Paul McCartney gets a repaint for his birthday

     Today (June 18th) is Paul McCartney's 78th birthday. This post was going to be for last year. I got this Kumik doll head last year, for my birthday,I think. 

But I didn't have a body for it. Ken got me a body last Easter,but the neck attachment was wrong for this head. Then he got me another one last Christmas, but the head has a long neck, and it wouldn't fit that body either. 

  So I didn't think I was going to get him posted this year either. Then, yesterday I realized the extra neck peg in the body I was using for the Michael Caine head I have could pop off,leaving the neck peg that worked for this head! Yay! Now I have a body for this one,and hopefully Michael Caine will fit one of the other two spare bodies I now have. I also wanted to do some repainting. You see, I found the head online,and Ken bought it for me. It was supposed to be a Paul McCartney head. But when I got it, the same sculpt was selling as a Tobey Maguire  head,and the one I received had BLUE EYES.

Scary blue eyes.

 Now wait a minute Kumik! There might be some similarities,but that is no way Tobey Maguire!

 And why are you sending me a Paul McCartney with blue eyes?!

 So I was going to attempt to repaint the head just a little, to make it more Paul-accurate. Of course, I was terrified to do that, because the head was about $30, and I was afraid of screwing it up. The eyes scared me the most. I decided I was NOT going to try to remove the original paint,because I was likely to make a mess of the whole face. Those eyes are really tiny. If I smeared the paint trying to remove it,it was going to go all over the face. So I decided to just paint over the existing eyes.

I glossed them too,so they would shine like real eyes.

 

That neck still looks really long without a shirt on him.

 I changed the colour to brown and made the iris' bigger.

I also lined the upper eyelids differently to make them look more sloped down at the outside corners,and have heavier lashes.

Guess what I used to paint those fine lines. A cat whisker!

 I darkened the outside corners of the lower lashes just slightly too.

I extended the left eyebrow just a hair,(That's a pun!),and darkened both the eyebrows and the hair.

His hair kept showing white spots. This was happening even before I painted over it. Major flaw in the head. I need to get some matte sealer and go over everything,but I'll have to touch that hair up---AGAIN---before I do.

 

I repainted the lips,trying to darken that little point in the middle of the top lip so it would look smaller, or even disappear.

 The dip in the middle at the top is a bit much, but ok. That point at the bottom just doesn't look right at all.

 The last thing I did was put a bit of shading on the chin to give the illusion of the slight chin cleft Paul has.

I still don't like the point the top lip comes down to. I could have tried to file it down, but what kind of mess could I have made of that?! That would also have meant I would have had to repaint the lips from scratch,and I was afraid I was going to have to leave them as they were, since I had trouble getting the paint colour right to repaint them. I still don't like the colour I ended up with, and I may change it.

  I spent today trying to get him photographed in between thunderstorms. Oh, and making him a black turtle neck out of a pair of black socks,bought specifically for making doll clothes. It was hot today,and it made me too warm just looking at him in the sweater. But,hey. Black turtle neck.

    My light was about to run out,and I was still making that sweater. So...I cheated a little bit. I only attached the turtle neck at the back, and folded part of it over the neck of the shirt. Part way through his photo shoot,it came untucked. Of course. I do intend to fix it.
  So what do you think,compared to this photo?

This is slightly later than the head. The hair is longer. I'm thinking that left eyebrow should have been lengthened a bit toward the nose. I can still do that.

  Ivy griped at me,"Yuck. Why did you give him stubble?!" Well I didn't. he came that way. Dark haired people tend to look sort of '5 o'clock shadow-y', even when they are clean shaven. 
  Other than the lip thing, my other complaint about this sculpt is the nose. Why is it so long?

Maybe that's the Tobey Maguire part.

  Kumik does some amazing sculpts. They have heads of lots of famous people,including John Lennon. It would have been pretty cool to get a John head too, so John and Paul could hang out together,maybe write some songs. But the John head is an early 70's head. The Paul is a 60's version.
  That's it. Maybe we'll visit with Paul again on a day with some sun!

What I've Been Up To:Custom Mini Figures

  I hope you're all social distancing and managing not to go insane doing so. I feel bad for those of you who live alone. I know I'd be pretty insane by now if I hadn't had people here to talk to. I don't do well for long stretches on my own. I tend to start talking to the cats too much, and then to myself!
   At least now there's the internet and cell phones. We can stay instantly updated, constantly entertained, and always connected. My sister-in-law called from England yesterday to wish Fuzz a happy birthday,(25!),and she is all alone,social distancing and attempting to stay safe. She missed her grandson's 9th birthday party yesterday,and I think she was feeling lonely. At least she has this beautiful view to look at from her door.

 Fuzz chose not to have a birthday celebration and cake, but to just visit friends. I baked a cake anyway. Nobody is going to turn down cake,even if they don't want to blow out candles.
  I ventured out into my own yard to do some yard work last week. I raked up all the twig things that fall from the walnut trees,which I missed doing before the weather got bad last fall. I was working,as you may recall, on Ivy's room then, and my back was out for a while. So I cleared up all of those so I can mow the yard soon. I raked the hosta bed because I noticed the shoots were starting to come up. When they get to about 6 inches tall we'll eat some of them. We had them a couple of times last year, and they were pretty good.

Last year's sauteed hostas.

  My lilacs are budding, but they still don't have any leaves to speak of!

My side yard daffodils bloomed and are on their way out.

As you may have noticed in my post on the Daisy Kingdom raincoat, my short fencing has seen much better days. I'll probably be replacing it with a plastic one this summer. I have a similarly made regular sized bit of fencing that was in the ceiling of our garage. It's ancient and still in great condition. This stuff is modern, and thus, crap.

But my daffodils at the back,down the little sidewalk to the side yard,didn't get one flower this year. The flowers that grow on the ground cover vines are growing full force though.

Yes, I do need to rake in the back and sweep my sidewalks.

The yard is also full of wild violets.

There are also these little white flowers that I have only otherwise seen growing in the woods.

It was good to see that with all that is happening, that nature and life goes on.
  I have been working on a project you will see later this week, and there's a long post you'll be seeing soon,connected to that previous post on Our Dolls,Ourselves. But today I'm showing you something else I have been working on.
  After Christmas there were lot of things clearanced at our local Kroger store. One thing I found was these little Lego type figures.

They were only 30 cents a box. There were policemen and rescue guys in hats too,but I needed the guys with hair. I had an idea for a project,but I needed four of the ones with hair,so I had to get four packs of the action heroes. I worked on them the other night,painting their suits.

Then I had to paint the hair and put faces on them.

I'm hoping you can tell who they are supposed to be now!
 

 I got the idea because there are Yellow Submarine Beatles Legos. Yellow Submarine is probably my least favourite Beatles thing though. I wanted some earlier Beatles. So when I saw these guys with this hair, I thought,hey! I'll make my own!
 

  It sounds easy. But painting those very narrow lines for those tiny faces was harder than you'd think. It took a couple of days of trying. That's why you didn't see this post yesterday! For one thing, I thought I could just turn the heads around and use the blank backs, instead of trying to paint over the faces that were already there.

But as you can see in the above picture, that didn't work because the heads were shorter in the back. Once the hair was put on, it made the faces so short there was hardly any room for the faces. So I had to paint over the prepainted faces,and then leave that to cure for a while.
  Then there were a million tries at painting the faces. I practiced before hand by drawing a few million caricature faces on paper. That gave me a false sense of security, because it was a lot easier to do with a pen on paper, than with the world's tiniest paint brush and a needle, on a rounded, tiny plastic head. So this is my semi finished product. I'm still not satisfied with them. I still have some heads,so I will probably keep trying until I get it right. I haven't put any fixitive on them yet either, so, as you may have noticed, the suits need touched up. So they're not finished anyway. But here they are. This is what I've been doing.