Left Out Dolls: Re-Resurrected

I've kind of dropped out of my Left Out Dolls fervor for a while now. This might be the last post in this category as my base doll pool for this series is shrinking (Rainbow High is, by all appearances, dying, Shadow High is done) and other things are driving my attention. So here we go!

 Go here to see the post where the Left Out Dolls came from, and here to see the first standalone Left Out post. Go here for the second. 

Right Out

I had the idea for this doll not long after resuming work on the Left Out concept. I thought an anarchist doll missing their right hand with the name Right Out would make for a fun concept to break the rule I'd established with the Left Outs. I just had no solid idea of what the base or pieces for that character would be. However, in the orders for this batch, a Junior High Poppy Rowan had been mistakenly swapped for an incomplete Daphne Minton. The seller and I worked it out so I got the correct doll and was able to keep Daphne...so what do do with Daphne? Well, when she arrived, guess which hand she was missing? 

That settled it. I wiped off her brows and freckles and lips and as much of the left eye makeup as I could because I knew I wanted to paint the anarchy "A" symbol around it. In the workshop, I settled on her hair being a bunch of tiny tied-off tufts, though I did just cut off the rear part of her hair so I didn't consume all of my elastic bands on her. For each tuft, I tied off the hair into a section and then trimmed off the tail when that was done. 

Dressing her, I put her in Shanelle's beaded top which I'd taken from Bad Karma, and used River Kendall pieces for most of the rest, because he was one of my base dolls in this third pool. She looked really good in River's jeans and fake waist-tie shirt, and his black jacket worked with her colors and completed her outfit the right way for a messy rebel. I gave her Harley Limestone's tall boots without the string laces, and one of the safety-pin earrings from Kim Nguyen. Since the hand replacement for Right Out was only important because of which hand it was on, I just put in a basic screw in her wrist. No need for anything fancy, and I think the screw can connote a punny message of "screw the rules". 

Right Out

The way the world is put together just doesn't work for people like Right Out. And why should it? Lots of people get to have a life free of worry just because they've decided to make it harder for others.

 Right Out doesn't play those games. She doesn't follow the rules. She works to take apart corrupt structures brick by brick...and it involves throwing those bricks quite a lot.

You can try to arrest her, but she'll never honor it. You can call her out for her left hand, but she'll gladly claw you open with it. None of your arguments can faze someone who never believed in your values to begin with. And just maybe she's right about that, just a little. 

Right Out is ultimately here to make a hard time for the unjust parts of life, so maybe consider yourself wrong if she ever turns on you. Break the rules with her, though, and you'll have a fierce ally.

Lookie Lou

Somewhere I got the idea of taking out a doll's eyes and replacing them with something in the back of the socket to create a creepy follow-you effect, and I thought River Kendall, with his pops of blue and red, would make a perfect base for that visual. 

With my River, I popped out the eyes and painted the insides of the sockets red, as well as a smear and vein effect on the outside of the sockets. I cut out pieces of painted Bristol board to depict his recessed eyeballs and tacked them in and glossed over the eyes to make them shiny. For the outfit, I used River's sleeveless hoodie to match the red of the eyes and blue of the hair, as well as River's shorts and blue sneakers to keep the more pop look. I added on a Ken trench coat belt around his waist and put piercings in his temple and nose. For his hand replacement, I just glued one of his original eyes to the wrist and painted the "eyelid" section to match his skin tone and make it look more integrated and fleshy. Finally, I added a cuff from Ash's jacket around the eye arm, and a sleeve from Luna's jacket on his other arm to give him more edge. 

Still, I wasn't sold on his face. No matter what I did with lip paint, it wasn't working, so I realized he just needed to have his mouth covered to keep his eyes the stars of the show. I cut the top off a sock I didn't want and cut arm holes in too so it would stay attached to him as something of a mouth-covering sleeveless "turtleneck" piece layered under the hoodie. That worked well to complete the design and give him more of a cohesive edgy look. There's truly nothing interesting to see under the sock, but it's not there to hide something interesting. It just completes his look and makes him work as a design now.

The follow-you parallax effect of the eyes is very effective and creepy. You literally can't escape his gaze or take a photo where he's not looking at the camera!

I should have expected it, but it actually legitimately spooked me when I realized he was looking at me from across the room while I was lying down on my bed!

Maybe it wasn't his mouth I should have been covering! I'm honestly surprised I haven't seen any scary Halloween doll props that exploit this effect by having empty sockets with eyes at the back.

Lookie Lou

He's all eyes. 

Lookie Lou had a piercing stare all his life, and never seemed able to keep his eyes still. He rarely spoke, and always watched. The things he saw, however, were far too terrible. All the depths of human wickedness and cruelty and depravity...they're enough to burn your eyes out. 

But Lou's eyes never burned completely. Instead, they've survived. And he even grew a third one! He doesn't want to look anymore. But the only thing he can do is see.  

Jacq-o'-line

I was curious about the Junior High dolls. 

MGA photo of Rainbow High Junior High Series 1.

The Junior High concept reinvents the characters as slightly younger counterparts who have a shorter, smaller body and maybe slightly different eyes shape and size-wize. The dolls all come with fabric backpacks, but no doll stands, unfortunately, and despite the conceit apparently being to make them a lower-cost option, they really aren't significantly cheaper, don't feel quite worth what they are with no stands, and haven't been hugely accessible release-wise. I like the idea of smaller dolls, and I think they could be used to expand the pool of characters with younger siblings or other younger kids, though making them remakes of the teens probably helps keep them to their own corner of the market. They'd need a different release style if they were unique characters.

My idea for Poppy was to make her a jack-o'-lantern girl with a carved pumpkin face. Out of recognition for the younger doll design, I wanted to keep her horror factor more cartoony and her style less edgy.

I took out Poppy's hair ties and braids and removed her stock outfit. I drew a pencil outline of the pumpkin mouth cutout I wanted for her, making it wide enough to cut the lips out completely and carefully placing the pumpkin block teeth so the shape was right. I heated her head with a hairdryer to soften the vinyl a bit, and then cut out the mouth. I was so scared I'd mess it up, but it went pretty much exactly how I wanted it to. Then I cut her nose off and cut a triangle hole there too. I wanted her eyes to stay in because I think they make the holes in her face creepier and make her feel more alive. I just decided to paint black around the rest of her eyes to make them look like they're floating in dark sockets. Her mouth and neck peg got painted over in as much black as I could swish around inside her head so the mouth and nose would just show darkness. 

With the hair, I trimmed it and tied a bit off to create a round hairstyle with a stuck-up sprig of hair to look like a cartoony pumpkin shape. 

For her clothes, I put her in Luna Madison's black dress underneath the under-layer top Poppy came with, and I put her in Monster High boots from the CAM Werewolf. 

For her hand replacement, she needed a kitchen knife, so I bought a NECA Scream Ghostface figure for that. I shoved the knife into her wrist and painted over the red blood with black. Here she is.

I think the face turned out super cute and creepy in the best way. I can't help but smile at her big pumpkin grin...before shivering a little. I absolutely love the result here. 

Jacq-o'-Line

Jackie Carver loved Halloween pumpkins. They were always grinning and so full of joy. She wanted to look that happy always. She felt like it was right.

Her parents came home to a shock. Their daughter, grinning like a gourd. Her head lifeless and hollow as a dry old vegetable. Had she ever been human? 

Every year, they set Jackie out on the porch. It was what she would have wanted. Her smile glows brightly each October night.

Little Stitious

My initial concept was to have a doll who looked like a cutesy kid with black hollow eye sockets and a scythe for a hand as a representation of Death in an atypical form. The doll I tried using was Junior High Violet Willow. I blacked out her eyes and washed her hair, but after that, her hair was super hard to make tidy and I wasn't finding any special dynamism with her in the look I'd planned, particularly since the scythe looked too awkward and stiff when I held it at her wrist. I didn't want to waste the doll, so I decided to rethink. The cute girly Death idea could be repurposed on another base, perhaps, but Violet was not the one. Ideally, there'd be a Junior High doll of a character with a natural hair color for the most stereotypical caricatured sweet li'l angel base, but so far there isn't one. 

Not knowing what to do, I took out the doll clothes, and I liked how she looked in Nicole Steel's number-13 jersey dress. That made me think of making her a doll based on superstitions and bad luck. Living Dead Dolls' Series 13 was composed of separate dolls based on different individual superstitions, but I thought I could do a doll representing multiple in one! With that, I decided to seek out a miniature hand mirror to attach to her wrist so she would have a broken mirror for a hand, and was lucky enough to find a set of two hand mirror pendants at the craft store. I broke the glass and reglued it in, and made a piece of painted Bristol board to cover the hollow back of the mirror. I also removed the link at the top meant for attaching it to jewelry, and used pliers to cut off the flared bottom of the mirror so it'd fit in her wrist. 

I then set to chopping her hair down to make her look like she had a bad hair day, so I gave her a messy bob and thinned her bangs a little. I remembered I had Harley Limestone's barbed-wire cat ear headband, so I decided to grab that and paint the ear portion black, bending it to be tighter to her Junior High head sculpt. For her faceup, I wiped her brows, blush, and lips, and added on a cat nose and whiskers to further the imagery of the black cat superstition. Lastly, I realized I could work with her empty dark sockets to give her the evil eye, so I repeated what I did for Lookie Lou and painted a small eye cutout and glued it into her socket, imitating the classic blue evil-eye design. For the rest of her outfit, she got a silver ring from Mila Berrymore's hair as a bracelet, Harley's white stockings (the hem of the dress just covers up the green stripes) and a pair of shoes from Luna.

And here's a comparison between the Junior High dolls and the regular size. I really like the fully-jointed Junior High doll body, and I wish there had been more of them. 

 

Little Stitious

Little Stitious has always had the worst of luck. A mirror fell on her head and shattered, and a black cat scratched her on her first night alive. She was born with the evil eye, and umbrellas automatically open on her when she's indoors. 

At this point, she just embraces it. She figures she must be doing some good for the world if bad luck is so hell-bent on her, and she really does feel like she draws it away from others. She's doing a service for everybody by bearing all of this trouble...and it is a little fun, too!

Donezo

I had thought of doing something in the creepy clown genre once I saw Carmen Major's rainbow hair streaks and curly hair texture, and quickly came up with the perfect pun for a dead clown's name. While I had initially thought of swapping Carmen's head onto Finn Rosado's body to make a male clown character, I decided to just keep her together and have her be a girl clown because I wasn't as invested in this avenue anymore. I had gotten Carmen to give her jacket to G3 Monster High Venus, so it all worked out. I took the hair down and brushed it out to give it a lot of volume, and cut it down to a round clownish hair shape. I then painted over her face with white to represent clown makeup, and came up with a makeup design I'm really happy with, which straddles the line of cartoon gore and clown paint really well. I then decided to bore a hole in her forehead, because my concept for her had shifted. Rather than being a full-time clown, she was a prankster who messed with the wrong person and got shot on sight.

I think of her as being a relic of the 2016 creepy clown invasion. To dress her, I used Harley Limestone's hoodie and Scarlet Rose's pants (I tried to do something with Scarlet but didn't like the result) and put a scythe from an action figure in her wrist to give her a weapon hand replacement. For what I had on me, everything came together well for the image of a punk who played her last prank. 

Donezo

Creepy clowns were all the rage. They'd been showing up on street corners and highways, scaring people and causing a stir. She thought it would be fun to be one of those clowns and cause a little scare. All in good fun. 

She painted her face and teased out her hair, and grabbed a scary weapon. She couldn't help giggling to herself in the mirror. She was Donezo the clown!

Donezo decided to walk down the road. She would strike a pose and tilt her head at any person driving by, and she sometimes raised her scythe to them in a wave. Then, she saw a man on a walk, and crept up to tap him on the shoulder. He turned and shouted, stumbling back, and then shot her with his sidearm in what little of a brain she had. She was dead instantly. 

Sometimes your sense of humor just isn't appreciated, but Donezo thinks it's okay to bomb as long as you can get out of it. There's a place for darkness. Just...read the room.

Rainn Storms

This is following up on the last Left Out Dolls post where I said the Coraline doll raincoat could be used with Oliver Ocean to create a brother to Summer Storms. So I finally got Oliver.

Ironically, his hairstyle is very similar to Summer's, with the rooting split into six pigtails. 

Summer's hair got tied into eight to mirror the spokes of her umbrellas. I probably should have tried to do braids for her hair, looking at Oliver now, since that would control it much more elegantly, but I don't trust my dexterity for that and I have since already committed to a permanent hairstyle by saturating her hair with gloss varnish so it doesn't slip out of its ties or deform while in storage. 

For this doll, I undid Oliver's braids and cut his hair short, leaving some messy over the face for a bit of a visual echo to a downpour. I also popped out the eyes. I painted the inside of the sockets black and painted more streaky and dense blue drips coming from his eyes, and a couple from his mouth. For clothing, he has the original Oliver pants and shoes, but he's wearing Scarnival Clawd Wolf's shirt and the NECA Coraline "Little Me" doll's coat. For a hand replacement, I gave him a yellow boot from Prince Bee. 

And here he is with Summer. I really think she's the best Left Out Doll I've made. I need to repair her umbrella, though, since the pole needs to be re-glued onto the screw loop "joint". 

Rainn Storms

Rainn's not like his sister--no umbrellas for him. He likes the downpour, the wet, the dreary. Rain isn't a beautiful thing to him--it's a force of nature.

Rainn welcomes the floods, and wants the thunder to be as loud and bone-shaking as possible. Nothing is more powerful than the weather, and he loves the humbling effect of a good torrent. We can't rely on the permanence of good cheer. Nothing we build is forever. Security is a myth. We can prepare...or we can acknowledge our helplessness in appreciation and awe.

Well, that's been a very long time in the making, and this could be the finale, now that the dolls these are build on are going by the wayside and I'm now collecting the original goth dolls that inspired these. I've had fun coming up with these, though, as a mix of calculated character design and improvisation. It was a good exercise to establish a series of customs with unifying parameters and stylistic commonalities, and I'm very attached to several of the results.