Iza's Face Ups

I decided to redo the theme on my Magic Mirror Fairy and regular Branwen in quartz to better suit her name, Rune. I chose to go with Rovás Runes for her as my ancestry is Hungarian, and it felt fitting.

I chose to go from top to bottom with general runes, as it over all is a written alphabet that is read right to left, and is actually much more phonetically accurate to write Hungarian with instead of the Latin-based alphabet that is commonly used. Though the old Hungarian Runes are making a comeback, so that is lovely to see.

The translation of the runes in the left line top to bottom are: Wisdom/Deeper meaning/Understanding, Beginnings/Inspirations/the Self, Challenge/Opportunity/Growth, Power/Generosity/Authority, and Mastery/Achievement/Skill

The translation of the right line top to bottom reads: Joy/Celebration/Success, Flow/Unseen/Emotion, Expression/Articulation/Truth, and Strength/Action/Vitality

At least I hope that's what they mean, or I'll be sad despite my research!

Here's the comparisons of the two faceplates previous to current faceups. I did like the old faceups, but they just weren't right for her I feel. So off they came and she was repainted.

I also changed her outfit too, and I made her new eyes back in January. I loved the Ashuradark eyes in her, but I've discovered my love for making my own eyes. Still gotta make at least a dozen for my dolls as I want to swap them from acrylics to resin, and even some away from the plain glass ones they got.

Commissions are open!

This little fella is a Doll Chateau Larry that I repainted for my mother recently. She originally only wanted me to paint the body, but I offered to redo the 9 year old faceup too, which had also been painted by me. I opted to paint on a hairstyle for him because the head is a weird shape and makes finding wigs extremely hard.

Honestly, I think the painted on hair is really cute, I even did a little spiral just for extra cute snail-like goodness. On top I added a layer of shimmery acrylic gloss to give the hair a nice sparkly sheen.

Here's the before and after of the little guy. His theme has always been blue as it's my mom's favorite color. I'm not sure why I didn't give him any proper blushing back then, but I suspect I wanted to keep him mostly monochrome. Glad I changed that!

I made him some new 8mm eyes too, because his original glass eyes were bad, the pupils were vastly different sizes, and it bothered me how black they looked inside the head. So yeah, new eyes, faceup, and body blushing.

Quick comparison of his old look from 2017 vs 2026. What a glowup! I did not repaint the shell or eyestalks as I felt they had held up well over the years. They aren't even faded, so good job paints from back then!

Commissions are open!

I repainted this old gal of mine, a recently arrived LoongSoul Chloe in white skin. She's from 2016, I got her secondhand recently and she luckily arrived in great shape. Naturally her faceup needed to be redone, as all my dolls need to be painted by me.

She's nice and shimmery, and has a lovely set of ornate antlers with vines and roses on them.

Here's the video I did to show off the shimmer. My DSLR can never capture the sparkle just right, so often videos are needed to truly appreciate the faceups. Her eyes are random glass eyes I had in my stash, but I've made her new eyes by now.

Here's a pic of her with her new resin eyes made by me and her wig, but her antlers hadn't been blushed yet, as I blushed them much later.

I'm adding the antlers blush-job to this post regardless, because they do go with her. One day I will paint her hooves, perhaps even in the next few weeks. One can dream, right?

I kept the antlers blushing delicate, to keep the translucency of the clear resin they are cast in. I also wanted to keep the colors with her theme, delicate lilac purple for the roses and gold for the vines because she has pale gold eyes and fantasy detailing on her faceup. Eventually she will have a yellow-grey dress, but I gotta wait another month for it to be made.

Commissions are open!

Today I get to show off all 3 of my Fairyland LTF Juri 2013 faceups. The first is normal, the dreaming and the sleeping heads are modded to create more expressions for her.

I'm happy I repainted her finally, as I last painted her in 2024 and I definitely didn't like how she turned out. I had just made the switch from watercolor to acrylic paints for detailing, and I didn't have the thinning or extending of the paint down yet.

Couple of before and afters of each faceplate:

See what I mean? The old faceups were messy and the paint was definitely too think. I love how soft she is now though, I also gave her forehead scales again.

Another comparison of all 3 faceplates together. I literally painted them assembly line style. Basically I'd paint a scale on one face, then I'd switch to the next face to paint a scale in the same spot, and then on the third as well. I did that until all 3 faceplates looked same enough.

I also have a video showing off the shimmer and shine on them:

Isn't she lovely? It looks like she fell asleep to me, which I love. In the video I made her some new resin eyes, as I wasn't happy with how lacking in depth her acrylic eyes were (featured in the still images).

Here are the two sets of purple kitty eyes I made for her, since her third face is sleeping, I didn't need eyes for it. I've been having a lot of fun making eyes, and am offering them for commission as well!

I'll be posting images of her put together on my photo blog @izasbjdphoto soon. I really need to take her outside or setup a little scene for her.

Commissions are open!

I got a fun little commission recently to emulate the Little Sister from the first Bioshock game in a Luts TDF Bell in grey skin. It was fun to make her grungy and to keep her colors monochromatic. It was interesting giving her a kind of sad expression without eyebrows, a good challenge!

All 700 of my faceups in order of completion

It's been almost 15 years since I started doing faceups in August/September of 2011 on my first bjd, my Resinsoul Ai.

I've painted her 8 times so far, always 99 faceups apart so she could always be the 100th since the last time I painted her. I started this collage when I did my 50th faceup, boy was it hard to find pictures of all the previously completed faceups p until that point.

The collage used to be just one image up until I reached 500 completed faceups, but neither my computer nor photoshop could handle the file anymore, so I split it up into sections of 50.

This faceup on my Resinsoul Ai in normal skin from 2011 (back then the normal color was called fleshtone) is special as it is my 700th completed faceup! I can definitely see the improvement of skill.

It's been 2,5 years since I last painted her, so I am happy with my growth. She was my first resin BJD from back in June of 2011. And she also had sported my first faceup from August/September of the same year. Let me show her with my first faceup:

I had help back then on the eyebrows and eyelashes. But I am happy with my growth since then! 15 years almost and I did 700 faceups. Damn, what a milestone!

I'll finish the post with a picture of her on her body, dressed, and wigged. I need to take full body pics of her...

I recently painted a 3D Printed BellaBugs Acacia in tan skin, but I color matched her to Fairyland tan skin. The eyes are made by me, but they are C grade at best (bubbles over the pupil), but they are nice enough for pictures!

Let me show you how she looked before:

She was quite different from the tan the client wanted her to be.

And then here is after the successful color match and with the faceup in place. Fun times!

I managed to paint one of my own dolls, a Lost Chronicles Naris in normal skin, while I was waiting for more commissions to trickle in. I’ve wanted this head a long time, so I’m ecstatic to have one. His Faceup can’t really be appreciated in photos, so I made a video:

just look how wonderfully shiny and sparkly he is! My favorite part are his ears, I love creative elf ears.

My only sadness is that one of my mom’s cats knocked him off my desk and broke one of his ear tips and the piece is gone forever. Luckily I have all the necessary materials and tools that I could resculpt the missing ear tips and blushed it to match. Now I can barely tell where the break is even though I know that it’s there.

I will end the post soon, I just gotta gush about how nicely his ears poke out of the wig. I want to dye his wig greener, but all in due time…

More pictures can be found on my photo blog @izasbjdphoto

This is the third Dream Valley Olivia I’ve painted, and I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of this adorable sculpt. She’s based on a friend’s v-tuber model, so I did a hybrid of my normal Faceup style with anime mixed in. She’s in white skin, and does have a white wig, but the model had black eyebrows and eyelashes, so I went with that.

I also made the eyes with resin, only my third attempt at sparkle eyes, and my most successful one yet!

She’s also really sparkly, as are the eyes. The video shows her off well I think! I might still do a new video of her, but this’ll do.

I wish I could upload a second video to this post without needing to reblog it (because let’s face it, I’m gonna forget to reblog by the time this posts from my queue) as I really am proud of these eyes!

I will be painting her body and fantasy parts soon!

Today I get to show not one, but two Faceups on some spare Sugary Girls 1/8 MJD Blind Box doll heads! Not bjds due to the joints construction, but they are definitely cute. I struggled to paint the eye chips as normal doll eyes don’t fit really inside the head cavity, and I chose to paint the no-eye head to be a sleeping head to match to the open-eye one.

My wife did a GO for the full set of them, and received a ton of extra faces and heads, including a whole blank body and two blank wigs. I’m customizing this one for a friend of mine, and only the wig is left to be painted. I’ll be airbrushing it, once the multitude of cats is gone and order is once again restored within our home... anyway, I’ve included some bodied pics in this post!

here you can see just how small these heads are in my smallish hands. I’m gonna use the rest of the faces as practice heads for anime faceups, I do feel I am improving with each one!

I repainted my wife’s Soom LittleGem Special Order Golden Light Shale unicorn Centaur with open eyes. Her old Faceup was from a long long time ago, like 12 years, so it was high time for a redo (it was in good condition, but faded and I’ve learned a lot since painting her last).

Here’s a few pics of her in my hand taken with my phone. I’m glad I got to paint her horn this time too, it really needed a silver accent!

Of course I needed to make a comparison of the two faceups. The before is from when I’d just finished the Faceup back in like 2014. I’m especially hobby with how much more natural he freckles look now! I also chose to give her black eyelashes instead of grey as they look nicer and work better with her medium grey hair.

I’ll end the post with some quick owner snapshots from her in the doll cabinet! The ring around her horn is the engagement ring I’d gotten for my wife. Her wedding ring naturally is on her finger, but neither of us wear our engagement rings (mine is too small now, and hers has an Opal for a stone and she doesn’t want to lose or damage it).

So this doll has become an expensive and fancy ring holder hah. I do need to restring the doll, she’s super floppy, but I dread it as she’s a centaur and they can be complex to restring…

Got this cute Sprouting Dragon Zilu in Mia white skin that I modded sculpted eyelashes onto before painting her. I also made the eyes, I love their delicate gold shimmer!

I will also need to blush her body and paint her wig a warm dark brown to a warm medium brown (she’s got a resin wig). Soon I hope!

I actually made a second pair of red anime eyes in resin that are 22mm instead of 20mm, just in case my friend wanted her eyes bigger. She now I have spare 22mm anime beast eyes. I do want to make more eyes, and experiment with painting in them…

I just wanted to go a little more into detail about how I reblushed the last two heads I posted, as both are heavily faded and a little greened due to prolonged light exposure. The bigger head is a Soom Thera in bronze from 2015, and the smaller head is a Luts HDF Madeleine in real skin brown from 2016.

This is just how faded they are under their faceups. You can easily tell it’s from sun exposure due to the uneven nature and the fact that the head in the right has built in eyebrows now as the paint from the last Faceup protected the resin color from the light.

First step for me was to blush them with pastels to make the base colors even again. I used different browns and reds to counter the greening. It took about two layers to get them to where I’m happy with their colors.

Next step was my usual, adding the blushing, contouring, and deepening the colors. Pastel colors I used were reds, purples, blues, and some peach tones. I rarely use straight up browns for lighter tans, because I find it often looks unnatural. You’ll also notice that I added the eyebrow base blushing so I know where to paint those.

In the next step I added the eye detailing (brows, lashes, and liner) and a small dusting of shimmer for the two. They are lo at done at this point, only missing their white freckles and then the finishing steps!

Here they are with their white freckles sealed in and they are glossed. I normally do freckles first, before I even blush, because it softens them more. But for white freckles I gotta do them just about last so they don’t discolor when I blush.

Here are the two faceups finished! Not a bad restoration if I may say so!

Here we got another older gal, a Luts HoneyDelf Madeleine in real skin brown from 2016. She also belongs to my dear wife and her color hadn't stayed stable either.

Just like with the previous doll I posted, I restored her coloring with strategic blushing and then painted her. I think she turned out really sweet. The eyes she's wearing are some of my first ones, but they look nice in her I'd say!

Naturally since I painted her last in 2016 I had to do a comparison picture of her previous to current faceup. I'm really happy with my improvement over the last decade.

I admit I still struggle with painting white eyebrows and face the individual hairs show up properly. But it's okay, white is a tricky color for eyebrows and eyelashes and I get better each time!

Have a small owner picture of her with her cookie she's had for literal years. I think it's also around 10 years old, made of polymer clay by a collector in Minnesota, as we bought it at a meetup.

This cute Soom LittleGem Thera in bronze from the 2015 FCE belongs to my dear wife. I last painted her shortly after her arrival in July of 2015.

She's sadly heavily faded in the face, unevenly, due to light exposure as Soom Bronze has always been rather unstable if there's even a smidge of light. But no matter, I managed to mostly restore her original color with strategic blushing!

I love this comparison, because it really shows how much I've improved in the last decade! She looks so much more alive, and the linework is better too. I also have nicer eyelashes now, so those look more natural too. Speaking of eyelashes, I need to soon reorder some...

Here you can see the restored color in the head compared to the faded neck and arms. She's lovely though!

This eye-searingly hot pink doll is a Magic Mirror Fafnir in raspberry from my own collection. She'd arrived with the artist's faceup, but I always gotta do my own.

I used lots of shimmers and some duo-chrome watercolor paints on her to really make her shine.

Sadly once again, the sparklies cannot be truly appreciated without a video, so I included one. She's a goober though and kept flaking off the filigree linework along her cheeks before I could seal her. But I won the war in the end and it's staying put!

Quick comparison of the lovely artist's faceup vs my own. Next time I repaint her I will try to put her eyebrows lower and make them a little thinner as they are kind of taking over haha.

If you'd like to see more put together pictures of her, I did recently post her to my bjd photo blog @izasbjdphoto