Sunday, April 9, 2017

Vintage 1920's Doll Restoration! - Part 4 - Body painting

Hello everyone!  Welcome back to this doll's story!
This is the 4th chapter in her story, and it will be one of the shortest ones.  This chapter will focus on how I repainted her composition body after repairing it.






As you can see, even after resculpting, her body was still pretty scuffed up.  So, I started out by sanding down all the cracks, rubs, and joins between composition and sculpting medium.





 After I'd sanded everything, I stacked up about three layers of matte-finish Mod Podge on all the still-rough places to smooth them out and provide some tooth for the paint.






These pictures show some of the worst places in terms of roughness.




The absolute worst place was, of course, the inside of the resculpted hip joint.  I had to add about 5 layers of Mod Podge there.





Next, I added a preliminary coat of flesh-colored acrylic to all the rough areas.




I paid special attention to the places where I had replaced missing parts with sculpting medium.  This included her left hand....




...left foot...







...and, of course, the new right hip joint.




After this preliminary paint had dried, I mixed a giant batch of acrylic in a pale color very similar to her original skin tone.
Then, I painted her entire body in two sessions.  First, I did the front, then, after that had dried, I turned her over and painted the back.












I painted her legs and arms at the same time.





I watered down the paint to remove lumps, and because I did the entire body with the same batch, it came out super-smooth.


When the paint was dry, I coated her body with two coats of matte-finish acid-free acrylic craft sealant, front and back.











You can barely tell the difference between the two hip joints now.





And here's the full body.  With the paint and the sealant, she looks as good as new!




 The next step was to repair her face and eyes.  Stay tuned!


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