Monster High Harpy CAM Painting

Progress photos of painting this girl, I found myself liking her face more and more the more I looked at her :)

First step white highlights.

Next a little color, I was trying to go with something a little bird like.

More color.

Even more color ^^;  At this point I  thought I had messed everything up and this face up was going to be a disaster, but kept going anyways.

Paint the whites of the eyes.

Another layer of white on the eyes, and some black details in the nostrils and corners of the mouth.

Black eyeliner, red water line, and white outline.  I didn't do black eyeliner on the bottom lid since I wanted to keep her a little natural looking, not too much make up.

Painted her iris color.

Black shadows.

A quick initial blend with the eyes.

More blending, this part always takes much longer than the rest of the head combined!

Put a little white in the bottoms of the eyes and blended it.

Little eye shine dots.

Eyelashes.

Eyebrows.

I put some white 'freckles' in, I thought it would be a cute little thing to keep her looking 'bird like' and feathery.  The last step is seal and add gloss!

Voila!

Blank Heads!

I was lucky enough to pick up a few of the new girls when I was at Walmart, so here's a blank photo of all of them!

Part of what makes Monster High dolls so nice is their sculpting.  There's so many small details and differences in each of their faces, someone really cared making them :)

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.

Zutter Bind-It-All Machine

A while ago I found out about home binding machines through an unrelated search on Amazon.  Originally I saw The Cinch, a high end expensive home binding machine.  It had great reviews but the price was more than I had to spend on a fun little thing (it sells for between $65 and $110, depending where you buy it).  It has a lot of options and looked very easy to use.

Through some research I found many scrabooking communities, since they are the main audience for at home binding.  I found a lot of people asking if they should get the Bind-It-All or the Cinch, and surprisingly there was no consensus!  People liked both of them a lot, and that brought me to Zutter's page.

The Bind-It-All, version 2, is what they sell new for $60, better than the price of the Cinch, but still an investment.  At the time though, I was lucky enough to see that at the bottom of their page they were still selling their version 1 of the Bind-It-All.  It didn't have all the features of the version 2, but for $30 I certainly couldn't complain.  So on a whim, I ordered one along with some metal rings for the binding and all together it came out just under $50.

It's a very reasonably sized machine, which was one complaint about the Cinch, that it took up a lot of space.  It's light and although it looks a little confusing at first, if you just follow the little instructions book that it comes with it's incredibly easy to figure out its functions.

My test projects were making little card notebooks.  I used some tarot cards and notebook paper.

I used my matt cutter to cut the stacks of paper to the right size, there's probably a better way to do this!

The paper is all cut down to size!

It took me a little doing to get the holes in the right places, if you're doing less than six holes I found it a little tricky to get everything even.  I also had to punch half the pages at a time, and the two cards at the same time.  The Bind-It-All V1 has a fairly limited width that it can punch through, which it looks like the Cinch can accommodate more thickness with less effort pushing on the handle.

The wires are pretty cheap, so I got some cute pink ones.  You just hook them through...

Put the wires in the machine, and clamp them shut!  It's the most fun part for me, I like doing it, and it makes a nice professional little set of rings.

And all done!  I like it a lot, it's fun to make little notebooks and I'm sure you could make much larger things too.  As for usefulness?  Not as useful as I thought it would be, so I'm glad I only spent $30 on this one.  If you think you would like making your own spiral notebooks though it's great, and I'm sure scrabookers love it :)

Book Binding!

I've been working with all the paper that I got, making bound books! :)