Mods going as expected

Which is to say, I want to punch myself in the mouth repeatedly and throw the head into oncoming traffic.

I got the dremel bit all properly attached to my dremel and drilled some holes through the area of the eyes I'd already carved out so that I could tell when I was getting close and (hopefully) not destroy the eyelids.

I started in on making the eyewells deeper, and very quickly realized I had to go a lot further than I'd thought. This is one of those cases where my ignorance made me brave enough (or stupid enough) to attempt something that I never would have if I had any idea of what I was getting into.

I kept at it very timidly until I got to about this point and figured I should stop using the dremel and do it by hand. That ended up being a very slow process and I wasn't really getting anywhere, so I figured it couldn't hurt to do just a little bit more dremel work.

Spoiler alert: this is where things start to go horribly wrong.

I was going along slowly, being very careful not to just obliterate the eyelids and leave a 12mm hole in the head, when suddenly the lower lids just start moving. My immediate thought was that I'd gone too far and they were just going to fall out, but I quickly realized that the heat of the dremel was just making them soft. So I immediately stopped, held the eyelid in place for a few seconds while it cooled, and all seemed okay. So I moved on to the next eye and did the same thing. Only on that eye, I had come in at a slightly different angle, so instead of just making the eyelid soft, one of them actually cracked.

It's not actually terribly easy to see in the photo but the right eye has a crack near the tear duct. I have glued it together but I think I will also reinforce behind it with epoxy putty.

With the eyewells deep enough for proper eye opening, I figured I'd go ahead and get started on that. I know from experience that I should not attempt to do eye openings with just an x-acto knife. I know this. I was telling myself not to do that even as I was doing it. But I couldn't stop myself. I kept thinking "it'll be so much quicker and I'll just do it until I get to my guidelines (which I had to re-draw) and then I'll switch to sanding". Well, I reached my guidelines and the eyes weren't quite even so I figured it wouldn't hurt to just use the knife a little more to even them out. Then I could sand.

This is what I ended up with. On the one hand, I did manage to open the eyes. On the other hand... the right eye is an abomination. The left it actually just about what I want so at least there is that. I will go in with the epoxy and try to fix the right eye and then attempt to carve in some eyelids. After that, a lot will depend on if I can get the face up right.

Another problem with the right eye is that due to the poor angling of the dremel, eyes don't sit quite right in the socket. Some more work will probably have to be done to remedy that. They do work well in the left though! How I wish Orkas was a pirate right about now so I could give him an eye patch and be done with it!