Extreme face painting!

Although I don't post about them as much, I have a budding 1/6th scale doll collection, mostly of charity shop rescues and the odd one from ebay. (like the super cheap 12" Doctor Who figure with one leg who I intend to make into a post apocalyptic cyborg wasteland wanderer. XD)

I've got another Skyrim inspired one to post about soon actually, but I'll leave him til another time.

I bought this 'Get Real Girls' doll a couple of years ago. The range was designed to rival Barbie, with an emphasis on sport and outdoor activities and absolutely zero pink. The clothes and accessories were really good quality, as were the dolls themselves, though I believe Mattel pressured the company behind them to the point that they ceased production, which is a real shame as they had a lot of potential.

While I liked the body, the headsculpt left much to be desired. The facial features, especially the eyes were far too stylised for my taste so she had to have a bit of work done...

Ignore the clothes - the shoulder armour belongs to someone else but she'll probably end up as another wastelander eventually...although now that she's done I'm kinda changing my mind a bit.

To start with I whipped out the acetone and carefully removed her original face paint.

Then, once I'd given the head a quick rinse to remove any remaining acetone, started adding in a new face. This was tricky as the head had no sculpted eyes, so I was painting directly onto smooth plastic with little visual or sculptural clues as to where the eyes should go, so they're a little wonky. (not helped by the fact that all my good tiny brushes weren't tiny enough for the level of detail I wanted.)

She still looked a bit plain so I gave her some freckles and now I love her.

I added in some white 'highlights' which made more of a difference to her expression than I was expecting, though they look a tad green due to the underlying paint seeping through.

I'd covered up her head so I could seal her face, then unwrapped it and dipped it in boiling water to restyle the hair. It wasn't the best quality hair but I'm not ready to attempt re-rooting and I thought it had potential to look good with a little work.

She's far from perfect but I like her a LOT more than I originally did as she has a lot more personality.

I gave her some new hands as the ones she came with - while not as useless as Barbie ones - came with a magnet set into one (presumably to interact with specific accessories) and were therefore not really all that realistic.

My only other GRG doll had an even more extreme makeover a few years back into an alien thief of unknown species - Hetche!

I really want to get back into my sci fi crew- I had great plans for photostories and things but, like many projects I start, I end up postponing them for ages, which is frustrating to say the least.

Also, random thought but I realised today that this is the first time in the history of this blog that I've managed to post at least once EVERY month! Woot!