Aesthetics creating my characters

this project journal will be a catchall for all the resin cast characters that will be a part of the fantasy story i'm slowly conceptualising. as i tend to take pictures and upload in one big chunk, i'd rather have all the characters in one place, rather than separate and very short threads. hopefully this is okay

with my first resin cast bjd Doll Chateau Beacher now safely with me, i have been working on bringing my (admittedly vague) ideas for her to life! this started with this month's sewing challenge where i made a qipao and most recently, a camisole.

after the qipao, i moved onto dyeing her shell and coral crown. i've been procrastinating uploading my pictures of the process for a bit even though i had already written up the post, so i'm just going to include the post i would have posted before, below. i figure this would help others as other guides helped me!

on a high from successfully making her qipao and receiving my rit dyemore bottles the same day, i decided to tackle dyeing her as well!

though i thought she could have looked really lovely with some dye on her limbs as well (a dusky brown gradient or something) i decided i wasn’t feeling brave enough to unstring and restring her. so i simply ordered some super pink and racing red for her two part shell and crown, figuring that her crown could serve as my test piece.


i added 5ml of dish detergent to a pot of water that was deep enough to fit my biggest piece, and washed the pieces i wanted to dye with just water and soap. then i brought the water to a boil as i strung the pieces i could string with grey polyester thread (it was just what i had on hand). i was worried that i couldn’t string the back piece of the shell but it turned out that that didn’t affect the dyeing process at all! i added half a capful of the racing red, and roughly a quarter capful of the super pink to the water.

i started by dyeing a strip of white cotton, though i didn’t take a picture of that at the time, as i was already rushing to dye the actual pieces. i was satisfied with the colour, and decided to test it on the crown.

i started my stopwatch and moved the crown through the water for about 30 seconds, at which point i took it out and rinsed it with cold water. i was very pleased with the colour and decided to do that same process for the other two pieces.

and here’s now they all turned out (including the little fabric square)! i am overall really happy with my results as they are quite uniform, and any variation just adds charm. nature and hermit crab shells aren’t perfectly uniform in colour after all!​

the next thing i did was her faceup! i would love to one day send off a doll for a faceup but i was feeling a bit impatient and confident that i could get a nice enough result, and so i began! i followed cam's station's sunkissed faceup guide for this process, although i mostly forgot to take pictures of the steps! these are the only two i have of the middle of the process, after i had finished adding some colour variation and blushing.

and here she is at the end!


i absolutely love how her faceup turned out! while i plan to buy brushes that would be better suited to the task of doing a faceup (i was using toothpicks and q tips T-T), i'm so glad i already had artist grade watercolour pencils and soft pastels, as this made the task unbelievably easier!

the only things left for this girl now is picking a wig (i bought two, hopefully i'll like at least one of them on her ) and a name (oops!). i'm thinking either brambles and kestrel for her name right now, but i feel like once i choose her wig, the right name will fall into my lap. i also plan on making more clothes for her, hopefully now that i like her top (the camisole below) i'll be able to slowly work on the skill of making them neater. my next resin cast doll is on preorder and won't be here for a bit, so in between this doll and a couple of off-topics, im sure to be doing lots of crafting, some of which i'll show here! thanks for reading!

 

thank you, i really appreciate your kind words! i’m also excited to see how she keeps developing