Repainting Howleen and Catrine Part 1

Since my camera was out of battery today I used my tablet to take photos.  But I can't figure out why those horrible white lines keep showing up!  Next time I'll make sure to use my camera!

Here they are all blank and ready to be painted!   I taped off their hair to make sure nothing gets in it.

I did white on Howleen to make some highlights, since Catrine is already white she doesn't need that!

I used a bubblegum pink color to make her look very 'made up', her pink hair is so bright I wanted to come up with something bright and bubbly to go with it.

Here's the first layer of the whites of her eyes, it needs to dry a little before I can do another layer.

While Howleen's eyes are drying I used a purple to do some shading on Catrine.  Since she's already white, I do a little more shading than I normally would.  With the darker dolls I can use white and dark colors to contour, but since she's already white I can only use darker colors.

I used a more blue purple in a few spots, so she won't look too monochrome.

One layer of white eyes on Catrine, and two layers on Howeleen.

I did pink eyeliner at first on Howleen.

But It wasn't giving me enough contrast, so I added black eyeliner on the top of the eye, and used it to blend down into the eye too.

More work on the eyes!  I'll post again in the next few days once I'm able to finish them!

Making a Rainbow Wig!

I made a rainbow wig for one of my dolls and got a lot of interest in how I made it, so here's a little tutorial!  I threw another one together today with the leftover materials from the first one :)

I don't specify how I made the wefts in the tutorial, but it's basically the same way as this, the only difference is that I sew them onto tracing paper and tear them off instead of tulle.

I used some cheap braiding hair because I needed six different colors, but only a little bit of each color, so I wanted to save some money.  You can buy it for $3.55 a pack at Doctored Locks, they have a low price guarantee and a huge selection of colors, so I like buying from them :)  Or if you have some more money to burn feel free to buy wefts pre made somewhere like Cool Cat, they have a huge selection of doll hair wefts.  If you're looking to just make a junky practice wig I recommend buying a cheap weave from a beauty supply store in your area, they come as cheap as $8 in my experience, and are good if you don't want to waste money on more expensive hair just for practice!

On to the tutorial!

Supplies you'll need:
-Scissors, sharp enough to cut hair
-Hair wefts
-Plastic bag
-Stretchy, thin fabric for the wig cap
-Brush or comb, to deal with the hair
-Hot glue gun (not shown)
-Needle and thread, or sewing machine (not shown)

See the rest after the cut!

Obitsu Apple Ara from MUdoll

Obitsus are funny little things, especially without clothes!  But they can be a lot of fun, and their lower prices can make them a lot of fun for customizations that you wouldn't want to do on a $500+ doll.  I like using them a lot for character customizations, making them in to little fan made dolls from series that I like.  For $50~ and a little bit of work you can actually have a nice little doll, even if it isn't technically a 'bjd' and isn't allowed on Den of Angels.

I got this MUdoll little apple Ara head on a whim (it was $20 from JunkySpot), it’s not the greatest thing though.  It is made of resin, but it came with some flashing in the eye wells still (that means very thin pieces of resin left over from the casting process).  Not a huge deal but not everyone can fix that on their own, and in my opinion it would have made the doll look bad when painted over the uneven areas.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that it comes with a magnetic head cap though, that makes it so much easier with such a small head, and I haven't had any trouble with the head cap falling off on its own. Not to mention that the inside of the head is quite spacious, making eye positioning much easier.

The body I got is unfortunately too small, I for some reason got 21cm bodies when these should be on 27cm ones.  With such a small doll 6cm can make all the difference!  Maybe next time I make an order I'll splurge a little more and get a new body.  The head really just doesn't fit on the 21cm neck, whoops!

I got it painted up pretty nicely, but the resin is really thin in some places.  You can see it looks like bruising on the temples the resin is so thin.  I might be able to airbrush it a little, just to give some extra opacity in those areas and the bruising effect would go away, but that's a lot of trouble.


With a wig the thin spots won’t be so noticeable, but I don’t know that I’d buy another.  The styling reminds me a lot of the old Rasendou head that I have though, very sharp angles and smooth planes, not a very refined sculpt.

I can post finished things!

I figured for once I could post something finished.  So here's the finished Davesprite obitsu that I did!

Inevitably there are a lot of things I would have done differently if I were to do it again, but overall I'm pretty happy!

Wiiings!

Well I went ahead and finished the feather wings that I had started before, since if I wanted to try again that meant buying more materials and I'm being honest I don't have moneys for that right now!

I used all 20 feathers to make them, so shockingly there's about ten feather's worth of feathers in each wing?  I really underestimated how many I needed, I think I could have used twice as many as I did.

So the easiest way I could think to attach them was to drill holes in the back of the body and just stick the wings on there.  Keep in mind that I made the wings with this plan in mind, so the base wire had two prongs of wire sticking out.  If I wanted to get fancy about it I would have bought some magnets, but I wasn't into it.

So I took the torso apart so that I was just working with the back plate.  The reason that I went with two holes for each wing is because if I did one, the wings would have a tendency to droop down.  With two holes it will keep them pointing straight out!

Holes drilled!  They're not 100% perfect, but they're going to be covered in feathers in a minute!

Yeah wings!

When choosing where to drill I was lucky that there wasn't any obstructions inside of the torso to block where I wanted to put the wires through.

Put it back together!

Pretty okay I think!  And since they're made out of wire and hot glue I'll be able to pose them pretty well too.

Skipping out on updates again!

Sorry, but I have another excuse!  My brand new computer is super broke :(  It crashed randomly, and just won't come back up, some of the hardware is broken but I don't have the expertise to figure out where.  I hope they will let me return it, it's less than thirty days old...

For now I'm working on my ancient tablet PC, it's functional, but far from perfect.  I miss my computer.

Anyways, I do have things to update with, more work on Davesprite!

I airbrushed him orange (which turns out is just one of the shades of yellow that I already have), and I made his tail!

If anyone wants to know more about how I made the tail I can go into it, but I didn't take any photos of the progress, whoops!

So now I have to decide what to do for his eyes?  There's just no good reference for his eyes!

Tiny orange wings

So I've started working on the wings for the Davesprite Obitsu!  Unfortunately... I don't like them x(

My biggest problem: I didn't buy enough feathers.  I bought twenty, thinking it would be enough, but in reality I just needed more even if I wasn't going to use the full feathers.

Now I'm thinking I might try some other material for the wings, or just buy some premade resin ones or something :(

Momentary lapse

Sorry I've been gone for so long, but my father's recovery from his heart surgery took longer than expected!  He's still obviously recovering, but he's home now so it's so much easier than having to go to the hospital every day!

Now that I'm back I'm working on another little Homestuck Obitsu, since I ordered two more from theJunkySpot.com

I'm going to be making a character called Davesprite (he'll come up under google if you want to look), who's got orange skin this time.  So that means I have to change the whole body color of this doll first!  Or, well, half of it.  He has a 'tail' kind of thing instead of legs, so I separated the body at the hip.  At first I was worried that I was going to have to break something to get it apart, but Obitsus are surprisingly easy to take apart!

All I had to do was pop the little balls on the top of the thighs off with some pliers, and the hips popped right off after!  Since there's such a nice arrangement inside with the joints, it will be perfect to attach elastic to for the tail!  Some kind of armature would be ideal for the tail so it could hold poses better, but I think strung elastic will work just fine.

Now I also have a random pair of hips and legs for... something else?

Next I took all the pieces that I could apart!  I could have taken the stomach piece off too, and probably will before airbrushing, but didn't for the photo.  I had to make sure to remove ALL of the joint pieces, since they're what I'm working on right now.

So here they all are!  Very small, but a huge nuisance.  Since any kind of surface paint that I put on kept chipping off, no matter how many layers or what type of sealant I used, the only other option I could think of was to dye them.  I decided to just go for it since if they didn't turn out well I would have to go back to finding a different surface treatment to cover them, and it would cover up a bad dye job if need be.

I didn't think of it until I had already tried it, but these joints actually come apart into two pieces if you're handy with two pairs of pliers.  I should have done this first since for some reason that I can't fathom they made each side out of a different type of vinyl, so each half takes the dye differently from the other.  What this meant is that one half took dye much quicker than the other.

It wasn't a difficult fix though, I just took them apart after, put the lighter pieces back in the dye bath and then put them back together.  They're not perfect, the dye went on slightly uneven (I used RIT fabric dye, but it was the powdered version and I had trouble getting the crystals entirely dissolved) but since they will be mostly hidden inside the joints I'm not that concerned.

The point is that dyeing the joints actually WORKED!  I'm so pumped, this means that I won't have to edit out huge white splotches in photos where there's chipping in the joints.  The rest of the body I can airbrush since there shouldn't be an issue with rubbing.

More work on the obitsu!

I have been working more on the little custom obistu to be a Homestuck troll.  For now I'm just leaving the body alone, since it will be an awful lot of work to fix.  I'm thinking of trying to dye it next time?  Since chipping at the joints is a huge issue.

But for now what I've done is sew some clothes and add hair.  I'm really not the best there is at placing wefts, so there is er, a bald spot or two around the back of the head, and maybe a few wefts still showing, but it's acceptable I think?  I also know nothing about how to cut hair, so I just kind of winged it.

The clothes... were so hard to make ^^;  I'll make sure to take some photos of the size of this doll when it's done, but it's an 11cm doll, so the clothes are very small.  Thankfully the jeans fabric was stiff enough that I could put it through the machine, but the shirt not so much.

Looks like the hair needs some taming on top there, I think I'm just going to use glue.

No updates, bad me x(

Sorry for the sudden lack of updating!  I've been having some of those days where everything I do turns to a big pile of crap.  I kept trying to switch from one thing to the other, but... sigh, nothing is going.

So here's one of my failures, since I have nothing successful to show :(


A while ago I bought a few little Obitsu dolls, since they're awfully cute sometimes and especially cheap.  I wanted to try out one of their new tiny ones, the 11cm ones.  They're very similar to Pukipukis from Fairyland, only significantly cheaper!  I think I paid around $28 for one with a head from Junkyspot.com

I just let it sit around for a long time before I decided that I might like to try making a little Homestuck character?  Have you heard about Homestuck?  It's a webcomic at MSPaintAdventures.com

Anyways, I thought I could try to make one of my favorite characters from it into a little doll!  So here's my trying to make Sollux Captor into a little Obitsu.  The first problem was that I needed to make the skin gray, so airbrush away!

Then I tried to seal it and well... I don't know if you've seen sealant gone wrong, but something here has gone so, so wrong.

I've used sealant enough to know why this happened.  I didn't let some part of it dry enough, so it crackles like a mother.  I now get to look forward to wiping it all off, mixing the same shade of gray again, and sealing once I'm absolutely sure that it's dry.

Somehow the issue did not effect the head, so I went ahead and painted a face!

My only issue is that I do not have a gloss that I've found to work on vinyl that will dry completely.  Should I try Tamiya?  I use Liquitex, hm.