Hallo, @bluebasementwitch

It’s not letting me tag you so I hope you see this!

Thanks very much for the compliment!  I’m glad you like my dolls~   I like them so much more now than I did when they started too, haha.    

My dolls are the Bandai dolls that were first released, not the new ones that have just been coming out in the last year.  This made the decision to repaint them easier, honestly!  They didn’t look anything like the characters, so modifying them was the obvious choice.   I bought mine right before they suddenly became scarce and expensive, so I can’t advise on where and how to get the older models now if you’re trying to get the same ones. 

Anyway, since the dolls were designed to be the characters already, I didn’t have to change hair color or anything, and Chat’s hair was already sculpted and ready to go.  If I had been making them from scratch, I probably would have given him real hair too, as I’m not a big fan of sculpted hair, usually!  But I like his a lot and I think he was the first doll with sculpted hair I’d ever painted, so I wanted to give it a try.  

I removed both of their default eyes with acetone as well as Ladybug’s lip color, added color and shading to both of their faces (and particularly Chat’s hair) with layers of sealant, watercolor pencils, and pastel, and then did much of the finishing work on the eyes with acrylic paint.  As I recall, I had to change the shape of Chat’s mask completely to fall on the right parts of his face, and the colors in his eyes were inverted in the factory paint on the doll, but Ladybug’s might still be the same mask outline she started with.  (I did these a few years ago!)   Both of their eyes were given an acrylic shiny gloss, and Ladybug’s mask was given tiny dots of the same sealant to look like the texture she has in close ups on the show.  Added earrings with acrylic paint and a little dome of acrylic gloss, of course. Earrings are essential for Ladybug.  I also hacked off most of her hair to better reflect the show.  It’s still the same hair she was sold with, there’s just less of it now.

Both dolls had hand joints that could only rotate in the wrist, but I wanted ones that could flex too.  So I pulled out the doll’s original hands and replaced them with hands from Monster High dolls.  Ladybug got basic monster high hands from a Draculaura that I painted red and sealed, and Chat got a pair of Monster High Abbey Bominable hands painted black because hers are bigger and include claws.  They’re a really good match for him, I’m really happy with how those look.  I added a portion of his costume around his wrists with some painted scrap leather I had lying around from an old project.  I had to paint his ring on the new hands, but it’s still on there, just very tiny.

Both dolls could bend at the elbows and knees already, but the range was not very big and they felt a little stiff, so I cut some of the plastic from the area where the two parts of the arms/legs collided so they had more range.  The dolls are always in bodysuits, so any weirdness this might have in how it looks isn’t a problem.   Now they move just enough more that they don’t feel as limited as they did when I first got them, and the new hands make them more expressive and less stiff.   

I hope some of that is the information you wanted!  One of the things I love most in the world is dolls, including customizing them, so a lot of what I did with these two isn’t much different from what I have done with my other dolls.  If you’ve got a question about a particular aspect of these dolls, feel free to ask!