BJD Finn Faceup

OKAY. So don't be scared by the freaky looking doll face with no eyes, please. XD This is a Featherfall "Finn" head, which was designed by my friend Apis and sculpted by an artist and made into an actual doll. My friend Kat won this head from a doll clothing design contest Apis held awhile back, and she generously gave it to me so I could use it to practice faceups.

Doing this kind of art is something I think I'd have fun with, it's basically like being a makeup artist but for cool, expensive, personalized dolls that people own. XD It's a fun hobby and I hope to get my own doll someday. They are, however, around $800 bucks looking at just the basics of a body, head, and maybe a faceup, eyes, and some hair. Custom faceups done by artists generally go for pretty expensive, like around $50 and upwards because they're so detailed, time intensive and supplies consuming.

So I'm thinking if I could possibly get good at this and maybe get some good supplies, like spray, gloss, pastels and what have you (or even an airbrusher in the future) I could make quite a hunk of change doing faceup commissions for people. And to invest in the BJD economy in an even better way, I'll purchase my very own doll one day using the money I make! (Read: Splurge and spend any precious money I may acquire while in school and spend it on a doll instead of necessities such as food.)

So that's why I want to start doing it, aside from the fact that it's fun. Anywho, I just tried doing my first faceup last night at Claire's, so onto the results:










I think for the most part, I did pretty good for my first try. I went for something simplistic so I could learn the basics without diving into anything too complicated right away. There are a lot of obvious screw ups, and I'm gonna be completely honest, after about 4 hours I started to get lazy and I wasn't putting as much effort into steadying my hand as I should have been. Doing the stuff like the eyebrows with a thin brush is actually not that difficult, you just have to know how much paint to have on the brush, and knowing how to paint with acrylic beforehand definitely helps with this.

The lips are a bit lopsided, which is something I sort of knew was happening as I was painting but chose to ignore anyway, lol. There are also a couple of spots on his right cheek where the MSC got dented while drying, and a few paint blobs that I was too lazy to try and clean off. It's easy to get rid of pastel, but not so easy to get rid of acrylic, especially after it's dried and you already have like 8 layers of MSC down and don't wanna ruin the entire thing. I figured that I would just live with the little mistakes in favour of not having to start from square one.

That being said, the mistakes I made were mostly little. I didn't do any huge "OMFG SHIT" paint puddles in his tear duct or anything. I just worked slowly and built up the colours and layers. So that's encouraging. I think if I sit down at a desk where I can rest my hand and take proper breaks every hour or so I could do a really decent job, as opposed to sitting on Claire's couch, holding it with one hand and watching Veronica Mars for like 8 hours straight.

I think the main things that need work are:

- The eyebrow hairs are pretty smooth and balanced in shape for the most part, but I did screw up on a couple strokes. I need to learn how to fix them without taking off any of the MSC if that's even at all possible, or I might remedy this by using watercolour next time instead of acrylic.

- The lips are lopsided, and the crease could be more steady, same with the lip lines. ALSO, they do not have any gloss, which they should. I didn't get a chance to experiment with that, I wanted to see how thinning out the gloss would work, but alas Claire didn't have any as she lent it to her friend.

-The pastel is chunky/blotchy. It doesn't look so bad in these pictures, but you can tell when you look at it in real life. I think I got it pretty smooth for the most part, but I'm still unhappy with the unevenness, and I think I can blame this mostly, again, on the too-many-layers thing. It ended up with uneven distribution and etc. etc. I also thing the blushing is too dark around the sides of the face, chin and nose, especially for a head with such a pale resin colour.

The biggest mistake I would say is that I overworked it. Instead of doing everything in one layer, if I messed something up, instead of trying to go back and fix it I just kept mixing paint and going over it til it looked how I wanted, which gave it a very "painted on" look and not very natural at all. The biggest trick I think is that less is more and you basically have to get it right in one or two layers or it will look too caked. So that's something I'll try for next time-- as little number of layers as possible, and one chance to make it look the way you want (before you erase, haha.)

I also didn't get to try putting on eyelashes, but that's something I'm sure I'll get to try eventually.

So, that leaves us with this: Any suggestions on what I should aim for with my next faceup? Any ideas for a faceup that is unique, challenging, or a new technique so I can vary my style from what I'd normally do?

PS. I did also post a thread over at Den of Angels so for those of you who are also on the forum, if you'd like to provide your feedback there instead, it might help me out a bit more to discuss it sort of within the community. :D

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