Aesthetics Creating Poppy - My Chibi Unoa Flower Fairy (Faceup Finished 3/9/24)

This is Poppy! She's a B-Grade Chibi Unoa Roron in Fairy Skin that I ordered from Alchemic Labo in May 2023. She is going to be a fairy character to fit into the vague magical forest setting I have for my MSD and smaller dolls.



My main goals for her are:

• Dye her body dark brown.
  
• Faceup and hand/foot blushing. Faceup should be pretty straightforward. I want her palms and the soles of her feet to be lighter than the rest of her skin like a real person's would be, so I'll be experimenting with ways to achieve that.
• Creating her wings. I'll be using these ones made by PixieHillStudio on Etsy as a base.
• Creating clothes for her. I may or may not post updates about this part as my sewing skills aren't the best and I tend to procrastinate on those projects for a long time!

The Dyeing Process

I've already completed the dyeing process. This was my first time dyeing a doll and it went surprisingly well! I used Rit Dyemore and followed the instructions on the bottle. My dye mixture was about 4 tsp. chocolate brown and 1/4 tsp. sandstone in a little under a gallon of water.

I prepped the pieces by wiping them down with rubbing alcohol and then scrubbing each piece with dish soap and rinsing well. She's a new doll so this was mostly to get any mold release residue off. Once she was dry, I strung the pieces onto some scrap yarn and dipped each one into the dye, swishing it back and forth gently in the mixture. I kept each piece in for about 7 minutes and compared the pieces to make sure they matched. Then I plopped them into another pot of cold water, let them sit there in a bit, then removed them and placed them onto a towel to dry.

Here are the parts shortly after dyeing:



The dye took WAY more evenly than I was expecting it to, especially considering she's a B-grade doll. I had considered sanding her seam lines beforehand but opted not to because I wanted the dye to take as evenly as possible, and I'm glad I made that choice.

Here she is all strung:





I dyed her at night and once I got to see her under natural light the next day, I realized she had turned out a lot redder than I thought--definitely more red than any of the skin tone reference photos I was using. I strongly considered dyeing her again to see if I could get her to a more natural tone but I consulted some folks on the big BJD Discord server and they informed me that red pigments usually fade first, so if I leave her as-is she should mellow out to look a bit more natural over time. I'm going to operate on that assumption for now and continue forward. In the future I will definitely try and only dye dolls during daylight!

I read that acetone will remove dye from resin, so I decided to try and see if I could use this technique to selectively remove some dye from the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet so they looked more natural. I used a magic eraser with acetone to scrub her palms, and dipped her feet in a very thin puddle of it to try and remove the dye. Here are the results:







I'm really happy with how her palms came out, but I wish I had used the magic eraser on her feet as well instead of dipping them, because dipping resulted in a very harsh line that doesn't look quite as natural. That said, the magic eraser made it difficult to control the acetone and ended up messing up the dye on the tops of her hands. Hopefully I'll be able to even out the results on both her hands and feet with blushing, but overall I'm happy that my idea sort of worked.

I'm really happy with Poppy's progress so far! She's finally starting to come together as the character that I imagined and I'm so excited to keep working on her.



Stay tuned for next time when I work on her faceup as well as her hand and foot blushing!

 

Thanks everyone for the encouragement and praise! I wanted to give a little progress update since I worked on Poppy a bit today.

I ended up deciding to color-correct the redness in her skin. I was struggling to figure out how I was going to paint her because her skin tone was considerably redder than any of the reference photos of real people I was using, and I want to make sure I'm using lots of references when I do her faceup. I decided it was better for me to try and get her to a more natural tone first before trying to paint her, even if she does lose some of the red over time.

I looked up some color theory and played around with color filters on photos of her to try and decide what would help. In the end, I made up a mixture of 4 teaspoons of peacock green Rit Dyemore and followed the same steps as last time. I ended up dipping each part for about 2 minutes.

It worked great!



Here's a before and after photo of her elbow joints, which I dipped separately. The piece on top is before and the one on the bottom is after the green dip:



Her skin still has a red undertone, but I think it looks much more natural than it did before. The only problem I did run into is that the pieces I'd taken some pigment off of previously obviously took on more of a green hue, which looks pretty rough:



Here's those parts after scrubbing off some of the green with more acetone. Sadly, I lost the nice gradient on her hands and they are still a bit on the green side. Hopefully I'll be able to correct this with blushing!



It got dark outside before I could get any more pictures of her in natural light, but here she is all strung:



Overall I'm really happy I went ahead with this little change, and I feel a lot more confident going into her faceup and hand blushing now that her dye job is fully complete. I also feel a lot more comfortable using dye now that I know how easy it is to color correct with another dip!

 

Long time no update! I put Poppy aside for a little bit until a few days ago when I felt a new spur of motivation to work on her! In that time I finished working on her hands/feet and faceup! Pics incoming.

First I decided to focus on finishing her hands and feet, because having her sitting around without them made me sad. I blushed them in many layers with chalk pastels and tried my best to correct the splotchiness from my messy acetone job. Then I painted her nails with gouache.



Finally I glossed the nails and her hands and feet were done! This was my first time blushing anything besides a face and it felt a little more nervewracking than I expected. The sealant around her joints on these pieces began to chip immediately after I put them back on her body, but that's a problem for another day! Overall I'm satisfied with how they came out.



After I finished her hands and feet it was time to work on her faceup. This was my third faceup ever and also my first time doing a faceup on dark resin, and it was a learning curve for sure! It took a long time to build up opacity, but eventually after many layers I came to something I'm happy with. Since she's a flower fairy I wanted to give her eye makeup that would pop. I settled on yellow because it's the color of pollen!

Here's the finished faceup:



There are still some things I'd like to improve on next time, the biggest thing being that I feel like her eyebrows came out looking kind of flat. I tried highlighting a few hairs with white/light brown but it just made her look like she was going gray, so I scrapped that and just ended up going with just black. Believe it or not, I did use mica powder in her makeup, but once I sealed it it hardly shows up at all. I'd like to figure out how to use that better next time too.

After her faceup was dry I immediately popped her back on her body and tried on her wig. I think she looks really cute!



Here are some pics I snapped of her in the daylight the next day:







Overall, I'm really happy with how she came out! She was definitely my most in-depth customization project yet and I learned a lot from working on her. This post completes my main work on her that I had planned, but I still have yet to work on her wings and wardrobe. It might be a while before I get around to that, but once I do I will be sure to post another update.