Sunday, June 29, 2014

Doll-A-Day 164: Nesting Dolls of My Own Making (And My Own Family!) and the answer to that glaze question

  First of all, London Peony, our Blogiversary giveaway winner has FINALLY received her prize. She sounds happy with it! She's planning a photo shoot with it, so I hope she will share some of the pictures with us,or alert us if she posts them on her blog.
  Now, a while back I did a post on another of the tiny dolls I make, and one of our readers,Margarita,asked me what kind of glaze I used. Today I'm showing you another project I did using the same glaze. It's this set of nesting dolls I made for Ivy one Christmas.

Left to right: Ken, me, Emma, Fuzz, and Ivy.
It was a set of  blanks I bought and painted for Ivy, since she collects nesting dolls.
What to do with Ken's hands? Why let him hold a prop: his most frequent real life 'prop'? His knife and fork of course...

I drew the faces with pencil and chickened out when it came to painting over my pencil lines.I painted them with acrylic paints and used the glaze Triple Thick, by Deco Art.


Triple Thick says it only takes one coat, but I did give these a couple of coats to make them extra shiny.

Ivy would kill me if she saw this because I don't have the halves perfectly lined up. (She has a thing about lining the halves up.)Notice my left thumb.

Triple Thick is supposedly resistant to cracking and yellowing. It seems to live up to the claim so far. These nesting dolls were done in 2007.

Emma when she still wanted to be a movie director, before she went to film school and completely changed her mind. That's a video camera in her hands.


One thing about Triple Thick though: I have noticed that once it's been opened it starts to go thick and sticky fairly quickly. (Like, within a couple of months or less.) So, unless you use a lot of glaze in a short period of time, buy the smaller bottle instead of the large jar. Price per ounce is cheaper on the big jar, but unless you get to use it all before it gets too sticky to use, it ends up being less economical simply because of the waste. 

 
Fuzzy.


By the time I got to the Ivy, the smallest nest, it was pretty tiny and hard to even hold while painting it. That's my excuse for why the tiny one looks so bad!
Ivy is holding her favourite larger doll, Baby.There's no way I could have painted her other favourite doll in scale to that nesting doll of her.Her other favourite is a Kelly friend,Major Mint from Barbie Nurcracker.
Major Mint originally looked like this and was a boy. We thought he was so pretty he looked more like a girl, so 'he' became 'she', and, as she did with a lot of dolls at the time, Ivy named her 'Blue'. (It was her favourite colour and the only one she knew the name of, since she was only 2 years old.) This is the only one named Blue that we still remember the name of. But then, we still see her on a regular basis.

Since the dolls are painted to look like our family it worked out that there were five of them and five of us.



That's it for today. See you tomorrow for another doll.

2 comments:

  1. Amazing! Thank you so much for the info, it really helps. I love the tiny details! My eyes totally zoomed to the chest hair, jaja! What did you used as a drying rack so that the edges didn't form bubbles or glued to where you set them? Thank you for sharing!

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    1. I know there are drying racks you can buy, but I'm cheap! I used anything that would fit the various sizes of the nests, including nail polish bottles,an Elmers glue bottle, pencils, etc. In fact, I remember wedging some of the tops on bottles and using that to paint them too.That last, really tiny one was the hardest to hold. I can't even remember what I used. I made Ivy another nesting doll with about twice as many nests, maybe more, and that was a real challenge! The last nest was the size of a crumb!

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