Teatime Tangents and Toys: Left Out Dolls: The Return!

My relationship with Shadow High has shifted a bit since I made it my governing obsession with the Shadow High Deep Dive series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3, and epilogue).

While I still like the brand and still feel open to it, most of the dolls I picked up have fallen in my favor--either I had my fun with them and satisfied my curiosity and no longer felt I needed them, or I fell out of love with the dolls over time. Part of that is due to the epilogue post. While dealing with facially and physically busted copies of Zooey and Heather, I discovered an improvisational tongue-in-cheek edgy goth doll aesthetic to make the dud copies over and make them worth keeping-- The Left Out Dolls, named for the fact that they were inspired by a broken Heather Grayson whose left hand was destroyed. All of the Left Out Dolls are deliberately ridiculously edgy and all have something in the place of a left hand. They're inspired primarily by the Living Dead Dolls brand which hasn't had a mainline series of dolls in several years now. However, I think I've come to preferring the transformed Left Out Dolls in many ways to a large proportion of the factory Shadow High output, such that I've become more interested in the brand as a medium for that custom style than for its original designs. Zooey Electra, Monique Verbena, and my customized Heather are the three SH dolls I still find exceptional and untouchable, but the rest have become fair game for the Left Out style. I've also now turned toward viewing Rainbow High/Shadow High dolls expressly as candidates for Left Out Doll character ideas. I have some ideas brewing for most of Shadow High series 3's dolls already!

Part of the fun of the Left Out Dolls for me is the aspect of remixing, since the Rainbow/Shadow High brands are full of fun clothing that I've consistently found to transfer across characters with really effective and appealing results. The use of text (and self-referential text at that) occasionally makes the clothes restrictive, but swapping wardrobes on these dolls often works beautifully. The rest of the fun is finding a fun edgy aesthetic and concept for the doll, including face paint modifications and devising an unusual hand replacement for each character. That was a strong thematic hook I gave myself (pun not intended, Helen)-

Helen DesTroyed and her thematic hook.

-and it inspired me to re-examine other dolls in these brands to customize and expand my own weird troupe of kooky goths. I guess the other part of what makes the Left Out Dolls so fun is that, even though they're an appropriative art form transforming premade pieces, they're fully-original doll characters I've put in their own universe with rules I've devised myself. I adore Monster High and working in its style, but it's fun to have a custom doll series fully beholden to my own creative whims where I decide what's authentic.

This was initially going to be one post, but my ideas quickly ballooned and I started being held back for time with part and doll orders, and it's been long enough since my last post that I decided to split this into two (hopefully only two!) so I could have something up a little sooner. When the rest of this group gets finished, their post will come. The point of splitting comes at a pretty natural place, as well--this post is all about the dolls I bought for themselves later being remade, while the next will be about dolls I bought expressly to be remade.

Loverboy (R.I.P Ash Silverstone)

Previously, the only dolls I made Left Out were faulty duplicates, but the first doll I got that I fell out of love with enough to outright convert into a Left Out Doll was Ash Silverstone. While I took all the photos for it, I hadn't written a review for him here primarily due to being very underwhelmed by his look at the end. I simply couldn't muster the passion to make a post about Ash not feel like a chore. His clothing pieces were great, but I didn't find success in making the full Ash a particularly compelling presence.

Not even with his hair reshaped and his sleeves cut off.

To make him a Left Out Doll, I eventually came to the idea of him being the resident killer archetype of the bunch. I flattened his hair with boiling water for some of the nineties heartthrob look, and with that hair and face, it made me think of him as a killer known for youth and beauty--maybe even romance. Maybe he's a tragically wronged young lover who literally lost his heart--Loverboy! I wiped Ash's face paint off and carved scars into his face with a printmaking tool, same as I did for Eva, which I then washed over with red to get color in the cracks. I did the same for a chest scar to explain his lack of a heart. His lips got a small bloody heart painted on them, too. For clothes, he's in Rexx's outfit minus the hoodie and a witch hat from a shelf-sitter doll cut down into a wide-brimmed men's hat. For an accessory, I gave him a rose, and for a hand I bought a NECA Ghostface figure to get a miniature knife, which I couldn't find anything comparable to anywhere else.

Because I happen to be very fond of the Scream movies and wanted to have Ghostface be worth keeping, they get to have the kitchen knife, which reads the most "slasher" to me, while the long brown-handled knife goes to Loverboy. I had to cut down the handle to shove it far enough down in his arm so it would look embedded in his wrist.

Slasher villains have long been subject to Freudian academic critique, so maybe I'm leaning full-tilt into that with a romantic murderer, but these are Left Out Dolls. Taste need not apply.

Loverboy

They say he was once happy and in love until his heart was stolen--literally. The attack was brutal, and yet he clings to the thief.

Now he stalks the cold streets in February, looking for the one who took his heart away, offering a rose to those he suspects it might be...and a knife in the chest to those who aren't the one.

No one knows if his love still lives, or if Loverboy will ever be restored. Do not approach the man in the hat if you do not know him. He may stop your heart.

His rose doesn't fit too great in his hand, so for idle display, it's better to tuck it under his arm. His hat also falls off easily, but it's fine. I'm really pleased with the scar pattern I came up with for his face, and that I made all of the scars successfully dimensional.

Taryn de la Plume (R.I.P. Natasha Zima)

Next was Natasha.

The best photo I took of Natasha alone.

She was worth checking out for the original review pool, but her mouth shape and paint landed more weird than effective to me these days and I didn't like her nearly as much as Heather, Monique, and Zooey. She had just narrowly escaped being in the weaker half of the six dolls reviewed in the original deep dive, and escaping that classification didn't mean she was on par with the dolls I loved most. To gothify her, I took inspiration from her feathery dress and decided to add tar--make her a victim of tarring and feathering after being obnoxiously wealthy! This led to some really fun and striking grotesque black splotch painting over her white pieces, which I then coated with a gloss, and I replaced her hand with a paintbrush head covered in black goo itself. Her hair got mostly chopped off because I wanted to use it for giving G3 Monster High Abbey a new head of hair. Her left eye got popped out and made to look like it's leaking tar.

Taryn de la Plume

Taryn was rich, born and bred. She ate credit cards for breakfast, wiped her mouth with exorbitant checks, and wore the fluffiest, fanciest feathers you could find. She was very proud of herself, and very confused to see fewer people like her. Why weren't they doing the work to get the money she was? Couldn't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Never mind that heirs like her made that ideal next to impossible.

Eventually, the people got sick of it. Since she had so many feathers already, all they needed was the tar, so they painted her in the boiling ooze until she was a sticky, disheveled mess.

Taryn thinks of herself as frightfully enlightened now. What a wonderful lesson she was taught! She now wears a brush and paints tar onto herself with abandon, proud of the good work she's doing.

Everyone but Taryn understands completely that she has learned and done nothing. Still, she wears a black-painted sticky smirk of satisfaction. She's so educated.

I love the grotesque black and white color contrast here, and I think her face turned out great for a self-satisfied ignorant lady playing at being daring and subversive.

Bones Jones (R.I.P. Rexx McQueen)

Rexx McQueen was another doll I liked but no longer felt I needed to hang onto.

Rexx at his best.

I loved the look of the doll, primarily due to the coat, but simultaneously didn't feel all that attached to him anymore. When playing around with pieces, I thought he looked really good in a contrasting spare Heather Grayson jacket, and that made me think of giving him a skeleton theme with paint on his face and torso evoking bone patterns like the jacket--white-on-black for his skin and black-on-white for his jacket. I popped out both of his eyes, but then regretted it and put one eye back in--I actually grabbed a spare one of Zooey's, actually, since the boy eyes and sockets felt way harder to push back together. It was still really hard pushing a girl eye into his head. His neck peg broke a little while removing his head to do this, but fortunately the disc part hand still popped in to keep his head on afterward. For pants and boots, I gave him Ash Silverstone pieces, and for a hand, I went out and bought miniature dollhouse gardening tools which included an awesome serrated shovel. I thought that fit with the corpse theme and it looked really good. I just chopped off the end, glued the rod into the arm (the metal piece of the shovel can rotate for posing) and washed the rod with a little black to make it a little creepier. I then bored some holes in his face and put pins in for piercings.

BONEs Jones

Jeremy Jones always wanted to be a corpse. Mummies, zombies, and especially skeletons captured his imagination and looked powerful and beautiful to him in a way nobody could understand. People called him morbid, sent him to counselors, called him tasteless and disrespectful, but yet no one could ever find malice or instability within him.

Eventually, he began dressing in skeleton paint and a bony jacket, and buried dead animals he found to collect their bones after they decayed. "Bones" Jones became his name and his game. Everyone said he would see one day, that he would learn not to be so grotesque and disrespectful. Bones doesn't see it that way. He feels he's honoring the dead in his own unique way.

One day, he'll join them.

The shovel arm looks good held out to the side, and the more childlike look of the head sculpt kind of suits the character better to me here. I felt like Rexx looked too young to be a teen, but I kind of like this face sculpt for a morbid kid.

I had considered doing a more mask-like paint skull over his face to cover everything but the edges and lower jaw, but a quick sketch in Paint showed me that might not look as good as the way I did it, and I might have run into trouble making that shape look clean enough.

Prissy Tina (R.I.P Karla Choupette)

Then, Karla Choupette. I loved this doll for a time and had a wonderful experience with her doll as the only flawless entry in the deep-dive's sample pool of six, but I had since grown tired of her hair and hand fan falling out of place on display. I felt like I had loved Karla well and had my fun with her, but now no longer needed to keep her as she was.

This was still the hardest call to make, though, and more of a justification.

I had an idea previously to make over Rainbow High Junior High Bella Parker as a pretty-perfect girl who preserved herself while still alive, but I realized Karla could pull off the exact same look, with the benefit of an unnatural skin tone to aid the effect. I tied her hair back in a high ponytail, boiled it a little straighter, and painted pursed black lips on her mouth and removed her brows. Shanelle lent several pieces--her hair-tie black bow, her black lace socks, her jewel earrings, and her jewel heels. I thought they added more nice black contrast and brought in a theme of glamor and perfection. For a hand, I considered giving her the hand fan I so loved, but in all my efforts to devise some way to attach the fan and make it functional and poseable, I just couldn't find a way, so it's not able to be used for a hand replacement. Instead, I gave her a string of pearls from the jewelry section of our house's craft cabinet, screwed into her wrist the same way as Busted Keaton's chain.

However, while this face alteration seemed on paper to be the right kind of spooky beauty-caricature, one I had also invoked with Busted Keaton, I wasn't sold on the puckered lips somehow and decided to try painting the whole lips black instead. I tested it out with MS Paint over a photo of Tina, and found that looked good, so did it for real next. I also added black dots on her brows to make her makeup feel more in aim of perfect artifice and added veins on her face and body to further connote she's dead and preserved. After that, she came together just right as a goth character design, and I think it helped her step further away from Karla into having her own identity with most of Karla's original strengths as well.

PRISSY TINA

Tina was the most gorgeous girl she'd ever seen. Not a line or freckle or blemish upon her face, nor a single hair out of place. Clothes always perfectly tailored and pressed, precise and artful makeup, and jewels of the finest form and fashion decorated her each day.

Tina knew she was on a time limit. Some day, she wouldn't look perfect, even with all the cosmetics and jewels. Part of her worried she wasn't perfect without them as she was. A doctor could always tighten her up, but she really just wanted to keep what she already had. So what else was there to do?

Tina died after drowning in a mortuary. She'd jumped into a vat of formaldehyde, a beauty preserved at the moment of utter perfection.

...yeah, at the end of it, this was partially a mistake. Tina was fun to make and I like her, but she was probably the most rash and perhaps regrettable makeover of the group for me personally. I'm pleased with her, but I don't think it's right to have her instead of Karla, so I think I'll be seeking to get another Karla soon so I can have both. I disrespected how much I liked the original in overriding her and Karla deserves to be in the "keep" tier of Shadow High alongside Heather, Monique, and Zooey.

Boa (R.I.P. Shanelle Onyx)

Then I looked at Shanelle, who I've since concluded was far less magnetic to me in-person than I'd hyped her up to be, despite her high-contrast visual theme. I felt like anything was fair game for her.

I'm honestly shocked she didn't click with me the way I hoped.

Like with Rexx, I tried her out in lighter clothing, and I was intrigued by the snakeskin Heather dress on her. I thought then to try both the dress and the pants, which I had concluded were too much on Heather, but seemed to work for Shanelle. It kind of made her look like a disco dancer...and there came the ideas. A disco dancer in snakeskin strangled by her feather scarf! You'll see how it comes together. I boiled Shanelle's hair to fall in a loosely parted shape and cut it down to a short bob. She got snakebite piercings with two pins under her lip, and her lips got painted solid purple while her brows got wiped. Her wrist got a couple of bracelets, and I painted over her right eye to make it into a disco ball, then added glitter to fully sell the look. For a hand, I was stumped as to what she should get, so I kept that on the list while returning to the craft store. I later found a microphone for her hand, which I altered to put on a narrower handle constructed from a dowel. I gave her G3 MH Abbey's fur wrap, cut in half and glued at the seam to turn it into a skinny scarf to wrap around her neck.

BOA

She was a disco queen, dancing under the sparkling lights with the sharpest, most passionate moves anyone had ever seen. Her snakeskin suit and serpent boots hugged her body and made every pose and spin into a work of art. She always danced with feathers around her neck.

One night, the beat was thumping and the crowd was jumping. She went around the floor, strutting and owning the space until she found herself struggling to breathe. She'd danced her body into a knot and her scarf was constricting her. Nobody could stop it from taking her last breath.

Some things don't die forever. Sometimes people remember the fun. They say she's been spotted again on the floor, dancing like nobody ever danced, with new hits that sound just like the old songs she performed to long ago.

Disco is back, baby.

I found Boa to be one of the most dynamic Left Out dolls I've made yet! Her scarf and costume just invite her to be posed as a dancer.

Addendum- Busted Keaton

I also decided to revisit Busted Keaton.

Keaton as you last saw her.

I had the idea of a Left Out Doll with a laden clothes hanger hanging from their left arm, but not a full character for the concept. Since Keaton has already been defined as a failed fashionista and I had no love for Natasha's thick-armed coat which would match her, I decided to cut the sleeves off the coat for Keaton to use, and grabbed the matching Zooey hanger. To attach the hanger, I used the same screw loop attachment as I did for Keaton's original chain, but added a jewelry link and one of Heather I's metal hair rings to create a loop the hanger could hook onto. The metal pieces on the arm can pull through the arm hole of the coat when the hanger is off. I also gave Keaton mismatched socks to help prevent her horribly loose slides from falling off every two seconds. Here's the result.