#mjd

By the way, this cafe now has a new little dog.

I got more scrunchies and a clip bow!So here are my dolls again!

Originals:

Since the eyelashes for her arrived at the start of this week (and the weather has started to cool down, my gods I am not built for this weather) I spent my Friday afternoon re-doing some of Maria's makeup. Before we start, here is Maria's face before changing anything. The original eyelash design I added is a stylised design based on the painted eyelashes on standard model Dollfie Dreams, 1/3 Azone dolls, and Smart Dolls.

Step one is then to remove the paint where I want to replace it. I used Volks' eco paint remover for this since I knew this would be suitable to do it without damaging the vinyl. The technique here is to dip a cotton bud (a q-tip for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic) into the solution and gently wipe this across the area to be cleaned. This meant I could be fairly precise with what I wanted to remove, so I've kept most of her eyeliner and eyeshadow along with some of the blush on her cheeks.

I didn't remove all of the colour from her lips either since the cotton bud couldn't get deep enough to remove the deeper shading and I stopped before fully removing the lip colour.

Then we get to the new makeup! I did the lips first, making use of what the Volks video I learned them from called "smile techniques" and using a colour gradient to make the lips look a little more realistic. The key change here is adding extra shading and shaping the colour at the corners of the mouth so the edges of the mouth look upturned, making Maria look a little more cheerful.

The eyelashes were tricky as I needed to keep re-pointing my brush but thinning the paint a bit (as well as using a slightly brownish grey rather than solid black) helped a lot. Lastly came the glued-on eyelashes, which was by far the trickiest part and so I'd advise only doing this if you're confident of your skill with fine work. I added a flexible fabric glue with a pin and placed the sections of eyelashes in place with fine tweezers. Just to make sure, I also added extra glue on either side to secure the lashes once the initial glue had dried.

So now we come to the big reveal, here is Maria with her new makeup!

I'm so pleased with the result, she looks extremely cute with the new makeup! I think the only change I might make is adding some gloss to her lips at some point (even if I can find it, I think the old pot of Citadel gloss varnish in my cupboard has solidified so I will need to get some new gloss varnish) to make her lips look a little more realistic, much as Volks do with their Super Dollfie faces.

there’s a time and a place / that I thought I knew / but now I know I can’t / be the girl I used to know / even though I thought I could

I especially love this glass fish tank. The goldfish are constantly swimming, while the dolls are still.

The doll in the pink dress is Suzu, written as "雀" in Chinese. This character usually refers to the order Passeriformes. If you were to sculpt her as an animal, I think she would be a white canary.

She came to my house with Ito, so perhaps she could be considered Ito's sister.