Doll Experiment- Part 11

It is good to be back to blogging about my projects again.  I took a vacation from the blog for a few weeks.  Sometimes the pressure of trying to get content up on the blog during the holiday season becomes very intense.  I can keep going, but grinding away at something when you feel stressed can lead to burn-out.  In the long run I feel much better if I take a break and can come back to it refreshed and enthusiastic.

Checking back over the blog posts on my current project, I was surprised to learn that I had been working on this project since the beginning of October.  I spent so much time traveling that I did not have much time in the studio this fall.  Another factor in the project taking so long is that it is that the doll is made from many layers of papier mache'.  Each layer must try completely before another layer is added.  It generally takes at least twenty-four hours for a layer to dry.  (I could speed it up by heating it in an oven, but I prefer not to do that.  It is possible that bad things can happen if paper becomes overheated.)  And of course, the holidays factored into everything.  However, now I am back on track to completing this project.

When I left off blogging in December, I had just given the doll a couple of coats of Gesso.  The Gesso is opaque enough that it prevents the newsprint from showing through on the other layers of the project.   Since then, I decided to take a detour into a painting experiment.  Some years ago, I had read an article in Artist Magazine about some artists that created a very ethereal and otherworldly effect in their paintings by under-painting in gold.  I kept that type of project in the back of my mind because it was intriguing enough that I knew that sooner or later I would want to experiment with that.  Well, I have a doll that needs painting, and I have some gold metallic paint, so here I go down the Rabbit Hole again.  I planned to give the entire body of the doll a gold under-painting and then build up the color to a flesh color with a series of thin glazes.  I wanted some of the gold color to show through and reflect light, giving the doll a sort of internal glow.  I knew what I wanted, but I had no idea how this was going to turn out.

It took two layers of the gold paint to cover without looking streaky.  I lightly sanded between coats.  The look of the doll was pretty bizarre.  In a way, the doll began to take on the feel of ancient Egyptian art as the gold glowed through.  Then I started adding glazes of various colors.  I made the first layer too thick and had to do some extra work to recover from that mistake.  It took a lot of layers to build up to anything that resembled a flesh color.  I lost count after seven, because it was many more layers than that.  I finished off the glazes with a last thin mix of glaze medium and the gold metallic paint to bring back some more of the reflective quality to the doll.

As I mentioned in previous blog posts, 
 I had painted the first layers of the eyes in order to get a feel for
where the doll was looking.  The eyes still need to do some more
work on them.  They are still in the beginning stages.  I think
that I will be able to make them look more realistic.  More work needs to be  added around the pupils, eyebrows, eye lids, lips, and cheeks.  Also, there will be shading around the nose and eyelids.  It takes a fair amount of time to get the detail of a face looking as I want it to look.

Then I will be moving on to adding hair and costuming the doll.  There is still quite a bit of work to do on the doll.  At the moment it is just a figure.  The magic of making a doll is to make it tell a story.  Without the accessories that give you cues as to what the story is, the doll is just a static figure.  The details draw you in so that you become interactive with the doll.

Check back on Thursday for the next blog post.