Faceups Body blushing and unstringing

You can do a full body or partial body blushing/shading with your doll fully strung or disassembled. I find it is a matter of personal preference, and what works for you. When I learned about these dolls in winter 2003, I blushed my earlier dolls unstrung, because I thought it was the "right" way. Later, I blushed my largest or my tiniest (at the time) doll fully strung and it was a truly eye-opening experience. I've never gone back to unstringing them, unless it is for cleaning them up, which you'll have to do, if you want to clean off body blushing. Regardless if you blushed them strung or unstrung, you'll have to unstring them to remove fixative, paint, pastels, ect. and not have the elastic build mold.

Here's my most recently body blushed doll, this is an older photo from 2023, I did his body blush in 2022 when he first arrived to me. His body blushing still looks the same, and I feel it has the same wear as fully unstringing the doll, if not better because nothing wears/chips/scratches due to putting the doll back together again, because it's already strung. Hope that helps, and good luck!

He's a MYou Bettina male, at 28cm, my tallest is 67cm but it was still doable to fully body blush him as well (all strung together).


I feel like he might have been the reason why I started blushing my dolls fully strung. He's a discontinued Fairyland CL Rou, a pain in the gut to restring, allegedly.


The 67cm doll. The photo is kind of washedout, and I edited the joints out, but the body blushing is still holding strong, despite its 13-year-old-age.

 

@Enzyme These look great! I was wondering, did you have any problems with applying sealant after blushing them strung? I'd love to do it, but I'm a bit scared of sealant between joints not drying properly and making them sticky>_<

 

ArtsyCreature, I didn't find any issues with the fixative not drying between the joints, because very little gets in there. I feel that's also why i prefer this. The fixative doesn't go on the joints, which will be the first to be damaged anyway. The fixative just rubs off immediately t the joints, so this kind of avoids getting any fixative on the none exposed joints. The fixative always dries as usual and I haven't experienced any stickiness on the joints, myself. Having said that, I am stingy when it comes to fixative, I always use the minimal amount necessary to protect and prime the surface and always go very light with each layer of fixative. So, that might be why I've never experienced any issues with fixative remaining sticky or not drying. Hope that helps. (:

 

I never unstring my dolls for body blushing. I just try to keep the paint off of the joints. When I first body blushed I use to blush the joints, but that ended up looking dirty after awhile and I had to strip the blush off and redo it. Now I just blush around the joints without getting any paint on the joints itself. My dolls look better that way.

 

thanks!! Sounds good, I might try it when my boys come home

 

I use chalk pastels ... When I first started I used water colour, It's worked okay, but the chalk pastels just go on smoother.

 

The only time I've preferred unstringing is on large dolls for manuverabulity. I'm slowly working on a loong soul black dragon and he's got heavy parts so it's easier to work on him in parts. If can move them easily, there's not really a point to unstring them.

Although unstringing them forced me to learn to string which has made me unphased to take apart dolls for things like repair or adjusting tension