Custom Blythe #1 Cherry’s Face-up
Turns out, in between the wind and the rain, there was a calm sunny moment last night and I rushed to take advantage of it. I managed to do Cherry’s face-up and eye lids!! She’s all ready now, just waiting for those darn eye chips and the bugger of a body, that just don’t want to show up. Oh well, at least she’s ready now for whenever they might arrive. I will obviously still need to put her back together, which might prove quite the challenge yet.
Anyway, on to the main event – the face-upping! I wanted Cherry to look very girly and pretty, with red lips and cheeks, with a reference to her name. So that’s what I set out to accomplish. Here’s all the stuff ready for starting the work:
These are the same brands I use for my BJD face-ups:
I’ve done BJD face-ups for a couple of years already, so this was nothing new to me as such. I learned the tricks of the trade back in the days by watching Andreja’s face-up stories a.k.a. Nicolle’s Dreams videos on Youtube. I highly recommend those for beginners, where you see how it’s done in great quality videos. She has also done some very good Q&A videos with all the info on what tools and how to:
Well, on to Cherry’s face-up. I’m used to working on resin, so it was at first disconcerting to work on this different type of plastic, but in essence it was really quite similar a process. I went about it exactly the way I do with my BJDs: foundation blushing, sealant in between, building up colour, again sealant, accents, sealant, final layers, sealant and gloss varnishing lips – done! Hehe! Here’s a WIP progress chart which will give you a much better idea of what I mean:
I checked in the end if I had added enough colour, because Cherry’s hair is dark and too light tone a face-up would get washed out in photos. I thought there was enough, so I did the varnishing then. I use Game gloss varnish for that.
Here she is all ready now with a face:
The eye lids proved the hardest for me. BJDs don’t often have them as visible and certainly not like this. I had no idea what would work there and I was not sure how thick a layer of colour I could apply there without it causing problems with the eye mechanism and closing the eyes. I first tried a pale green tone for her and meant to draw little cherries on top, but gosh, it was not good. It looked messy and out of place for her. Luckily acrylics are water soluble! Hehe! I decided to go with something more traditional for my first custom girl then. So that's how they ended up looking. I’ve yet to test whether the lids will work, but I’ll know once the eye chips get here and I can put the eye mech back in her head.
I’m rather pleased with how she turned out. I’m just nervously waiting for the putting back together part. The assembling might be a bit of a violent business. I hope her face survives it all and I’ll have a full Little Big Head in my hands yet one day. Hehe! Now just some more waiting… ;)
