¡Hola! Me llamo Marigold

This is my Monster High Skelita Calaveras' debut!

My amazing boyfriend bought me Skelita for Valentine's day - it wasn't an intentional gift, I bought him a present and he was just going to make dinner for us (which he did, and it was incredible!) but when we were walking through work (we work in Tesco) I saw a Scaris City of Frights Skelita on the shelf and got all excited because she's been so hard to find, and she was the first Skelita I'd actually seen in person.

B asked me if I'd like her as a Valentine's present and I got a bit shy and said yes, so he promptly bought her for me and yaaaaaaay I have a Skelita!

Naturally she was never going to stay in the box!

Poppy II: La segunda parte...

Finally! I've started to get somewhere at last!

The spray paint actually worked this time, I built up the layers finely and slowly and left her to dry for a few hours without touching her at all. I came back this evening and started to draw on her calavera markings with watercolour pencil.

I'm really pleased with the progress and hopefully this face-up will look pretty good when it's done! The great thing about this being a painted white mask is that the colour difference between my NS bodies and this yellowed WS head is that no one will be able to see the overlap of colour unless they take off her wig or look very closely.

Poppy

I am pulling my hair out with this girl.

My project head (a modded and re-modded old Volks F-05 (F-03 under new FCS numbering)), is being very irritating!

I've decided I want to make her a calavera (Mexican sugar skull), so first I have to create a smooth white base to then draw my designs on.

On Saturday I started painting her with white artist acrylic. It was too thick and streaky. I thinned it, it was too thin and streaky. I washed the whole thing off and today I decided to try again with white Games Workshop spray paint. Layer 1 went on smoothly. Layer 2, looking good. Layer 3...where the hell did that dust come from? Layer 4...why is it all bumpy? :(

I still think spray is the way to go, but after scraping four layers of the stuff off today, I'm too beaten down to try again. The picture above is layer 3 of spray paint, before it went all rubbish.

You can also see how uneven her eye mods are, but meh. I'm not even in the realm of caring about those at the moment, especially when they're going to be spray painted again and then painted over in black. They're the least of my worries. Her mouth is uneven too, but that's entirely original, so if Volks doesn't worry about that, I won't worry about her eyes.

I've been working hard at designing the face I want to draw on her. I think I want the traditional flowers on her forehead, chin and temples, but I do want spider webs and hearts too. I just need to work out a nice placement for them.

How do you solve a problem like Mojito?

I am having style problems with my Unoa Sist. I originally planned for her to have a mint green colour scheme and wear pastels...so far so good. Only, when I did her face-up and tried her wig on her, Mojito didn't look the way I wanted her to look.

So I changed tack. I figured perhaps Mojito wasn't a minty, pastelly girl. Inspired by ClockworkAngel's amazing psychobilly doll Cherry~Sue, I thought 'why not make her a rockabilly chick?'

So, I wiped off the pastel face-up with the mint green eyebrows I kinda liked, and did a more rockabilly style one, with glossy red lips, dark eyeshadow and eyeliner and some nifty black arched eyebrows.

I ordered her a new wig, a natural black one with curls and waves in a rockabilly style. It arrived today and... what an awful wig. I do expect that there's a difference between a wig that looks good on a large doll and a wig that is scaled down for a smaller doll, but this is barely recognisable as the wig I wanted. It is supposed to be black on top and brown underneath (I was going to snip off the brown) and the wig I received is a multitonal brown/black thing. There are even stray blue fibres in there from another wig.

So, I was forced to wash and restyle the wig. It's currently drying on top of a ball of kitchen paper put on top of a bottle so it'll dry in the right shape without putting a wet wig directly on my doll.

I've started re-reading the Hunger Games and now I want Mojito to be all pastels and fun colours again like Effie Trinket. I really don't know what to do with her!!

In good news though, I've received her feet and I got some high heel feet and option part hands as well, so there are more parts to play with as I try and figure out who she is.

Watch this space!

Gwenllian's gone to the spa

Well, Gwenllian has now gone to Viridian House for her face-up. I'm going to miss her being around. It's been nice having my 'big 3' together, but when Gwenllian comes back with her new make-up she'll be perfect!

My last try at getting Gwenllian a body of her own didn't work out - there was a language barrier and a lot of misunderstandings - but I've found another SD13 body on the DoA Marketplace and I'm looking into that one now. It's an L bust, so if I do get this one, Gwenllian will probably inherit Morideryn's M bust body and Deryn will be upgraded! Deryn's steampunk outfit looks great on her, but it was made for dolls with a bigger bust!

Tomorrow I'm going to start working on the Ikea Duktig bed I bought months ago. I set it up perfectly fine, but it's a strange size. Only 1/4 scale dolls can lie down in it, but the bedposts are too chunky for them really. It really looks like a doll bed if you put a MSD-size doll in it. I want to convert it into a sofa for my big girls to sit on, because it'd look more correctly scaled for them.

What I need to do, is make a seat back from thick cardboard, make seat cushions and back panels and work from there. I'm going to make it so that it can be converted back into a bed if I want it to.

Happy Summer Guaranteed

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about my incoming Momoko, Happy Summer Guaranteed Pink ver., who was being sold as junk on Mandarake!

Well, she'll arrive tomorrow! The Post Office and Parcelforce have been closed for Easter, but post should start moving again and according to the tracking she's ready for delivery in Deeside!

What makes this super exciting is that her new hair arrived on Saturday! I ordered the £3 skeins of katsilk saran hair in 'Hazelnut' and 'Cognac' colours from MyLittleCustoms.com and they look great. The Cognac hair is quite a bright brandy red, but once it's mixed with the Hazelnut it won't be too overpowering. I'm going to blend the colours so that each hairplug has some strands of each colour, making her hair colour multi-tonal. I want to avoid giving her definite streaks of colour in case they don't blend well and I want her to look fairly natural.


I'm not sure about names just yet. I'm thinking Shiloh might be a good name though. I've been learning Hebrew at a slow pace for a month or so now and Shiloh is the first word I was able to read and understand!

Adventures in Crafting

Not content with the other outstanding projects I've got on the go, I've found myself a new one!

I was browsing the Mandarake site when I saw a forlorn Momoko being sold as junk because her hair was cut and her lips were partially rubbed off. When I looked up which Momoko she was she became a must have - she's a Happy Summer Guaranteed Pink ver. Momoko, which means she's the rarer, alternative version to the standard Happy Summer Guaranteed. She's a tan skin doll with blonde hair and pale lips. Although I didn't much like her in her original form, I can't wait to transform her into a new doll because I've always wanted a tan Momoko!

I'm going to reroot her in a blend of hazelnut and cognac saran hair (from My Little Customs again) to give her a multi-tonal hair colour. Warm brown mixed with the dark red is going to look awesome next to her tan. I'm going to paint her lips coral or a tan brown and paint in her teeth. I may gloss them a little as well.

Pretty excited about this project. I'm making clothes for her as well because she won't have a stitch when she arrives.

Ghoulia Yelps

I've done it again! Well... My Abbey Bominable hasn't even arrived yet and I'm already planning the next custom. Creating Chathabialeh zh'Bomeen will be a tiny custom compared with this one.


I'm going to be customising Ghoulia Yelps into a Cardassian original character called Glinn Otala Zeltan. This means I have to wipe her face-paint, cut her hair off, reroot her, add Cardassian facial ridges, repaint her and make her a Cardassian military uniform. It should be worth it though.


Otala is one of my favourite original characters, I have such a soft spot for Cardassians anyway, but Otala is a special one to me. She's not a sue though, I wouldn't handle things the same way she does!


I've already ordered some black saran hair and rerooting needles from My Little Customs, I need to head out to the craft shop in Llandudno tomorrow to pick up some grey coloured Fimo. Fimo is awesome stuff. You shape it like plasticine or clay and then bake it at a low temperature to set it. This is how I'll be making Otala's facial and sternum ridges and extended Cardassian neck. I'll model the Fimo on her and then carefully remove it and bake it. When it's set I'll be able to glue it directly to her face and body and with some blushing it should blend in well if I find the right grey.


What I was astonished at when I took off all the face paint is how angular and Cardassian her face actually is. Ridges would complete the pictures, but she has very chiselled features already and her ears are set quite high, which is going to look perfect when her mods are finally done. Monster High dolls actually look prettier when they have less make-up, I think. Ghoulia has lovely lips, but you can't really tell until you take the red lipstick off.

Rerooting Repainting

For the past couple of days I've been looking at fashion dolls rather than my usual BJDs. I've always liked fashion dolls, but they've gone by the wayside a little while I've been more interested in BJDs, mainly because I've found BJDs to be more customisable...but! Almost everyone I know has been busily getting into Monster High repaints and while I enjoy doll painting, I'm not under any illusions that I'm half as good as any of the amazing repainters out there.


Instead, I've been looking into rerooting dolls, which seems like a fun (permanent!) alternative to wigs. My Sekiguchi Unoa doll has a really mean fringe and blonde locks that I don't mind, but don't care for terribly either. I wouldn't want to ruin her by doing a terrible amateurish reroot, but I really do want to have a go. Payday is a week away, so I'm thinking of buying some nylon hair and a rerooting needle from My Little Customs and having a go rerooting an unloved Momoko or Monster High doll. They do sell Monster High girls in work, but I know that as soon as I buy one boxed I'll want to keep her mint and I'll feel bad about cutting her hair off and pulling it out :s


I've been scouring eBay and Flickr for adoptable MH and Momokos, haven't found the right one yet for the right price. I really want a Momoko because I know she'll fit in, but I'd work with a MH doll too.