Monthly Archives: May 2020

Fancy new Wasp Dolly!

Wasp Doll on balcony by Suzanne Forbes May 24 2020Wow, this is another project that took ages!

Not as long as the Giant Alien Venus Flytrap, but I’ve been working on the doll part of it since March, and her steed for years!

Wasp Doll in salon full shot by Suzanne Forbes May 24 2020There are so many processes, layers, coats, cures and stages to a big bricolage or assemblage art project.

I bought this headless Monster High Wydowna Spider doll body on eBay for a couple dollars, when I was looking for doll arms for the Eliza doll.

Wasp Doll WIP headless by Suzanne Forbes May 2020Then I just let it bounce around the doll parts drawer for a couple years. I had some vague idea of making an insect doll with it.

When I started messing with holographic and iridescent vinyl, I used the tiniest scraps to make the body a superhero suit in the style of Ororo’s First Appearance. I made a standing neck ruffle of crystal-studded glitter pvc during the same couple months, and an inner ruffle of clear blue vinyl that came from a package or something. Trying to use some actual trash in all my assemblage now!

Wasp Doll WIP wires in armpit by Suzanne Forbes May 2020Because almost no adhesive will hold shaped vinyl or pvc against its natural flexion, I secured the ruffles with wire and wired them carefully around the doll’s armpits to preserve articulation.

Wasp Doll WIP feet by Suzanne Forbes May 2020I had some yellow plastic doll sandals with filigree tops, which I snipped down, colored with a blue paint pen, painted with blue interference paint, and coated with Mod Podge. I put those on her shins, tied them on with ribbon and then sculpted some shoes onto her feet with Apoxie Sculpt. Sanded them, painted them blue, gave them shine with blue interference paint, and varnished shoes and spats with my hardcore German solvent-based varnish. And added some jewels, attached with UV resin. Done!

For her head, I had several loose doll heads I considered. I tried one out, coloring it black, styling its hair, adding huge jeweled eyes – but it didn’t look right.

I had to sculpt her head from scratch in the end.

Fly Doll head test fit WIP by Suzanne ForbesI formed two connected balls out of crumpled aluminium foil, and then I used the same method of alternating layers of air-dry clay, then Apoxie Sculpt, as I did for the Alien Venus Flytrap.

I find initially covering a tin-foil base shape with air-dry clay is both faster and easier than using Apoxie Sculpt, because you don’t have to mix it and the air-dry clay is softer, so pressing it onto the base doesn’t deform it.

After a day or two of drying the air-dry clay can be sanded to refine its shape and covered with Apoxie Sculpt for more strength and rigidity. Let that cure for a day, sand and refine with your Tack-Life mini-dremel, then smooth with air-dry clay!

In the end I got a pretty nice head, and then I painted it with black tube acrylics.

And then, so many coats of Mod Podge Matte diluted with water.

It worked so well! (See the Giant Audrey post for the subject of whether you can dilute Mod Podge, a heated topic! ) Diluting the Mod Podge let me get smooth coats without brush marks, and the pencil let me rotate the head to help drips self-level. One of the many important things I have learned from action figure customizers is to always, always put your head on a stick.

Fly Doll Head WIP by Suzanne Forbes

The head was looking almost as if it had been manufactured with the body, which is always the customizers’ goal.

The subsurface specularity of the layers of Matte Mod Podge (which isn’t really matte) almost precisely matched the albedo of the molded plastic.

Wasp Doll WIP by Suzanne Forbes May 2020

Of course, I foolishly ignored another crucial action figure customizer thing, which is, always, always, always prime!

I just decided to skip it for some reason! And you can see the results above. The areas of the head I hadn’t covered with Apoxie Sculpt let in moisture and the head cracked from moisture absorbed during the Mod Podge coats, even though the head had been painted with multiple coats of black tube acrylic first. Air-dry clay, even if it’s cured, can expand and crack when moisture seeps into it. ALWAYS PRIME!!!

Wasp Doll WIP UV resin head by Suzanne Forbes May 2020Anyway, having screwed up with not priming, I proceeded to screw up again with the UV resin.

I had envisioned the doll’s eyes as covered in refractive, transparent layers of UV resin and glitter from the beginning. I used Padico UV/LED resin, which cures almost instantly when hit with a UV LED flashlight. But I am a UV resin amateur. When I started to put the resin and glitter layers on the eyeballs, of course it crept over onto the forehead and beak. It is very gooey, very drippy stuff, and the minute it touched the rest of the head, it couldn’t be wiped off without destroying the whole finish.

Wasp Doll WIP drilled out head by Suzanne Forbes May 2020So I covered the whole head with resin. Which messed up the lines of the sculpt a bit, because it is so hard to apply UV resin to a rounded complex shape and get a level finish! You can see that on the lumpy eyeballs above. And it changed the albedo of the finish so it was now higher than the body!

Augh. I had to keep going, at this point – sometimes you just have to.

I drilled out the base of the head to fit the neck join of the body – my drill goes right through the crumpled foil- and attached antennae from a plastic bug. (Those had been Mod Podged, painted black, then Mod Podged again!)

Wasp Doll bra by Suzanne Forbes May 24 2020I used UV resin to attach the antennae, and I have to say that is a bricolage and assemblage application that UV resin is perfect for!

It is faster than Super Glue and holds more varied connecting surfaces. I just put a blob of resin on the base of the antenna, held it onto the head with one hand and hit it with the UV LED torch with the other. BOOM!

I also put a light wash of diluted Mod Podge over the center of the doll’s face to knock down the albedo. It is a hack, and could be scraped off, but it looks ok.

Wasp Doll WIP wing by Suzanne Forbes May 2020

The wings were another UV resin experiment.

I had some cicada wings printed onto acetate from a doll company, bought years ago, and I wanted to bond the acetate wings onto Angelina Fantasy Film. In retrospect, I should have used holographic vinyl, which is thicker! But I smeared a layer of UV resin on the back of the wings (not yet cut out of their sheet) and put the Fantasy film over it and squidged them together like filling a cake. Then I hit the sandwich with the torch to cure it and cut the wings out.

I would say it worked fairly well, bonding the surfaces without smearing the print on the acetate or warping either film. Probably white glue or Mod Podge would have worked too. However, I felt like my UV resin luck was running out. I didn’t think I could get a smooth layer on the surface of the wings, although people on etsy do it all the time. So I used my hardcore German varnish. I coated the wings heavily and let it drip off (terrible fumes!). It did self-level pretty well, although it got a little thick at the edges.

Wasp Doll WIP wings and wires by Suzanne Forbes May 2020The final touch was something to cover the wires around her shoulders that hold the ruff on, and something to hide the place where I glued the wings on her back. I was peering into my ribbon drawer, thinking of ruffling a thin organza ribbon, when I saw a hair flower that had lost its back. Bingo! I tore it apart and the results were even better than I hoped – it was constructed of little triangular folded wings that fit perfectly in all the spaces!

I put her jeweled metal girdle on and tied it with ribbon at the back, and fused it with the front of her costume using UV resin.

Wasp Doll in salon with other dolls by Suzanne Forbes May 24 2020Oh wow was I glad to be done! SO MANY PROCESSES!!!!

How I made the ombré filigree holographic vinyl and resin girdle will be in the next post, which is…

 The Wasp Doll has a horse-bird-steed thing, too!

Other doll-things I have made:

Limb-Different Non-Binary Fetish Fairy

Reserved Parking for Eliza

The Gothest Action Figure Custom ever.

Valentine’s Monster Doll Armada

Snow Queen/Jadis

Fearless Pink Gay Santa

Custom Elsa Lancaster as The Bride

Gothic Rococo Horribella

Horribellas

Mummified Fairy King

Evil Mermaid

Opal Fimo Mantis Doll

Earliest dolls! with bad photos!

 

 

GIANT Alien Venus Flytrap aka Audrey 2!

Alien venus flytrap by Suzanne Forbes May 2020This project was started four years ago, damn it takes a long time to finish things sometimes!

I started this little Alien Carnivorous plant cutie using an aluminium loaf pan and FIMO. I had a lot of old green FIMO lying around, brought here in the shipping container, and I wanted to use it up. I cut the loaf pan in half, and shaped it into two cupped buds. I attempted to cover it with FIMO. I knew the translucent properties of polymer clay would give a great leaf surface.

Alien venus flytrap and Morgan by Suzanne Forbes May 2020But using polymer clay hurts my hands, especially when it’s old. And although I love how it looks, I hate the way polymer clay feels and smells. So I baked the partly covered leaf cups and abandoned the project. For four years.

But as I have said before, for artists the long game is often the only game in town.

This January, after using and enjoying air-dry clay for small Audreys, I decided to cover the leaf cups with that.

Alien venus flytrap WIP air dry clay Suzanne Forbes May 2020

I wound up trying a kind of mixed materials approach, where I covered the old polymer clay with the air dry clay and let it cure for a couple days, then used Apoxie Sculpt to reinforce and fill cracks. Air dry clay is prone to cracking in thicker applications and areas where a lot of water is used to smooth. It’s physically easier to smooth than Apoxie Sculpt though, which nice on my hands, which are already showing signs of arthritis according to our hand und knie spezialist.

Working back and forth with layers of air-dry and then layers of epoxy clay turned out well!

Of course I had to wait for each layer to cure, but since I was also working on the head of Fly Dolly (post coming soon!) with the same two materials, I could work on both and leave them to cure. You can see Fly Dolly’s head being test-fitted above.

Alien venus flytrap WIP air dry clay Suzanne Forbes May 2020I sculpted some veins with each clay, then I had a terrible idea.

I always have a terrible idea. I wondered if using my Mr Surfacer500, the Japanese model primer that created a disaster the last time I tried to use it, might help me get a smooth surface on the pods. HA HA HA NOOOO! Not only is it goopy, gloppy stuff, the solvent in the mostly empty jar had evaporated off enough to make it even thicker! But I tried it anyway! It was… a disaster!

I wiped off what goopy globs I could, used the goopiest part to thicken the veins, and sanded off the parts that looked terrible.

The whole point of bricolage is to try things. It’s fine.

Once I had sanded down the mess, used some more air-dry clay for a final smoothing, sanded the whole fucking thing some more, and primed it with plain white primer, it was ready to paint!

First, I put five isolation coats of Mod Podge thinned with water on it.

I had tried googling “Can you thin Mod Podge with water?” on several occasions, because unthinned Mod Podge shows brush marks and does not self-level. However, google results for “thinning Mod Podge with water” only got me a bunch of Mod Podge loyalists decrying the practise of using thinned white glue as a substitute for Mod Podge.

Alien venus flytrap WIP red glue by Suzanne Forbes May 2020So I fuckin tried it. And it totally worked!

You can thin Mod Podge with water to the liquidity of heavy cream, and use it to brush on smooth coats. Using Mod Podge Matte, I even got a lovely smooth plastic quality that was exactly what I wanted. It took a while, but the thinned Mod Podge dried faster, and I really like the results. Then I painted over the MP with artists acrylic, the Windsor-Newton Galeria I always use, also thinned a bit. Then, I tried another new thing – colored glue gun glue! I used red glue glue to make the leaf veins even more prominent, and also translucent. It worked great!

Alien venus flytrap stem Suzanne Forbes May 2020I did a wash of contrast colors over the whole thing, with some drybrushing and some wiping down, then sealed it all with two more coats of Matte Mod Podge thinned with water. It looked wonderfully plasticky, perfect since it would be surrounded by plastic plants! I also coated the tongue with UV resin and made a dangling saliva drop with it. Extra glossy and creepy!

Incredibly, while I was working on it, Cory Doctorow tweeted about Swamp Thing action figures from 1990, which I did not know about. So I had to check eBay, and I totally want the Transducer with Mutated Insect! Anyway, once the last coat had cured, I drilled holes through the sides of the “jaws” and wired the whole thing together with green floral wire to make a thick stem (4 o’clock in the picture above).

Alien venus flytrap base WIP Suzanne Forbes May 2020I used tinfoil to fill out and pack the bases when I made small potted Audreys last year.

It worked great, so I decided to go that way again! I went out to the balcony, grabbed this huge planter that was out there when we moved in, dumped the cigarette butts out of it, dusted it off, and packed it with foil. I also used some plastic trash from our recycling bag to add volume and structure that would support the Audrey 2, which is pretty heavy!

Alien venus flytrap detail by Suzanne Forbes May 2020I glued the whole thing together with glue gun glue and wire, including green glue gun glue (say that five times fast!) at the end where it could be seen (it looks great!) and took it out to the balcony and put it on the plant stand.

It’s a good luck charm, a place holder towards the days when we’ll be able to have parties again. Some poor innocent will go out to the balcony to smoke, and will look over and say, “You finally got a plant for out herRRRR AUUGGHH!!!”

I live for moments like that, as you know.

Alien venus flytrap on balcony Suzanne Forbes May 2020

Getting started

So many plants!

Potted plants and fascinators!

The finale (well, before this one!)