IOS shipped my Infernale exactly when they said they would. I was very impressed. He arrived over the weekend while I was out of town for A-kon and my mail carrier was kind enough to call me on my cell phone and get my permission to leave the package with the apartment office so that I could pick it up as soon as I returned. (This saved me a trip to the post office. I was very happy!)
I got home Sunday night but was able to get him from the apartment office on Monday morning before work. For the last couple days he's been sitting around without a face up because I was intimidated.
My last two attempts at face ups came out... less than stellar, to put it politely. I'm very easily discouraged when I fail at something so it can take a while to push past that. Adding to my anxiety was the fact that Infernale has an open mouth with two interchangeable tongue pieces and I struggle with doing face ups on dolls with the tiniest bit of teeth showing.
After a bit of arguing with myself, I decided to gather up my airbrush and pastels and assortment of brushes and head out to the balcony to get to work. It is absurdly hot outside today so I was quite uncomfortable, but luckily I was in my project zone so I didn't notice until I was all done.
I didn't really get any in progress pics, because I didn't want to get too attached while there was still the possibility of screwing it up terribly, but here are some pictures of the face once it was pretty much finished.
I think I overdid it a bit on the red under the eyes and on the eyeshadow. I really struggle with face ups on WS dolls.
Here are the tongue pieces post-blushing. These were a pain to do because they're so small and they wanted to fly off the table when I tried to seal them. And then the pastels didn't want to stick to them so I had to airbrush them and they kept getting stuck to my fingers and falling and collecting dust. I'm going to have to break out the tweezers if I redo these guys.
And here are some shots of the completed head with the two different tongue pieces. It was already a tight fit, but the layer of gloss on the tongues made it even harder to get them in and out. I'm sure there is some chipping of the paint in their future. I was, however, relatively pleased with the color.
And here we have a shot of him on a body which may or may not be his permanent one. The hands I've been saving since 2008 just in case I ever decided to shell his character. They came with Soom's Vega - Last Song and they've been sitting in a closet for about five years now.
Not 100% certain about this wig, but the one I was planning to use didn't look quite right once he had a face up. (really liked it before that though). Will see how it goes though.
