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Removing Lusis’s Face-up

I started removing the two face-ups from My Lusis faceplates last night, which turned out to be quite a lot of hard work, though it did provide amusement. You can see from the pic above that I was literally peeling the lip paint off of this doll, this is how thick the paint was applied. ^^; For the most part though, after a swipe with isopropyl alcohol and a soak in warm water I was able to peel a lot of the paint off with my fingernail. However the corners proved to be stubborn and I had to carefully use my clay-working needle tool to carefully prick and pull out the paint that was crammed into tiny corners. The eyes also had a lot of dried glue around them which required a lot of soaking in warm water to get the glue pliable enough so it could be removed. There were a couple spots of paint in the eye wells that didn’t want to come off for me despite resorting to using acetone on them, but I chalk it up to being the rough surface that needs a gentle sanding. Anyway I have to say that if you can peel off your face-up like in my pic above, “UR DOIN IT WRONG!” XD (the face-up that is).

Here they are all cleaned up and ready for customization. As you can tell from the photo, Lusis R (right) has her mouth opened a tiny bit more than Lusis L (left). Also Lusis R’s mouth is a tad asymmetrical. I think I should be able to fix this easily enough with gentle sanding. For Lusis L, she’s in great shape except the seam line around the edge of her plate is rough and needs a little sanding. Both of these girls just need a little gentle finishing sanding really, but overall they are in excellent shape. I suppose I should also record that both of them have had their eyebrows sanded, however there is a very slight, faint sort of smooth ridge where they used to be. I’m not sure if I will sand them any further or not. I guess we’ll see when I decide to start working on their face-ups.

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Unoa Lusis Arrived!

She’s here, and much sooner than I expected to boot! I have to say that after much fretting and curiosity over the condition of her since she is secondhand, I find her to be far prettier in person despite her bad face-up and body blushing. 😀 Anyhow box opening pics follow, along with some quickie resin comparisons between Unoa, Dollmore, and Asleep Eidolon. Also I wanted to be sure to record her well with photos so I can have clear progress pics of her impending “make-over” so I can see how much more beautiful she will become! :DD

Read on behind the cut

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Getting my grail doll – Unoa Lusis!! :D

As I eluded to in my earlier post, I ordered my grail doll, a Unoa Lusis off of the Mandarake site. She’s been paid for and now I’m just waiting for a shipping notification. She’s going to be a little bit of a fixer-upper since her face-up is pretty bad looking and she’s had some unnatural pink body blushing, but never the less I am very excited!! The pic to the left is what Mandarake had on their site, and yes, she will totes come with an extra faceplate and small bust part for a price of only 45000 yen!! She will however have some yellowing, but from what I understand after reading about other people’s secondhand dolly purchases with Mandarake is that the dolls always appear better in person and yellowing is minimal (it’s just their photos that are poor). I really don’t care much if the doll has mellowed, afterall I’m pretty sure that my AE Yara has yellowed, but she still has a natural looking creamy beige skintone that’s even, and I think no less of her for it.

I don’t know if it seems strange, but for some reason I’m doubly excited to get a secondhand doll. I think it’s because when you get a brand new doll fresh from the factory there is this “newness factor” that comes into play and it makes me super reluctant to do anything to the doll. I swear for the first month I had Sona I didn’t even want to take off her wig!! XD With a secondhand doll I feel much more comfortable with the idea of taking her apart, cleaning and sanding and blushing and etc…. Right now my big excitement aside from getting the doll sculpt I’ve always admired but never thought I could afford or acquire, is that I plan to customize the doody out of her and make her as beautiful as possible! By customize though I mean blushing and face-up, not actually modifications, because I think Unoas are the most perfect dolls out there and need no modding. One of the great things about a Unoa is that their sculpt is so beautiful that even a terrible face-up can’t hide the beauty of the inherent sculpt. Often with other dolls I find that the face-up can so drastically change the look of the doll as to make me reconsider a sculpt. With Unoas that doesn’t happen…of course maybe it’s that I have probably looked through every Unoa on flickr and studied them with great care. I’m sure there are other people who feel as passionate about their own favorite sculpt though.

Well, enough of this random crooning over Unoas, it’s time to ferry my mother about town since she has been cooped up since her knee surgery. You can expect more postings about my new Lusis when she finally arrives!! Yay! So exicted! XD~

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Oh dear, more beautiful MSD

It’s been a while since my last posting, and as usual I’ve been busy with my comic work, or more recently struggling with sleep issues. Anyhow I’ve gotten the dolly bug again, for better or worse, lol. I remember reading about Dreaming Doll’s MSD girls Misora and Airi a while back on BJD Collectasy and I remember being super impressed with them, especially Misora, however I was not in a position at that time to purchase a doll. Though considering dolls are a luxury item and in this bad economy is there really ever a time when we’re in a good position to buy a doll? XD I guess the money I’ve been sitting on in my bank account has begun to burn a hole through it’s virtual wall, because I find myself going dolly window shopping again (which is usually a precursor to buying ^^;;;). So it is now that I have rediscovered these fine MSD ladies.

I think I really like Misora the best, but it might just be the dark eyes and cute wig that are drawing me in, as I have a thing for dark eyes. I haven’t been able to dig up too many owner pics of them yet because they are still fairly new on the scene AND everyone seems very taken with Airi, who is also darling with her little teefers. The thing that puts me off Airi though is it seems her eye fills her whole socket so they just look like black pits. HOWEVER, I did find some owner pictures of her where a girl tried 12mm eyes instead of 14mm which seemed to solve that problem, and it put Airi in a new light for me. Anyway the current free shipping offer is tempting along with the fact that they have a lot of TTYA and Nine Style clothing available for purchase on their site. Oh but derp, do I really need another MSD girl? On the one hand, they’ve got clothes and wigs to share, on the other hand, they are MSD and thus can’t play in the dollhouse. XD I’ll dwell on it a little more and hope the free shipping bonus doesn’t go away too soon!

EDIT: I just looked back through my older posts to see when I last purchased a doll and I came to realize that it appears I’ve been buying a doll a year since 2010, except in 2011 I bought Ash and my Brownie. With that said, I guess I’m due for a doll purchase, lol. XD

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Yara’s bad face-up and Sona’s new to her wig.

I wanted to give my Yara a new face-up, this time something a little bolder and with fresher colors, and well it turned out bolder all right, but it started heading in a direction that I ended up not liking. After having already wiped and re-primed twice because of eyebrow flubs, I decided to just continue with my third attempt since the brows turned out fine. In the end though I think it’s too garish and I have way too many little flubs and blunders all through the entire face-up. I’m going to wipe her face again soon and re-do it, but I probably won’t be able to get to it again for a few days, so she’s like she is for now. Anyhow I thought I’d post this bad face-up for posterity or something. XD


Also, Sona’s newness has wore off enough so I thought I would finally remove her original wig which was velcroed on by dollmore. I had bought this short blunt cut wig for her back when I first ordered her and I wasn’t positive I would get the wig I wanted. After trying it on her I think I’ll keep it on her for a while since the cut has a schoolgirl vibe to it that I think suits her well, and it’s also easier to manage.

Still thinking about new dolls as in my previous post, but every time I consider making a large frivolous purchase I always have to argue with myself over it for a week or so before I come to any conclusions. I did however take my DIM Danbi out of his box this afternoon, mostly with the intention of checking his condition for sale. After getting him out and looking him over and being newly shocked by his size again, I think I decided I should keep him because although he’s not double jointed, it is a nice body sculpt, so IF I did order the Ash fullset there could be the possibility of him using the DIM body which I think looks a little more manly than the mudoll body sculpt. Argh! Listen to me, I am still seriously considering it! o(>3<;)o