Aesthetics Restoring a Delf Lishe & modifying mobility devices

Starting a project thread for myself to document this journey! I'm already partway through it at this point, but thought I'd retroactively post the progress, and then keep track of future work.

To be honest, I've never been a very confident or hands-on doll collector, and would typically much rather commission others than to work on my dolls myself. However, I was fortunate to have had my WTB post answered and been given a chance to adopt a long time grail -- a Type 1 BW dreaming Lishe head that I need to hybrid onto a male body -- to bring my character Elias to life. The only hiccup is that the head had passed through many hands, and at some point became rather unevenly yellowed, as well as acquiring a few dings (aren't cats wonderful? haha)

In addition, the character has a hypermobility disorder and uses a variety of mobility devices. I figured that this would be a good as time as any to get my hands dirty and do something more than simple aesthetic work.

List of things I need to do:

• Boil out the dents
• A combination of polident soaking and light sanding to try and reduce/even out the yellowing
  • I purchased a brand new ALM WS male body for him, and though I believe ALM is a more creamy kind of WS, it'll take a bit to match such a yellowed head to brand new WS
  • Saving grace: the body will yellow eventually and they can meet in the middle XD
• Faceup
  • overlordu suggested Panpastel white, which is brilliant. I'll apply a couple layers to whiten
  • The actual faceup - I've done one batch of 3 faceups before and have received helpful critique with tips that I'll be applying
• Piercings? May do some glue on
• Mobility Devices
  • Crutches: I purchased these from Smartdoll, but will probably need to boil and widen the forearm area
  • Metal Wheelchair: I am lucky to have bought a used My Twinn metal wheelchair years ago (which works well for SD dolls) but it was unfortunately damaged to me in shipping. The seller only used plastic bags, no bubble wrap or padding of any sort >.>. In recent inspections, I've come to realize it's missing other parts and is more broken that I previously thought, so this will be a mini project
  • Plastic Wheelchair: I also just purchased a plastic My Twinn wheelchair from ebay out of the fear that the metal one is a bit fragile with its rubber wheels. This newer model has a missing armrest, but more importantly, is a lovely combination of pink and teal. I'll need to replace the pink seating and then disassemble the wheelchair to spray paint. I also want to do something about the footrests because these wheelchairs for American Girl type dolls have such huge footrests to accommodate those dolls' wider feet, but that might be beyond me
• Get the head fitted onto the ALM body
  • I believe Type 1 girl Delf heads have a neck opening of 8", but the body has a neck of ~9". It might work, it might not. Will need to test out and then decide how to tackle this. I've seen other Delf ALM hybrid photos where the neck looks too short, but that's likely because male heads would sit too low given their 10" opening.

Delf Lishe Head (and thanks to LupusDarkmoon for allowing me to post their photos as I didn't take any 'before' shots)


You can see some of the uneven yellowing here


Close-ups of the main damage (and a smaller dent on the other cheek as well)



Step 1: Boiling out the dents & attemps to de-yellow

Boiling it was surprisingly simple! I thought it would be a lot scarier than it was. Rather than using a pot over a stove, I just heated water in a kettle, poured into a large bowl, and dipped the head in. The dings mostly are gone except for one small one on the right cheek that my camera won't pick up.

The polydent baths were less successful. I soaked jthe head for 24hrs without any visible difference when compared to the headcap



So moving on to sanding. I used some fairly high grit sandpaper sponges ranging from ~400 - 600. My goal was to even out the yellowing as much as possible, so I focused on the cheeks and forehead that were darker than the chin. I avoided detail areas such as the lips, eyes, etc. as I didn't want to damage a discontinued sculpt.

There was definite improvement after 2 rounds of sanding!


Step 2: Faceup!

A couple layers of Pan Pastel white really made a huge difference (this photo is after the first layer)


Base layer of pastels
Compared to the headcap, the face is now lighter in color whereas previously, it was noticeably more yellow.



Second layer
Sitting on the floor to do the faceup because I don't have a chair yet XD
One of the best pieces of feedback I got from my first faceups was to be very cognizant of the style I like, and in my case, I prefer the older school simpler faceups. I tried to keep the pastels a lot neater this time with very light blushing.


Final layer w/ brushwork
I did dilute my paint a bit too much so the lower lashes are a bit faintly colored, and there were some other mistakes, but overall, I'm very pleased this time. I don't love doing faceups myself, but there is something special about seeing a character come to life.



All done up!


Adding a photo of Elias on his body! Near perfect color match, and no modding required - the proportions and posability are great. I'm so pleased at these results.



I'll use the next post to document the journey of repairing his metal wheelchair, and then reworking the second

 

Wheelchair / Mobility Devices!

I'm not the best at remembering to document my projects, so the photos are sporadic

1. My Twinn Metal Wheelchair repair

The spokes of the wheels are plastic, unlike the rest of the chair, and arrived to me broken. My first project was simply to superglue some pieces together. It was in this process that I noticed just how broken the wheel was, with many spokes detached from the hub that also then had to be glued back.

As someone decidedly not very good at crafts, I would say it was a B- job considering I got some glue in places and it doesn't look the cleanest.



Step 2: the outer rings / handrims that one would use to wheel oneself were missing entirely, and some of the plastic 'nubs' that they would've been attached to were also gone. I was able to clean away the plastic that remained, and in a stroke of luck, found silver metal beads that were almost exactly the same size to replace them with. I will forever love browsing the many aisles of Michael's for this reason~



Step 3: for the actual outer ring/handrim, I bought some silver macrame hoops to glue on. They're just a bit thin, but it works well enough!




2. My Twinn Plastic Wheelchair customization

I've made a bit of progress on the plastic wheelchair as well. Thus far, I've spray painted it silver and matte black and added some black electrical tapes for the handle. It looks so much better for my purposes already.

Before (on the left):


After:



I am also planning to create a foot bar and am playing around with how to attach it to the chair in a way that is still removable so that it can be folded up. Fortunately, I think I have a solution using the same silver beads I used to attach the handrims above

I'll also be sewing some padded seats and arm rests so that hopefully, it gives the illusion that the chair fits Elias much better

 

Thank you so much!!! ~

 

I added some photos of my progress on the wheelchair, but in the meantime, Elias' body also arrived!!! It fits perfectly - because the head has a slightly smaller neck circumferences, it perches on top of the ALM body and proportions look great.

The color match is ~95%, and I'm hopeful that once the body mellows, it will match perfectly.



And another photo with his two siblings, reunited at last! The family resemblance is not strong in their family haha... but hopefully a faceup on my Moon and potential future mods on the FL60A head will help, but those are for another day.