Arrivals!

My package I mentioned before finally arrived! So now I can talk about what it is without worrying about inflicting further bad luck on its arrival!

I traded with someone on DoA for an Impldoll Charles. I was primarily interested in the body for my L-bi head but after seeing the Charles head in person I may end up doing something with it after all.

The body is so small though.! I was not expecting it to be quite so slim. I'd read that Impldoll's MSD bodies were slender but it's hard to tell from pictures.

I made him a wig out of a spare fur swatch I had lying around since baby Sollux stole the black fur wig I was using for one of my Unoa boys and the other two wigs were either not as functional as I remembered or too unruly from spending time in the wig box.

This is an extremely horrendous picture that exists primarily to show that he has a wig and a body now. And a random assortment of clothes I had in the right(ish) size.

The wig is extremely fluffy, which I'm not sure about. I like the color though! I haven't really decided for sure what to do with him. I'd intended to make him my new Nazoe after I sold the head I was using for the previous one but then I thought he made a cute blonde and I'm sort of tempted to make him into a younger version of Auralion.

Will give it more time before I do anything crazy. I also need to redo his face up (because aside from the eyebrows it's still the way it came to me from Yahoo!Japan yeeeaaaars ago) and blush it to match the body.

The other arrival was some appropriately sized purple eyes for Orkas. I would like to eventually get some with smaller irises but these work for now. Unfortunately(?) I like this head much better with these eyes.

My camera was being a jerk so it didn't want to pick up the color of the eyes. I had to adjust them in photoshop so that they didn't just look black/grey.

I went through a phase a couple days ago where I was severely tempted to use this head for Atlas , which would have forced me to go off in search of a new Orkas. Not something I'm eager to do because this has been my ideal Orkas head for a loong time now. Previous Orkas was modded to look more similar to this head so I'd really just be back at square one if this didn't work out.

head comparison and face up

EDIT: I may have gone ahead and gotten eyes in the right size anyway as well as a new wig. The current one is a little too coarse to sit the way I want it to and hopefully this new one will be closer to the right color. I do like redhead Orkas but he's supposed to be a little more strawberry blonde.

We are now fully committed to operation "attempting to recoup your losses is futile."

So here is the modded reminisce Vivien head (left) next to the default open eyed one (right). I don't have anything even remotely close to the right color in the right size for this head so I'm having a hard time deciding what I think.

It has helped me decide what to change if I continue working on the modded head instead of using this one.

The larger eyes make the head look larger as a whole, so now I"m not entirely sure if it works okay on the body I was using.

I am debating on whether or not to buy eyes in the right size first or work more on the modded head to see if I can't make myself definitively happy with it. If I don't keep the open eyed head then the eyes will not really be useful for anything else, so I guess it can't hurt to work more on the modded head first.

I need to close the eyes a little bit more at the top to give the impression of glaring and the right eye needs a little carved out on the lower lid in the outer corner area. This time I will also likely blush it to match the body.

packages

Two packages were supposed to arrive yesterday. Both of them were marked undeliverable as addressed, so this morning I went down to the post office so I would arrive the minute they opened. I wanted to try to intercept my packages before they were returned to their senders.

One package I did manage to get. My Elfdoll Vivien open eyed head arrived. The other is... somewhere. I don't know where. The post office didn't know where. They said they'd try to get my carrier to find it and bring it to me today but they didn't show up until really late in the day and I missed them so the package may or may not be in the apartment office. I guess we'll see tomorrow morning.

But about the head.

Wow, the eyes are so much bigger than what I did with my eye opening job. I guess I just wasn't getting a sense of scale from pictures and made them way too small? But now I'm used to them that size and they feel enormous at their regular size. Tomorrow maybe I can give the new head a face up to see if I prefer it or not.

I'm trying to talk myself out of being tempted to keep both. It would be weird to have two completely unrelated characters with the same mold, so I'd have to do something like mod the head I opened the eyes on to be sleepy again or something to justify keeping both and then I probably wouldn't alternate them like I should so it would defeat the purpose. I should just sell whichever one I decide I'm not going to use. Just a matter of convincing myself to actually do it. XD

Right now I'm exhausted from being out and about all day and waking up early to hunt down packages.

I'm afraid of talking about my other package until it arrives. I keep worrying I'll somehow jinx it despite the fact that its arrival has already been jinxed.

eye mods: Id

I was thinking last time I took photos of him, that I needed to bring Id's eyes in a bit because I'd opened them a bit too much for eyes to sit properly in them.

But I kind of put this off since it didn't seem like a very fun project and doing face ups on heads that small is scary.

Then yesterday I was ... doing something. I completely forget what. And I saw a picture of one of the little 1/6 guys on the Crobidoll website and he had these little teeth and I thought they were adorable and I decided that I wanted to not only bring in Id's eyes but also mod his mouth open a bit so he could have cute teeth too. XD

So I got out the epoxy and made his eyes a bit smaller. And, as always, I overestimated how much I'd need and mixed up too much, so I also gave him little elf ears while I was at it.

None of the pre-faceup pics turned out okay because it was night time and I forgot to turn the brightness back up on my camera. But here is one after the face up so you can see his ears. I should have sanded them more but I was impatient to see if his eye mods would be obvious once he had a face up so I just went for it before sanding more.

And here he is from the front. The eyes aren't even, which is something I also was planning tow ork on before giving him a face up, but again... wanted to be sure I was on the right track before devoting more time to it. But everything seems to blend in pretty much seamlessly around the eyes so I'm very happy about that and will go back in and work on evening them out when I'm feeling less lazy.

The worst part was doing the teeth, honestly. I'm terrible with using brushes on face ups as it is, but I'm even worse when I'm wearing glasses (and I can't wear my contacts for at least a few more days..) My eyes just have no idea how to make sense of something that precise when I'm wearing glasses. I'm sure with enough practice I'd get it down but it's very frustrating since I'm not used to it.

I can live with the asymmetry for now though. It's less obvious in person I think.

And some bonus shots of Shino after having his collar brushed so it looks less matted. He's sort of currently my favorite and has been sitting at my computer desk for the past week or so.

And now for some completely un-helpful photos!

As promised, I was productive today. And as promised, I worked on coat making. Weird, considering I never stick to what I say I'm going to do. Or, almost never..

But today I did what I said I'd do.

I have no in progress pics of the construction because it actually started at around 3am before I'd gone to sleep yet. I was pretty excited about working on this project and wasn't having much luck relaxing for sleep because I kept planning out how I wanted it to work in my head.

Late night/early morning brain got the better of me and I didn't take drape into account when selecting my fabric, so I ended up with something a little more thin and floppy than I wanted. The collar is pretty much what I had in mind though.

I didn't have any spare black fur but I did have this jacket I bought ages ago on DoA. I was really new and had no idea what I was doing and bought it based on the description. The thread didn't have a photo and for some reason it never occurred to me that I could ask for one. So I got it and immediately realized I had made a huge mistake and would never ever use it and it has sat in a drawer ever since.

But it finally came in handy and I cut it up for the collar fur on this jacket/coat/thing.

Here are two pictures that completely fail to capture any detail. Pretty much just "Shino's face" and "fuzzy collar". Black on black may have been a poor choice in retrospect but again.. me at 3am. Not the best critical thinking skills.

My planning also didn't get to the point of planning out the rest of the ensemble. In my head just putting the coat over what he was already wearing (a black button up shirt and some black cargo pants tucked into boots) seemed like a fine idea. In practice, this isn't quite as stylish a combo as I had hoped. In part because the coat looks kind of like a fur collared bathrobe.

I was much more displeased with this whole ordeal earlier in the day when I was redirecting dissatisfaction with other areas of my life onto this project. However, I went ahead and dealt with the issue after many hours of resisting doing what I knew had to be done, and I feel a lot better now.

new wig for Avignon

I had been thinking about getting Avignon a new wig and really the only thing stopping me was my inability to find the right color. But after a zillion years of browsing the marketplace on DoA, I managed to find a wig in the right color!

I thought it was going to be too big but it's actually exactly the right size for her tiny Souldoll noggin! No need to mod and potentially destroy it! Yay!

It's so fluffy XD It took me a while to even begin to make it manageable. It was just going everywhere and I had no idea what I was doing, but eventually I googled something to do with floofy hair and managed to figure out something.

I got new eyes for him because I was hoping to replace the really really bright ones he has now but the dome is too low and they didn't fit right. Oh well. They're nice eyes so I'm sure someone else will use them.

I slightly changed where I part Orkas' hair. For some reason I am more happy with him this way. I have no idea why it made any difference at all but it did...

Still on the fence about that lower lip but I'm going to give it more time before I make any decisions about it. In person it's stopped bothering me as much but in photos it feels very large.

I am not working on Sunday and I want to attempt to make Shino and Alek some jackets then. Or at the very least make SOMEONE some clothes. This is a thing I need to do. The number of people in need of clothes is decreasing but one day that number is going to hit zero. Only new arrivals will be clothes-less. That is the goal!

EDIT:  After an  un-successful attempt at giving Ezsphrein a new face up yesterday, I sort of got it in my head that my Latidoll Chaim (who has been my Ezsphrein for years now. I think longer than anyone else) looks too young for the character I want him to be. I've kind of always resisted replacing him because of how much trouble I went to to get Chaim, but the more I thought about it the more I really didn't think he fit the role.

So I thought for fun I'd just throw this spare Souldoll Chiron head I have on the body I had Chaim on. The Chiron head was airbrushed grey to go with my Impldoll Triton body but I wiped it so I could take pictures for a potential trade on DoA and then my trade partner ended up being interested in a different head which kind of worked out since once I had Chiron all cleaned up I was reminded of why I liked the sculpt to begin with.

So I tried the head on the body and tried on the official Ezsphrein wig and I immediately liked the combination so I went to go give the head a face up. It's pretty messy in places but I'm happy with it overall.

Fun story, the whole reason I 'updgraded' Defliel from a Customhouse Chamomile into a Souldoll Killian was because his head was too big compared to Ezsphrein's. This started a sort of domino effect where over the course of a few years I ended up replacing pretty much all of my heads so that everyone was at least reasonably in the same size range and didn't look too terribly weird together.

So I guess it's sort of come full circle now.

I was initially considering attempting to sell my Chaim head but the more I think about it, the more I think I will just hold onto it and one day when I am overflowing with funds I will get him a body along with my Customhouse Chamomile head (which I have held onto for ages because it was my first SD) and they can sit around and be old school together and sit on the porch and tell these young'uns how hard it was for them in the good old days. Wearing poorly made sock clothing. Having smudgy face ups sealed with gloss sealer because I didn't know there were different types. All that good stuff.

eyelids

Exciting title is exciting.

I kid, of course.

I'm so tired today I can't seem to form a coherent thought, much less string two together without stumbling over my words and second guessing what I just said.

But I managed to make myself go ahead and try to clean up Cailath's eyelids some. After which I spent a few minutes attempting to brainstorm ways to salvage his face up before I decided that it just wasn't a good idea and it was highly unlikely that it would blend well at all. So I went ahead and wiped him and re-did his face.

And then I attempted to get some photos of him an d everything was so bright and somehow his eyes still look black and I don't even know. XD I wasn't sure about the new face up at first but after about five minutes it really grew on me. I let the sealant dry longer this time so I didn't have as many weird spots and wasn't forced to give him an excess of facial scars (but I did still add in a couple).

Cailath's new wig

I had this whole list of things I wanted to work on today and I ended up doing silly grown up stuff like cleaning instead.

But I did manage to find time to make Cailath a more character-appropriate wig. I might go in and work on it a bit more tomorrow because it's not quite as long in the front as I wanted. It's also a little more layered and fluffy but I just have too much fun with that...

I tried to get pictures of him by himself but he didn't want to cooperate until I shoved Aura in the picture with him, and then he only cooperated marginally better.

He does not photograph as well as I feel like he should. Obviously he has a lot to compete with but I quite like him irl and I don't feel like he looks as good in photos. But at least you can sort of get an idea of what his wig looks like now.

Tomorrow I hope to actually get around to properly finishing his eyelids (which right now are hastily carved in and painted over because I didn't feel up to redoing his face up at the time) but I will probably get distracted by some other project instead because that's kind of what I do.

Unrelated, but his hair looks more like 'cuddly anime protagonist' than 'assassin' but I guess that doesn't really matter since his hair (and the rest of his face) are covered when he's doing that sort of thing. If I ever get hyper ambitious I'll actually make him something resembling his hood and mask dealy. For now I will probably just focus on making him something passable and also modding his ears similar to Aura's.

I should also consider doing some body switches or dyeing his. Or possibly not using a color that doesn't match next time I airbrush his head to make his mods less obvious. But I don't imagine him being paler than Aura so I'll probably just stick with airbrushing that way and do something about the body. 

Relocating Shino's eyebrows

I was just about to go ahead and wipe Shinozaki because his face up just wasn't working for me. In fact, I was so frustrated I was starting to look around for potential replacements. I haven't liked the last three or so face ups that I've given him and in the past year I've barely been able to look at him because he just wasn't making me happy at all.

Before doing something completely crazy, I decided to redo his face and possibly mod him further if that didn't work (because I wasn't really 100% happy with the mods I did to him originally but I had dumb plans for the head based on one person's owner pics. I would say I need to stop doing that but Shino was a nice happy accident.)

Anyway. I decided to try relocating his eyebrows further down before doing anything else because I was relatively happy with the rest of the face up. So I did that and made them look a little more angry and suddenly I was so much happier with him!!

I also tried a different wig on him. He has three different fiber wigs (that's two more than anyone else) and what do I do? I put him in a spare fur wig I made. It was too short but I kind of liked the look so at first I was going to just make him a whole new one out of yarn the way I did Auralion's, but then I told myself that that was a silly idea since Cailath is still sitting around in a temp wig and should be next up for a proper custom one. So I just gave Shino some small yarn extensions.

Perhaps once Cailath gets a proper wig I'll go ahead and make Shino one. I do love crazy hair that sticks out every which way. Tomorrow I should work on Cailath's. And also finish his eyelids so they look proper. Which might mean redoing his face up. We'll see.

I also kind of want to work on a few clothing projects. Iyrilaeth still needs something resembling a proper outfit. And at some point I do want to give Shinozaki and Alek some sort of fancier clothes. A couple reasonably stylish jackets might do the trick since I am not unhappy with what they wear. I just find it a little too dull. So that's my potential list of projects to choose from tomorrow.