Life Size Doll Painted and Wigged

I have been working on this life size doll nearly all year.  It is not that the project took so long to do, it is that this year I have just had little time to work on it.  I only work on the doll when time allows.  I am not the type of person who stays up all night trying to get things done.  Actually, I am pretty much ready to hit the hay once it gets dark.  I am definitely a morning person.  If I did not get something done on the doll in the morning, it did not get done at all.

From a distance she almost looks real.

When I first started the doll, I had visions of entering it into a competition.  Then the project hit a number of hard stops.  The competition deadline came and went.  One of the hard stops is that I totally lost interest in the project.  I began avoiding my studio because the project was barely started and I no longer cared about it.  Every time I would walk in there the project was in the way, making me feel guilty.  Maybe I should have just thrown the whole thing out then, but I made a rule for myself a long time ago.  The rule Part A:  no more unfinished objects (UFOs).  Part B of the rule was that I could not have more than three projects going at any one time.  The reasoning behind the three projects is that some of my projects take time to dry before going on to the next step.  By having more than one project available I could keep working even if a project was at a stopping point.

I used to start a project, get tired of it, and just stash it away out of sight.  Pretty soon I had a lot of UFOs and nothing completed to show for all my work.  So, once this project was started, it had to be completed before I could begin another project.  I already had two other projects going on.  The first was a king size quilt that I have been hand quilting.  That project is almost finished but it has taken a year.  I will never hand quilt a quilt that size again.  The other project was a quilting guild project, actually projects, as I have participated in two challenge quilts this year.  Since the other two projects were already accounted for, the doll had to be finished before I could go on to something else.

Another of the hard stops was that I hurt my shoulder early this year.  I was going to physical therapy three times a week and had exercises to do at home twice a day on the other days.  That ate up nearly all my free time.  My shoulder is still painful, though not nearly as painful as it was months ago.  Working on this project has not been very pleasurable because it hurt so much to use my arm.

The other hard stop was our schedule this year.  We are spending more time at the cabin than we did in the past.  It is not just the time spent at the cabin that was a hindrance to the project.  Getting ready to go requires grocery shopping and packing.  Returning from the cabin means lots of laundry and trying to catch up on every chore and errand that was not attended to while we were away.  So maybe a week out of each month I had a few hours to work on this project.  No wonder it took so long to finish the doll.

I learned a lot from this project.  Mainly I learned that I did not care much for working in this scale.  I am much happier working on smaller projects.  However, there were many lessons learned along the way that can be helpful in other projects.  I enjoyed the process of sculpting the head.  I like the challenge of making something take shape and form.

Once the doll was covered in papier mâché I painted her with a coat of Gesso.  Then I painted on a ballet leotard.  My intention was to costume her for Halloween, but I worked on painting her right up until the evening of Halloween.  At least she has some clothes on now.

With time running out on Halloween I had thought that I would make a quick costume out of white trash bags and position her a few feet from the door so that she had a ghostly appearance.  If there was a breeze the bags would rustle and flutter in the wind.  However, at dark on Halloween night the coat of outdoor sealer was still drying.  If I had costumed her I might have plastic permanently embedded in the sealer.  I decided that I would wait for next year to put her outside.  That was disappointing, but I would rather do it right than wreck the project. Who knows, maybe someone will want this piece to put on a parade float or something.

I purchased a Cosplay wig for her hair.  Then the Halloween costumes came on sale at Walmart and I purchased a cheaper wig thinking I would use the inexpensive wig on the doll and save the expensive wig for my own Halloween costume.  However, the Walmart wig has big chunks of hair cut off it here and there.  (My take on this is that the wig makers did not want people using cheap wigs for Cosplay.  Cosplay is big business.)  It looks like someone went mad and started hacking off hanks of hair.  Maybe that was okay for a Halloween, but it was not okay for the doll.  If you look at the first picture you can see some of the short strands sticking out on the side.  I was a bit miffed at the hacked up wig  The picture on the bag did not show that this was what the wig was going to look like.  At the moment, the wig is only tacked with a dab of hot glue so I could take some pictures.  After I add a couple more coats of exterior sealer to the doll I will glue on the better wig. 

Anyway, now that she is painted, she is ready to be costumed.  Maybe she will be the flamenco dancer I had originally envisioned holding a fan in her outstretched hand.  Or a bejeweled belly dancer stepping into a hip lift.   Maybe she is holding a glass ready to make a toast.  She could be a costumed as a winged archangel holding a flaming sword.  Or Lady MacBeth holding a dagger.  The possibilities are endless.  Now that the doll is finished, the costuming can begin.

If you are interested in seeing more pictures of the construction of the doll you can go to folkartbycaroljones.blogspot.com and scroll back through some of my earlier posts.  The doll posts are intermingled with posts from my travels this year.  Many of the photos showing the construction of the torso are on a blog post dated October 28th, 2018 if you want to see most of the construction in one place.  If you want detailed information about the process, you should read the posts on the life size doll that took place throughout the year.

I will be blogging next Sunday.  I will show the quilting progress on the king size quilt.