Dollieh Sanctuary

Ok, so, on Monday I stay up for the post to arrive, expecting a package. The mail truck arrives and just leaves behind a couple of those form letters printed on extremely expensive paper you sometimes get if you ever sign a petition. (I haven't even opened them.) Nothing else.

So, I get all worried and check tracking, and it says my package is still supposed to arrive that day, and that it was last recorded at the post office roughly a town over. I figure it just missed sorting and will arrive Tuesday, and start getting ready to go to sleep. (Yes, weird schedule, I know, it constantly changes here.)

And then here comes ANOTHER mail truck. I've never seen USPS run twice in the same day. I don't know if he just got so far and found he'd missed the package or what, I didn't actually manage to catch him. What mattered was what was left in the box:

So, after little details like taking measurements, and chopping off the redundant bits of a neck peg with wire snips:

(no, you really don't need any of that stuff on the top)
I attempted at first to remove the stain on the Monster High girl, only to have the personality/backstory for the doll develop in my head that actually explained why the stain was there. At which point I stopped trying to remove what is now a needed detail. XD I guess it's like when programmers reclassify a bug as a feature...

She's been renamed Meritamen. From what Wiki tells me, the name means 'beloved by Amen', and with Amen being a sun deity and the doll being from a beach set (Gloom Beach Cleo DeNile, according to a bit of websearching) it seemed appropriate (and a lot less steriotypical and punny than the official name).

A new faceup happened before I even went to sleep. I just had to stay up long enough to do it and see how she'd look in all the 'historically accurate' colors - 'cochineal' red for lips, 'ground malachite' for the eyes (and they put it on thick, unlike modern powdery eyeshadows. And the eyeliner used to be made from galena, which is actually a very dark silvery-grey. I used silver and black to mix it specifically. And I redid her eyes in metallics too (bronze and gold).


And here she is in her current spot, on Amber the Pony's back on the 'garden' shelf. Someday, when I have more space and shelves, I'll have to set up a garage for her to work in...


The Jem has a spot too, tho no new name yet. I have plans for her, starting with trying to do something about the torso yellowing. And I did find a dress that sort-of fit for now (though only because the top snap was already broken). While playing around to see what clothes might fit out of what was on hand, I found to my surprise that Liv wigs fit her at least reasonably well:

Yes, the wig still has the peg in for the Liv head, but that just helps it look more like 80's 'big hair'. I'm now slightly torn between my original idea of rooting her with a heat-sensitive color changing 80's giant mullet (think David Bowie in Labryinth, if someone attacked him with purple-to-blue and purple-to-pink hair dye)... and just trying to find a lot of really bright Liv wigs to swap around. I'll probably still go with rooting tho, since the wigs really only /mostly/ fit.

PS: Almost forgot, the little rug looks great in front of the Marionette Box.

... and there are still some debates over who gets the sunglasses. XD

Wow, that faceup on Meritamen looks amazing! I love the deep red and the darker eyebrows. So dramacic.

Jem looks good too! Glad everything arrived safely.

Eseme

The eyebrows were almost an afterthought. I was looking at her face while the rest of it was drying and just wondered... why is her hair pitch black and her eyebrows a really dark brown? Of course, the most likely ancient Egyptian reason would be "she's wearing a wig", but.... I had the black paint right there from mixing the eyeliner color, and thought, why not? XD

Fascinating work on the makeup!

Edit: Love your new blog, btw. Bookmarked it :3

Congrats on getting her and the new face up is 100% better than what she had.

Jobee wrote:Fascinating work on the makeup!

Thanks! I did a lot of reading on ancient Egypt as a kid (probably about the same age that some kids go through a Dinosaur Phase instead. XD) and a lot of little trivia bits stuck with me. I still had to look some of it up because I couldn't emember exactly which rock was ground up to make eyeshadow pigment (tho I knew it was probably malachite or lapis). And I actually didn't know the eyeliner/khol was made from galena until recent searches. I did know cochineal was made from squished beetles, tho. XD

Thanks to Wiki, I also know how to write her name in heiroglyphs, so at some point I'll just have to make use of that. XD

Jobee wrote:Edit: Love your new blog, btw. Bookmarked it :3

Thanks! So far it's just a place to show off my dolls, kind of build up their 'modelling cred'. XD Eventually, I hope to also use it to let people know when I have something new in the Etsy shop I don't yet have , or if there's anything else new that's specific to the dolls, their stuff, and the Theater idea (making little silent films based on public domain books using doll photography, probably to be posted on YouTube). Or... well, it's all about the dolls.

Tagging all my doll pictures I post with it still feels a little excessive/obsessive to me, but it was something I read about as a recommended step on some website somewhere... The site basically said that eventually someone's going to link to one of your pics or put it on Pinterest, and this way at least you'd get 'free advertizing' out of it.

maywong wrote:Congrats on getting her and the new face up is 100% better than what she had.

*nods* All that really pale grey-green was just... weird. It made her look sickly and washed out. But then, it is Monster High, so the 'undead' look was probably intentional. I like her much better this way, though... and I'm thinking she'll look even better after I figure out how to make a set of mechanics overalls with an Egyptian theme. XD Gotta make her some little tools and a toolbox, too.

Wow! I love your attention to detail! Awesome job!

Thanks. I have a tendency to go off on these weird little obsessive research tangents... it's nice when one is useful. XD

Yes this is the only reason I want a Cleo to go properly Egyptian on her (I'm tempted to try making Isis seeing as I snagged some harpy CAM bits). I'm very excited to see your Jem reroot too the big David Bowie hair sounds perfect! I look forward to the continuation of both these girls.

Arkinlae wrote:Yes this is the only reason I want a Cleo to go properly Egyptian on her (I'm tempted to try making Isis seeing as I snagged some harpy CAM bits).

Ooo, that sounds neat. XD I still have to put together some appropriate outfits for Meri, mostly because I still haven't found the bit of fabric I wanted to work with in my extremely disorganized stash. There's a piece of sheer white curtain in there somewhere, I know there is. XD

Arkinlae wrote:I'm very excited to see your Jem reroot too the big David Bowie hair sounds perfect!

It'll probably be a while before I've saved up to get the amount of hair that's going to take... Hopefully it'll be in my next round of rerooting, though... after I finish up the five already waiting that I have the hair for. I'm dreadfully slow at reroots. XD

I have already treated her yellowing a bit. It turned out to be sun-bleaching type yellowing rather than staining... so the only thing I knew of to try was lightly sand (removing some of the discoloration and providing a surface paint would stick to), heavily blush with light portrait pink acrylic, and then after that was dry gently buff with a Mr Clean Magic Eraser until the tone was reasonably close to right. It's still a bit uneven, as the last stage took a little more pink off the collarbones than I'd like, but it's a lot better than it was. Here's how she looks on the shelf now:

Lately I've been contemplating gemstone-related names, as a nod to her original one... The purple (and pink and blue) hair I plan to give her would mostly hint at Amethyst... but that's something of a mouthful and I already have an Amy on the shelves. XD I'm sure something will snap into place as right by the time she's close to done.