|
Reasons for repainting:
After seeing some Dollstown heads painted as children in an issue of Haute Doll, my friend asked if I would paint a natural childlike appearance for her doll. My friend sent two of her (relatively older, 2005) doll heads to me, one to paint just for practice. She had purchased a new Domuya-ONE flexi-body on the forum Den of Angels, which she thought would be ideal for the Dollstown Estella head. Since the seller lives in the USA, as do I, the doll body was mailed to me (Later I would mail the dolls to England, where my friend lives). When I saw the doll body, I asked my friend if she would like for me to color-match the heads to the new body with glazes of resin color. The heads were paleskin (a Dollstown term for almost-white); the new body, pinkish-peach resin. After removing all the original paint, I used sable brushes to apply two coats of resin-paint glaze for skin tone. As each basecoat was drying, I blended in shadowing/blushing on both heads, for a seamless effect. I think ears are lovely shapes and add so much life to a doll when blushed like human ears. I also blushed the new hands and feet and created natural nails.
Both heads seemed lovely when repainted, so no practice head was needed after all. I made different eyebrows on each, so my friend would have different expressions. In the photos here, the red-haired doll is using the Domuya-ONE body, so has more perfect skin-tone matching, face and body. At present, the blond doll has a body made by Elfdoll. Each of the dolls in about 60 cm tall (23.6 inches), comparable in size to the Super Dollfie (SD) size made by the Japanese company Volks.
Both of the head sculpts are Dollstown Estella, sculpted by An Jonghak of South Korea in 2004 and first produced (sold) in 2005. Here are some LINKS. (Please note that I am NOT affiliated with any doll company.)
Here is a link to the Dollstown company website
Here is a link to a Dollstown website page about the Estella sculpt, with photos and information
Here is a link to the Domuya website (doll body on redhead)
In some of the photos (at the ocean shore and indoors), the dolls have only painted eyelashes. In other indoor photos, they have applied eyelashes in lightest brown.
In these photos, the dresses are from Just Shining of Australia. In a couple photos, the redhead doll is wearing a pale-blue Alice in Wonderland dress by Val Zeitler (with Dollheart), a special edition from Haute Doll.
Just as artists who work on reborn baby dolls do, I used a blush of shadow-colors in creases, dimples, and concave areas of the face and hands. Variations of the cheek color are on the nose and chin, at the skin-corners of the lips, at inner corners of the eyes, along the inner edge of eyelids, in the nostrils, in the collar bone crevice, on the inner fingertips, inside the ears and on earlobes. My only regret is that I did not transform the one set of teeth to become more subtle with new paint, since the lines between the teeth seem a bit too obvious in the original state. None of my paint pigments use lead or cadmium. While I painted this doll only for adult collectors, I wanted the paint to be safe around children.
|
