My first faceup ever

For my first faceup ever, I chose a Obitsu 50-08 head as the guinea pig.

I started by cutting out the eyes, mouth and neck hole:

As the vinyl on this head is quite thick (0.5 cm in places), I first drilled holes through the parts that needed to be removed, and then used a modelling knife to progressively remove more material. For the mouth, I first stuck a piece of masking tape to the face, and drew the shape I wanted on that. The picture above is after roughly cutting everything out, prior to sanding.

I then made some teeth and a mouth out of Milliput epoxy putty, and painted those with Tamiya paints:

There is no tongue, but the mouth hole is too small to see that. In this picture you can also see my attempts at making canines from left-over Milliput. This head won't be having canines.

Then I set to work on the actual head, with Faber Castell pencils and soft pastels. Much layering with MSC later:

This is with artificial light and my camera's flash; the weather over here is awful and it's very dark, so natural light will have to wait a little.

I had to redo the eyebrows after slipping with a pencil, and retouched various small blemishes along the way using a Q-tip wetted with alcohol. I'm not dissatisfied with the result. Now I just need to attach the mouth parts and find some eyes that fit, 18mm is too large.

And I immediately followed up with a second one (Obitsu 50-02), where I tried using paint besides the pencils and pastels:

Things learnt:

• Pencils only apply and hold well if there aren't too many layers of MSC on yet.
• Pencils are not suited for filling in large areas (hence the paint).
• When using pastels, some colours don't work well. I tried to add light blue pastels to this head, and combined with the skin colour they ended up more grey than I hoped.
• Curiously, I find it easier to paint symmetrically than to draw like that (symmetry in my drawings usually is a catastrophe).
• Proper thinning for Liquitex Basics: small goop of paint + three drops of flow aid mixed with demineralised water according to instructions on bottle. Close to no brush streaks. I tested this beforehand using an old DD lower torso that is all stained to hell.

For my next head I want to try the "edge of eye beyond the actual edge of the eye of the head mold"-thing.

 

Edited December 31, 2024 by Kemonomimicry

I really like her brightly-colored markings, it reminds me of Kabuki masks a bit! A tip for watercolor pencils, if you wet them and lift the pigment straight off the pencil with a brush, you can more easily get into hard-to-reach areas and also get a bit more intense a color!