"AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!": My First Custom Doll!

 Sometimes life hands you a bag of doll heads.

Or at least a friend does. This friend in question had once given me a horror-themed vinyl doll head figurine previously because she gets me like that, and this time, for Christmas, I got a bag of ten identical unbranded vinyl fashion-doll heads. She was disappointed because she thought they'd be larger, but I was excited. See, I had been floating the idea in my brain of making a custom Monster High doll for a while. And now I had a bag of resources to encourage me to do it.

My first idea for a character still hasn't been made, and may not be for some time. There have been hiccups and I need good conditions for spray painting. So this doll was a second idea I had, which was easier and quicker to do.

Let's take a look at the heads first.

The heads are all unpainted and have no branding or copyright stamps on them, which probably means they weren't ethically produced in the slightest. That's not good, but such things get made and I had them now, so whatever. The heads are molded in a pale flesh tone with an odd greyish cast--it's very slightly like a latte or tea with tons of milk. The face has stylized features with large eyes, though on this head, it's the mouth that seems unusually small, rather than the nose. The lips seem sculpted/molded a bit askew. The nose is fairly broad and triangular in shape. The eyes feature a defined eyelid crease. 

The top of the head has a rougher circular section that breaks the texture of the rest and features scraps of irregular vinyl from where the head was presumably yanked out of the mold. The hairline has a groove in it denoting the area where hair would be rooted into the head.

The head size is not quite in-scale with Monster High. It's a little bit smaller than the smaller end of their 11-inch doll heads.

The Bride has one of the smaller-feeling MH heads, and the
generic head is just a bit smaller than hers.

The base sculpt doesn’t resemble a Monster High head any more than another cartoon fashion doll head does. I can't say this head sculpt reminds me of a specific brand, because without paint, it's hard to pin this to anything. Still, I don't have any faith the sculpt is original and it likely infringes on an existing one. It'd probably have to be drawing from a brand that never approached my pool of interests.

EDIT: I found a listing for these heads on Amazon by pure accident. They're sold by a brand called DoubleWood and might be original sculpts for the purpose of hobbyist repainting, but I don't know much more than that.

I'm not a giant fan of this base head sculpt. It doesn't feel particularly beautiful or characterful, and I even concluded my first project would work better on an MH base head. But on this character I made here, I think it works.

I was inspired by the reconfiguration of my bedroom, during which I swapped desks around, and had to empty the one I was using. In that desk was a magnetic plush finger puppet of The Scream, which I put back on display.

His right hand came unstitched from his head.

I've always loved the painting by Edvard Munch. The ghoulish wailing, distorted figure in front of a color-contrasted disorienting sunset and fjord, is a really striking and spooky and beautiful image.

This is not Munch's only rendition of his
Scream composition, but it's his
most iconic one.

The painting was done in response to an affecting moment Munch experienced, citing the sky turning red and feeling a powerful sublime screaming sensation in the environment. As such, the piece feels reflective of anxieties and large-scale existential and natural terror...but it also feels quite ghoulish and supernatural with its ghostly figure and red and black and orange tones. The painting has been connected to the Halloween mask that became famous when chosen to be the face of the Ghostface mantle in the...well, in the Scream franchise!

The Ghostface costume worn by various
killers in the Scream movies.

During a college cartooning class, where we were asked to parody a painting for homework, The Scream was my subject.

So as a lover of art history and the painting, I thought, based on the odd skin tone of the head, that I could make it into a Monster High take on the figure in the painting-- a fanmade Skullector The Scream, if you will.

It was tricky to come up with a facial design that could reasonably fit into the Monster High cast while more plausibly representing the minimal rendering of the figure in Munch's painting. The trick was to represent the painting without being able to represent the facial expression.

My first painted head was not the final one, but let's look. I took a head and went minimal with the face, and emphasized brush strokes with acrylic paint to mimic the painting. Her eyes were outlined and uncolored with dot pupils to replicate the painting, and I gave her bold eyeshadow based on the vivid sunset tones and blue water of the painting, with orange dashed through with yellow and blue underneath. Her cheeks have some grey painterly contour to invoke the famous shape of the character's head. Her lips were grey, and her head got small pen strokes and dark flesh paint strokes to texture her further. I filled her nostrils in with black pen to make them more prominent and evoke the noseless look of the painted figure. I also sanded down the irregular edges of the disc on her head to make her look better since she has to be a bald doll.

MH should have had a bald female doll. Darn hair-play requirements.

After I had the head, I needed a body. For this doll, I ordered an Ever After High Enchanted Picnic Blondie Lockes doll whose skin tone looked plausibly close in the listing photos. Monster High does not offer a lot of pale human flesh tones, and certainly not on accessible dolls, and I was almost stymied until I remembered Ever After could give me a good body for this character.

Picnic Blondie arrived. Her hair was gluey, but not my concern. Her body is definitely pinker than Shrika's greyish hue, but for an expressionistic painted character, I had no qualms about painting her body with acrylics to bring some of her head color into the body.

Blondie's bear bag was repurposed and repainted for my Coffin Bean Twyla, and she also came with a knockoff EAH stand that suited that Twyla well, too. Her headband might suit the other character I want to make. Blondie's head was not of use to me, so I didn't save it.

I'm glad this order gave me more 
than just a body I found useful!

The EAH body is more pear-shaped than MH's, but I think it suits a Scream doll very well, since the painted figure is so wavy. The EAH hands are also surprisingly eerie with their pose, and it gives the doll a creepier tone.

To put the head on, I trimmed the neck peg a little to take off the flared prongs and shorten it. Shortening the peg resulted in a really wide range of head motion! Her head was way too loose on the neck when popped on, though. I took it back off and squeezed a little hot glue into the rim inside her neck hole and that tightened the head nicely when I popped it back on.

The difference between head and body color was not negligible to me, so I sanded down the body to make it matte and more amenable to painting and mixed some paint to match the head's tone better.

Before painting.

After.

The body being painted solid and the head being a bit translucent and molded that color means the two don't behave entirely the same with the lighting, but the color match is pretty darn perfect besides. The body got the same strokes and streaks as her head.

To clothe the doll, I ordered a basic black dress from Etsy. My most ideal vision would have been something more flowy and body-hugging, but the best offering I found that suited the doll well was a dress crafted and sold by a user called Kosucas. This particular dress is available in multiple colors, and you can select which one you want on the listing.

The dress is fairly old-fashioned, which suits the doll, and has a wide neckline, long flared sleeves that go past the wrists, and a pleated skirt. The piece Velcros at the back. 

The only real issue the dress has is that it was sewn specifically for Monster High, and sister franchise Ever After High has some clothes-sharing difficulties due to the pretty different torso shapes. The neckline shrugs off her shoulders when her arms are down in a way it wouldn't on an MH doll, and the dress doesn't fasten as tidily and easily on my doll, but it does work and that's what matters.

The struggle is entirely due to the doll base I knowingly chose to use, so it's all on me. It's a great piece of clothing. I wasn't sure at first, but now I think the flared skirt actually works pretty well, since the pleats give it a sense of motion--as if it's being stirred by the force of nature distorting the Scream figure and all of the scenery!

To give her shoes, I ordered a basic neutral pair of black Monster High strapped heels, which I'd once owned because they were part of Iris Clops' I Love Fashion release.

This doll's hair fiber was awful, and they had zero clue 
what to do with this character's fashion sense, but the pieces
were good by themselves and Iris was still a novelty worth
having.

The heels are very simple pieces, but that's kind of the beauty of them. They work on most characters and look good on them, and they complemented the dress well on my Scream. Fortunately, MH and EAH shoes swap easily with no trouble, so the doll wears the heels fine.

Here she is dressed up.

This is not the base of the cover photo, but very similar!

The "Scream pose" is affected by the articulation of the doll, so she can't put her hands on her cheeks, but I think this is fine. She can't actually scream open-mouthed, anyway.

Even though there's more work ahead to discuss, I think this would be a good time to reveal my name for this character: Shrika Redfjord. 

The former is from shrik, the Norwegian for "scream", and the latter refers to the scenery of the painting. I don't think a full profile makes sense for her since I can't really picture her as a teenage MH student. She's a bit outside that realm the way I've designed her.

Though a small part of that may have been because I didn't see her face as close enough to MH. I wasn't pleased with the blue in her makeup not popping, and thought I could make her, within this divergent faceup style, a bit more in line with the brand.

For the new head, I reduced the use of pen strokes to surface texture and the nostrils, and defined her eye sockets and pupils with dark grey paint. Her eye makeup changed to more rounded bands with brighter blue and orange and yellow that accentuated a round eye shape to evoke the painted character and made the makeup more dramatic and Monster High fabulous. 

I also repainted Shrika's unbranded stand. I made the pole and base blended brown tones to reflect the pier in the painting, while I left the clip unpainted. 

The clips on the unbranded stands fit way too tightly on the poles as they were made, and I knew the clip would completely strip the brown paint off if I tried to use it as-is, so I used an X-Acto knife to widen the hole in the clip and even cut off the chunk in the tail of the "T" shape to make the clip looser and more flexible so it could be widened while sliding it up and down.

Hacked-up modified looser clip on the right.

Now finished to my satisfaction, I quite like Shrika!

I think I captured the spirit of Munch's painting well, as well as the style in which MH turns creepy things into fabulous girls! She's simple but she doesn't feel like she needs any more.

[I mean, besides double-jointed elbows and a torso joint. But that's greedy and infeasible for this style.]

Then I put the finished Shrika with my other Screams-- the finger puppet and a keychain figurine my mom brought to my attention, which I have slung over her shoulder for now.

There's not too many themed things I own only one of.

This was fun. It's definitely beginner work and very "easy-mode" compared to other ideas I'm planning, but I made a doll I enjoy and I'm very pleased with it. I hope you enjoyed this little trip into the sublime terrors of the Norwegian sunset.