Home

Salesroom

Latest Creations

Doll Gallery

Tips and Tricks for Repainting
If you have any questions please feel free to write!

Painting The Face
• Miscellaneous Supplies
• Paper plate for a palette - (wax coated) you can buy a professional palette if you like, but paper plates are cheap, and it's a LOT easier to just toss them than to try to clean the dried paint from a professional palette
• Towel - I use old rag towels, you can use paper towels if you like, but I'm messy and they dissolve on me.
• Small cup of water to rinse your brushes in
• Toothpicks with bitsy pieces of cotton wrapped around them for correcting minor mistakes
• Q-tips, cotton swabs for shading
Here we Go!

Step One:

Place one drop of each color on your palette, cover each with one drop of your medium/extender and 1/2 a drop of water and mix with your brush - rinsing thoroughly between each color. Using your 18/0 spotter fill in the ‘whites‘ of the eyes with either a cream or a light gray – never ‘white’ – If the face mold is ‘vague’ you can use a regular #2 pencil to draw in the eyes or pull a string across to check for evenness - the corners of the eyes should line up with where the top of the ear attaches to the head.... It should take two-three coats to get a solid color on the eyes, and each coat needs to dry *completely* before you add the next. (at least an hour between coats). Fill in the lips – using the darkest color (if your lips are going to be red, you want a red/brown mixture, if they're going to be coral you want a pure red) – think ‘lip liner’ – the upper lip should extend past the edges of the bottom lip. – you’ll get *some* expression from the shape of the lips. Pursed, smiling, sober, sad…..some face molds are easier to get expressions on than others.

Step Two:

Using your 20/0 liner (or 18/0) roughly sketch in the eyebrows. Use very thin paint and an almost completely dry brush… - the eyebrows are where you’ll get most of your expression – keeping them perfectly matched and identical really isn’t your goal. - Again, if you're not used to working with brushes you can draw in the eyebrows first with a pencil - holding the doll upside down sometimes helps to get them even. The inside 'start' of the eyebrow should line up vertically with the outer edge of the nostril - the outside of the eyebrows should form a 'V' meeting the corners of the mouth and the center of the chin...

Step Three:

Now for the fun part! – The eye-shadow! Use your liner brush for this. First…. – line the upper lid and trace across the crease of the eye using the burnt umber and again, an almost dry brush - fill in solid color in both corners of the eyelid, leaving the center bare and ‘cupped’.

Step Five:

Shading! – choose a mid-range eye-shadow color, thin it *well* - use your spotter and this time you actually do want a 'drop' of paint - apply it to the inner lid and use your shading brush, just barely damp, to drag it across the eyelid – use several transparent coats to get the depth of color you want. – don’t worry about going ‘outside’ the eyebrows or onto the whites, it’s fixable! - if you have 'excess' at the edges use a damp cotton swab and wipe it off

Step Six:

Exactly as you did with the eye-shadow…. – lay a strip of medium gray along the inner eye and drag it across with the shading brush – again, multiple thin coats are much better than a single heavy one.

Step Seven:

Using a medium pink and your liner brush fill in the corners of the eyes and run a line across the bottom eyelid – this one… needs lots of care. You might find it easier to switch this step to number one and fill in the eye whites after you've laid down your pink.

Step Eight:

The iris! Use your 18/0 spotter and fill it very full of your darkest eye color thinned to ‘watery’ and ‘drop’ the paint into the center of the eye and then ‘push’ it with your round brush out into a flattened circle – pay attention to the *whites* of the eyes to get the iris centered. – Holding the doll upside down, in profile, looking up her nose..LOL and using a mirror is also useful. Again, you can use a pencil to draw in the iris first, or you can use the head of a dressmakers pin sanded flat, or a very small dowel.

Step Nine:

Random details here – as long as you’re working with dark brown, line the eyes and thicken the eyebrow, again with a DRY brush and a sketching motion.

Step Ten:

Back to the iris… - use your yellow and the spotter and paint a “C” shape along the bottom ½ of the iris

Step Eleven:

Ok – now take up your liner with the darker color almost dry on the brush and make ‘bicycle spokes’ through the C shape, started at the outer edge and moving in to the center.

Step Twelve:

MORE spokes with a dry liner alternating light and dark (yellow & brown) until you have about what you’re looking for

Step Thirteen:

Pupils! - done just like the iris, but in pure black.

Step Fourteen:

What a difference eyelashes make !! – also in black, use your liner with *very* little paint on the brush – as thin and feathery as you can get them. – eye liner can be as thick or thin as you like.

Step Fifteen:

Highlights in the pupil with pure white. Highlights can be dots or dashes – but are *always* on the same side of both eyes.

Step Sixteen:

Remember those bicycle spokes? – do them again, this time on the lips using the alternating light and dark lip color

Step Seventeen:

Nostrils! – always a good thing to have… use your spotter with very very thin dark brown, drop paint into the hollows and blend with a cotton swap along the edges.

Step Eighteen:

Blush! – wondering what those q-tips were for? – VERY thin paint brushed on the apple of the cheek with the spotter and blended all the way to the hairline with a barely moist q-tip – it's subtle, but important.

Step Nineteen:

Last step – face shading! – exactly as you did the blush – again, go for subtle! – if you can see the lines you need to scrub more with the q-tip! – again, if you want more shadows, put on more layers!

A word about sealers.... - buy the good stuff. Winsor and Newton make the only truly matte sealer I've ever seen, they're in England and you'll have to find them 'on-line' - it's not carried in stores. Both Liquitex and Golden make good gloss and semi-gloss sealers. Don't skimp, a cheap sealer will 'yellow' very quickly. Besides a single bottle will last almost forever!

Taa DAA!

Aren't you proud?