The weather here near Seattle has finally improved enough that I feel confident doing faceups again! Plus I’ve been working on a DDP outfit that would be perfect for this DDH-12 girl, so I had to give her a quick faceup. This time I used a plum-colored acrylic paint for the eyelashes and I think it works very nicely. Really I have a lot of other projects I should finish first, but I think that taking some time to fix her up will pay off later. At least I hope I can work her into some future plans!
I took a more relaxed approach to symmetry and line quality with these faceups, but I think the results are pretty good for the time spent. They look more sketchy in close-up view but from normal viewing distance it looks fine. Fewer back-and-forth revisions meant I was able to do a couple faceups and some blushed hands all in the same week. Making faceups for myself means I also feel confident trying some colors and materials I haven’t used before.
The DDP default hands really bugged me because of some webbing between the fingers, similar to the Volks SDC. I can sort of understand with resin, the materials are more brittle and joining the fingers can help with demolding the resin, but for vinyl it just seems useless and ugly. Fortunately it wasn’t too tricky to clean up the webbing and I gave the hands a bit of blush and nail gloss, too. I like to have naturalistic blushed hands for all my gals but have not kept up with the new ones lately. I should also add that her cute free-size blouse is made by Puppy52 and fits DDP pretty well.
Meanwhile painting the DDH-12 girl, I also gave Towa a new look. My goal here was to try some lighter softer colors and more pink than usual. I also did a bit of highlighting on the eyelashes but I’m not sure how successful that was. I like the idea but I ended up toning it way down in favor of a low contrast look.
Again there’s some apparent asymmetry with the eyebrows and lashes but it’s within a reasonable range so I let it go. I’m hoping to get more confident in an artistic approach that’s less dependent on imitating factory faceups. It’s a hand-painted faceup, so why shouldn’t it look like it’s made by a human? That’s my current theory, anyway!
Towa has a super cute sculpt and a new paint job really brings out the best in her. I think there’s a lot of interesting options around her cute mouth shape for different expressions. Mine ended up pretty subtle- sometimes she has a slight smile, but in other lighting she looks a bit sad/pouty. She could probably have some teeth painted too. I wouldn’t mind trying a different version at some point!