."
Next, I had to do something to remove all those little plugs that were left. She needs to be truly bald, not just buzzed. I opted to do this via the traditional method: beheading!
(The Pyrex in the photo on the left is full of hot water, which softens up the vinyl head to make it easier to remove from that janky teal neck peg).
Beheading seems extreme, but it's for a good reason. All those little plugs of hair are attached to the inside of her head with glue. If I want to get them out, I have to do it by removing that glue from the inside. I could cut her head open with a knife or something if I didn't want to remove her head, but given that I have no reason to give her a lobotomy, going through the neck hole is the best option.
Fortunately, the hot water I used to behead her also softened up all that glue, making the job of removing it easier. I just had to stick something in there and rub it around until it removed it all, and found that a pair of needle-nosed pliers worked just fine.
The amount of hair glue in MH dolls is quite variable for whatever reason. I was hoping to have a relatively "clean" doll, but was out of luck. Instead, I got an especially gluey one :)
Eww, old doll hair glue looks like earwax.
After forty minutes of haphazardly pushing my pliers around, she has finally reached her pure, bald state!
But oops, now she's covered in glue residue and little bits of hair. Guess it's as good a time as any to wash her. Warm water and a bit of dish soap cleaned her right up.
You might have also noticed that part of her head was painted black, revealed after her hair was removed. MH dolls' scalps are typically painted with a similar color to their hair to hide any gaps in the rooting and make the hair look fuller. Again, Suki's hair is brown, so I had to remove this paint to keep it from showing through her new hair and looking weird. A second cleaning with the acetone does the trick.
What a beautiful, clean, factory default head!
After a second washing with warm water, she's been fully prepped. In total, this process took me around two and a half hours, but I can imagine it being much faster with practice. This is where I decided to declare victory for the day, since it seemed like a good stopping point.
She doesn't look like much yet, but she will soon, I swear! Prepping is super important, and I'm glad I was able to finish it in a single session without any major complications. In the coming days, I'm planning on giving her new hair, repainting her face, and making her new outfit, and I'm really looking forward to it. If I'm not a total fool, I'll continue to post about it, too.
1 comment:
So interesting! Hope there are updates as I catch up on the Blog :)
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