Face-ups on monster high dolls

@zero4conduct I started with MH because I wanted something cheap to practice on before I went up to Pullip, and eventually BJD, but I actually ended up loving MH dolls, however they are off topic here so I won't get into that too much lol~ I do think a lot of people start out with cheaper alternatives though. It's definitely not uncommon. It's a good way to start out without being worried about ruining a very expensive BJD head.

Honestly MH heads are really sturdy so there isn't much different about doing one on those than doing one on a BJD. But, do remember the texture is much different and often pencils won't show up quite as easily on the vinyl, just remember to use at least 3 coats of MSC (or whatever sealant you prefer), especially with vinyl dolls because I have heard those stain much easier.

Also, if you want a cheap way to practice faceups, there are practice heads available on Alice's Collections from Doll Family A - DF-A Practice Head (Special Offer) - BJD Dolls, Accessories - Alice's Collections Only $20 and it's a legit resin head.

Also remember to never use anything with oils, as it reacts badly with the sealant and can get gooey and make staining even worse and sometimes damage the vinyl/resin. Make sure only to use chalk/soft pastels and watercolor pencils and acrylic or watercolor or gouache paints.

Good luck and I hope this helps~! Don't be too scared to try, because remember that if you mess up, you can always just wipe everything off and start over ^_^

 

Glad you're excited! Faceups are pretty much my favorite part about this hobby, I love doing them, it just brings a doll to life so much ^_^ I have only been doing them for about 7 months or so, so I'm no expert, but I hope that you have fun with it! I'd also recommend looking up some channels on youtube about how to do faceups such as Nicolle's Dreams (my personal fave) and Dollightful (since she almost only does MH). There are others, feel free to PM me if you wish to talk a little more about it!

 

I started out with MH before I got my first BJDs, not only because I thought it would be a cheaper alternative to learn how to do faceups, but I also love MH (the old sculpts anyways). I still practice on MH. If I really don't want to mess up a faceup on my nice bjd, I will do a practice run of my concept on an MH doll. It's really not much different than painting on a BJD. The vinyl is softer, as mentioned above, so you have to do more layers of pastels/pencil to get a nice vibrant color. I don't find that troubling though. If you plan on doing your own faceups on your BJDs, I think practicing on MH or other inexpensive vinyl fashion dolls is a great way to practice your skills and gain confidence before your expensive resin dolls arrive. Good luck!

 

I think you can learn a lot from big headed fashion dolls though, like mh or whatever, but having painted on many many many different sorts of dolls now, I have to say, resin feels quite different and takes pastel quite differently.
Still, it helps to practice at the very least that steady hand, and how to do lashes and lips and stuff.
Makeup tutorials can also help, as a lot of the blushing techniques you'll use are actually human makeup techniques.

But also I say don't be afraid to just go for it on your new doll. So long as you use the right sort of materials and seal the doll before you start, there's not much damage you can really do.
If it sucks, you wipe it off and go again.
I've redone most of mine at least 2 or 3 times. Periodically I wipe my little YOSD because her faceup bugs me and I can't get it quite how I want. Grrr. She's up to like 5 faceups now!

The only thing i'll say about vinyl is what others said, the staining. So, even after sealing before starting, i've had MH heads that have ended up so badly stained that upon wiping them I still can't get the marks off and have to just incorperate them into the second faceup. This drives me mental, you lose a blank canvas and have to work around marks. Resin doesn't seem to do this, I don't think it's as porous or something, certainly i've wiped very thick black paint off pale resin and had no marks, not even ghosting. Vinyl however? A teensy bit of black watercolour pencil can stain those and arghhhhh.

Drives me MAD

Resin is way more forgiving.

 

If it helps watch Nicole's Dreams on YouTube. She does faceups on all kinds of dolls, including MH. She's one of my favorites :3

 

I did my first face up on BJDs before I tried couple monster high and several barbie (my scenes to be specific), I find resin and vinyl very different and the applications for both are not the same. Like others, vinyl dolls stain very easily and much harder to remove if you want to repeat.
If you are going into BJD hobby, I would recommend to go with BJD head to practice face up. It will give you the right medium to work with and get used to. There are some places you can get practice head for reasonable price. Alice's Collection is one of them.
Good luck!

 

When I started customizing my resin dolls Monster High weren't around, so I didn't start practicing with them. However, I do enjoy painting dolls and love playscale/1:6 toys more than larger ones.
One thing to keep in mind is that soft vinyl is different from resin, even though both are plastics they don't take paint the same way. Most people I followed who customized Barbie, Obitsu, Volks Doffie, etc,
didn't sealed the heads before they painted on them, because vinyl takes paint pretty well without priming. If you are not planning on selling your repaints, or you just want to practice painting on soft vinyl
heads without using a sealer first, it's easy to do so because vinyl will take paint well unlike resin. If you are repainting those types of dolls for your own personal enjoyment, or for selling to others, you might
want to use a sealer to preserve the work. I recall most of the Japanese customizers I followed back in the day (when I first got into customizable dolls 2003-2004), none used fixatives. I also remember most
people who did Barbie and Toner repaints not using any either some years ago, but now it seems like the norm to use a fixative of some sort. I think it is mostly because people nowadays use different
media than just paint. Pastel does have to be sealed regardless of what your surface is, if you want to keep adding more layers -- otherwise you'll just have a huge mess. Pencils also seem to be popular today,
I am not sure how many times my friends and I have joked about all these doll "repaints" without actual paint, but we are all art-nerds so it's probably funny only to us. DX

I am not a fan of using pencils myself, I only use them to sketch the eyes on before I paint them with acrylics. I do seal the work but only after I already added a layer of pastel and fully painted on the eyes.
There is no need to prime vinyl for paint, so I don't like wasting MSC if it's not necessary. I also don't sell my repaint work so I don't mind if there is a bit of staining on the heads (so far I haven't had any
staining on any of them). Pastel doesn't stick that well without a fixative on most surfaces, but again, vinyl takes most pigment rather well so I just do a light layer to get a head start before wasting any fixative.
I have been a traditionally trained artist for most of my life now, but my miniature line work still needs heaps of work, so I do think of painting these dolls as practice of some sort but I don't paint them often enough
to actually consider them good practice. I mostly repaint the ones that I like, so I kind of don't want to ruin the sculpts and just leave them after I am done painting them (unless I want to modify the sculpt or repaint
them once again). Having said that, soft vinyl heads are great for practicing line work if that is your aim, because you don't have to prime the surface to get paint to stick to it. You can just practice on it and wipe
the paint off as needed. They are probably not the greatest if you want to practice blending pastel, but I find that's the easiest. Line work on the other hand, with a not too steady hand at that!

 

Dollightful has a great set of beginner videos for face ups on vinyl dolls:


She goes through the list of supplies and has step by step videos. I love her videos because she's cheerful, adorable, and goes into detail which I find not all youtube face-up artists do.

I started out with MLP customs which I mostly sculpted and painted with acrylic, so I found her videos very helpful. I love MH dolls and some Ever After High and started to collect and customize them at the same time as BJDs.

A little note with acrylic paints, I find if you're going to cover a large area wit acrylic paint, it's best to water it down slightly so it wont clump and end up looking "chewy" on your dolls.

 

I currently work on Monster High dolls and dolls of a similar nature. I pretty much just make up characters or use characters from my novels (I'm an author) to turn into dolls. It was watching face-ups on YouTube that actually got me into the doll hobby to begin with. While I still want to customize MH dolls, I'm going to be starting my own resin family soon!

The only problem I have with MH right now is that they seem to be less popular then they used to be, and I can no longer find them in my local WalMart. I have to shop online for them now. Thankfully, I won a few lots from eBay, so I have plenty to work on for now. Still, it would be nice if the older molds made a comeback, and if the stores in my area would stock them again.

 

The great thing about monster high dolls is that they are already an affordable alternative practice for a BJD Face ups I find them at dollar stores sometimes but ever after high seems to slowly be taking over, and they're slowly falling out of popularity which makes the selection a little limited but I would highly suggest them as a practice. OMG the only down fall of these dolls is that they are so time consuming to draw on. I get so impatient (hence the reason I haven't even thought about doing a practice face up on my BJD's but that may change since I found a BJD head I really like but the artist no longer does face ups)

 

So I've done maybe two repaints on MH dolls. I dont have any issues with blushing but getting the eyes to look right and not dead is pretty hard

 

Hi! I started with monster high dolls... actually, I didn’t like dolls at all until I was 29 years old and came across a customized monster high doll with a gorgeous faceup on Pinterest and it turned me on to dolls as a whole hobby! I started customizing mh/eah dolls and was hooked! Once I became pretty darn good (IMO) on doing faceups and customizing these small articulated dolls with beautiful skin tones and gorgeous face sculpts, I became curious about BJDs... after much research I jumped right in and bought a Dollshe Craft Amanda Beauty with a bad faceup and I did my first BJD faceup and here I am today!!! So I still love and collect beat up second hand monster high and eah dolls to do faceups on and trade/sell to raise funds to go to future BJDs. I like giving them new life, and it keeps my skills sharp. I think a few important things to remember when doing faceups on these mh/eah dolls is 1. wear gloves or likely your pastels will shade unevenly, 2. Do NOT skimp on buying high quality watercolor pencils, gouache, and pastels, 3. Do not seal your work if you are even the slightest bit unhappy with something 4. Have fun!!! Take risks!!! Try new (to you!) techniques!!! Art is therapy! 5. These are great dolls to build your faceup skills with as they are inexpensive and fun. Enjoy your art therapy!

 

Does anyone know of any good acrylic paint alternatives to use on monster high dolls and bjds?

 

I just use pastels and watercolor pencils on my monster high/ ever after high/ etc. dolls. If you use a wet brush you can lift paint from the pencils directly and paint it on, which is what i usually do for the sclera of the eyes and the separation of the lips. You can do the same with bjd, but it's more textured than vinyl, so your pencils might have a more textured or grainy appearance, depending on the quality of the pencil and how the texture of the resin works with the tooth your sealant gives.

 

You can use the same kind of acrylic paint on resin as well as other types of plastic, as long as the surface is properly primed and sealed, there should be no issues with adhering nor staining. I personally prefer artist grade Liquitex brand of acrylics, because that's simply the one brand I've used all my life, but any other acrylic paint will work. Any grade of paint will work as well, the grade simply implies how much pigment vs binder there is in the product -- artist grade will have more pigment than binder, but it will be more expensive of a product and conversely the student/hobby/craft grades of art materials will have less pigment but will be less expensive (depending on the brand). All acrylic paint will work regardless, particularly, hobby grade types of acrylic paint if you're going for realism, instead of make-up or fantasy type face ups -- some of them even have skin tones which is useful for hyperrealism, which might not be a thing with most BJD enthusiasts. (:

 

I have used the acrylic craft paint that comes in a bottle and regular chalk pastels on all my dolls including Monsters. Just shake the bottle to see how watery it is so you know you're getting decent pigment. You don't need to seal unless you want a certain finish. If you're considering an artist set of acrylic paint I see no reason it couldn't be used on a doll as long as it's oil free. I've used some thicker water colors too.

If you're having trouble getting the paint to stick try a milky thin layer of chalkboard texture, especially on a smooth hard plastic like a Monster body, and see if that helps. I apply chalk pastels with a dry paint brush or a foam tip tool called Style Stix by Loew-Cornel.

It's all going to come down to your skill level and experience with the medium. For practice heads hit up a junk store or yard sale. Barbie and Monster heads are made from the same stuff. Just do the rerooting before the face up.

 

I think a good thing to remember when starting out is you can always wipe it off if you mess up. It also feels like there is less to worry about mistakes if you get second hand dolls that are already a little beat up. Then it doesn't feel like you're "ruining" it if you mess up.

 

And if you succeed with a second hand doll you've "rescued" it so it's a win-win.

 

You gotta be careful with monster high dolls as a lot of paints actually eat into the vinyl they are made of, same with a lot of sealants they will also attack the vinyl, that or just never cure.

 

Exactly!

 

Just dropping by to say that, I really want to start collecting some Monster High dolls!! I just love the looks of the G3 dolls, they look sturdier than their G1 counterparts and I’m seriously loving the variety of body types! I’d love to borrow a bunch of clothes from the Rainbow High and LOL OMG Dolls and just spend lots of time playing dress-up with my Monster High dolls.

Ahem, to get back on track with the topic of Monster High customization, I’d really like to try giving MH dolls a more anime-inspired aesthetic. They practically look like anime characters anyway, with all of their wild color schemes and character designs (they even have catgirl characters!) but I’d specifically like to give them those classic anime-style eyes, along with that thicker anime eyeliner to really sell the look. I don’t know whether I’d go as far as to sand down their noses to little nubs like you see on typical vinyl anime dolls, though.

I think I’ll spend a while looking at anime-inspired MH customs to get a feel for whether my ideas would look good on actual dolls. Theory is sometimes different than reality, as I’m sure many doll customizers are aware.

 

Their heads are soft and rooted so be careful with the sanding, it might take the whole nose.

 

Oh! I just remembered… a really long time ago, I actually did attempt a custom on a G1 Rochelle Goyle doll! I modded the body into a male one (using a disposable nail file on the chest area — I really should’ve worn a mask for that!) repainted his face, gave him a haircut, and… thought he looked awful, so I dressed him in “peasant clothes” (fabric scraps) and named him “Reek”.

I had a weird love-hate relationship with my little custom gargoyle. Unfortunately the original has been lost for ages, and I miss him. He’d be a fun custom to remake, if only for nostalgic purposes.

 

Oh boy did I learn this the hard way……especially the not curing part! Do a lot of research on this as the problems aren’t always apparent until several months down the line.
I spend hours and hours merrily repainting MH, EAH and a few others and thought to myself that I’ll get a nice batch done then try to see if they’d sell. Thank goodness I did hold onto them as a few months later I noticed the glossy varnishes I’d used began to spread and run. Although it had appeared to cure initially it in fact didn’t on vinyl. I tried at least 3 different brands, all of which were apparently ‘recommended’ for use on MH and none of them cured fully. Some just stayed sticky, some set then later went gloopy, Liquitex was one of the offenders and the sneaky one that seemed initially fine so beware! Tamiya is one I’ve found that does seem stable even several years later. All my repaints were done with MSC (very hard to source here in the UK which added to the annoyance), pastels and watercolour pencil.

Another thing to watch out for is the hair, especially on the older G1 and G2 releases as in some the glue used to seal in the hair degrades, runs and turns the hair into a disgusting slime coated mess which completely ruins all your hard work. Some EAH dolls from around then are affected by this too.

I did enjoy doing the repaints, they were fun and the smoother surface, even when prepped with MSC, felt lovely to draw on so I’d highly recommend giving them a go.