Shallow Post, Deep Sea: A GSR Draculaura Hybrid-Monster Custom!

I've had this hybrid monster character in my head for a long time.

I've mentioned that the Monster High doll of Draculaura in the Great Scarrier Reef uses the mermaid-transformation theme to turn her into a wonderful joke--a vampire squid! 

While you'd be forgiven for calling her an octopus, webbing between the tentacles is a feature of vampire squids as well, and there's no way that isn't what's going on. I always thought her body, unique from that of Kala Mer'ri, was fascinating, and I then thought that I could push the concept even further--make a vampire squid hybrid monster akin to the cast of Freaky Fusion, where the two monster halves are a vampire bat and a giant squid. There was a clear course ahead-- repaint a Catty Noir head, dye Draculaura, and dress her up!

Working with Kala just recently reminded me to check up on this doll and maybe finish her up. I was getting a little antsy to post again, and this one was right there waiting to give the blog some more content.

This post is going to be more text-heavy and a bit breezy, primarily because it was a victim of my massive photo loss when my phone broke: all of the process pictures I'd taken were not uploaded to this blog document or my computer itself since the circumstances of the work made me wait a while to confirm results before sharing anything or doing much work on this post. As such, this post will be shorter than I'd originally planned, because there's less point in talking about things as deeply now that there are no images. 

And right away, here's where the post gets gutted of content. I previously photo-documented a brief look at GSR Drac alongside process photos, but I don't have those now, so let me run it down more concisely to just what's relevant here. First, Draculaura's body.

• On the back, she has two wings which resemble bat wings or the flaps on some cephalopods which can be used for propulsion. These wings are snapped onto two static ball pegs on her back which allow them to turn up and down and angle in and out a little bit. No other MH doll has this kind of wing system, unless maybe the other GSR transformed ghouls did.
• Her waist joint is like other MH merfolk. 
• Her tentacles are a big piece attached to the end of her tail with a rotating hinge joint. The hinge only bends backward, but Draculaura's body can spin independently of the tentacles, allowing for some interesting fluid angles with the hinge. The tentacle piece is mostly solid, but some of the ends can rotate below the translucent webbing to stabilize her a bit in diferent ways. Some of them are static.
• When balanced properly, Draculaura can sit on her own tail--meaning her waist can be bent and her tentacles can be bent so she looks like she's sitting without a chair. It's not always easy to do this (or at least, it's harder with the doll post-redesign) because the longer tentacles do not and cannot point backward and stabilize this pose.

Then, process. I thought it would be a great effect to have a Catty Noir head reframed as an anthropomorphic bat, and to have this hybrid ghoul be mostly black. The Catty I selected was New Scaremester because she has one hair color and her style has straight-cut bangs which are associated with vampires Draculaura and Elissabat. 

Mattel stock photo of NS Catty.

I had first wondered if I should dye her hair red to pop against her, but I realized dyeing it black was likely to be least frustrating, wouldn't discolor the face in any way if it crept onto the front, and would make other colors pop more in the minority to reflect vampire-squid bioluminescence. Kala is all color, but vampire squid live in the dark and light up with a lot of contrast.

My copy of Catty had messy hair, but it dyed and tidied very easily.

Dyeing the body was significantly harder. The arms and hands were easy, but the harder plastics had to be sanded a lot, and by the time I got her body black enough, she'd been heated so long her body had warped. Nothing about her is overly distorted and her waist is still functional, but her torso has twisted and leaned out of shape a bit, and this is effectively irreversible. You'll see that soon. 

My disenchantment with doll dyeing is the reason this post is so long delayed, and is a factor for why I wasn't working on this post and putting the now-lost photos up here--I was waiting a good long time to make sure the pigmentation held. I discovered, heartbreakingly, that several dyes simply don't last in color strength within vinyl for very long--this resulted in the loss of color in Novi's legs, completely killed Avea Trotter after a disastrous series of makeover attempts (a much more measured second attempt to rework her colors without dye will be in the works on a new Avea in order to apologize to her), and most devastatingly, wrecked Gilliana. Her skin was over-dyed at first into a gorgeous deep deep green that I ended up really loving...and then I looked at her again one day and found her pale.

Now, this faded head color isn't bad, and it's closer to my original plan, but there was no clear way to undo everything evenly to lighten the rest to match the head, so Gilliana's out of commission. I feel like we went through too much together for me to discard her, but I got so disheartened that it still feels like I need time to think about making this work again. Probably just a new coat of paint. But this learning experience of a doll taught me one last thing--dyeing isn't really worth messing with in most cases, either, and as such, changing a doll's color remains impractical and best not attempted. Strikes out several character design ideas.

So I waited for a long time to check if this dyed doll would survive to be shared, and fortunately, it did. Black dye seems to stay pretty well, and I've noticed Bramble's hands are still good too. I could have been quicker to share this doll, but then I'd wondered if she was incomplete and had several other things to post in the meantime.

To clothe the doll, I tried to go very Gothic and vampiric. Lorna McNessie's top, with its red color and ruffles, seemed appropriate, and I ordered a copy of Headmistress Bloodgood's coat. I dyed this black, and then painted the cuffs with red. The dyed coat comes out a bit indigo, with silvery ruffles, and that adds some nuance and color to her that ultimately adds to the look. I cut the coat in back and folded it over so her silhouette remained sleek and squidlike. 

I considered dyeing the wings of the doll red, but the color didn't really get into the hard plastic enough, and I decided I liked the silhouette more vertical, with the long hair and tall narrow body pointing down and blooming into the squid tentacles.

To repaint the doll, I covered Catty's white sclerae with red and made the irises dark with big white pupils to make her eyes look more shiny and fishy. Catty's face was pretty wonky, but I think the repaint disguised it. The eyebrows remained, though their pink color was welcomely muted after the hair dye. I repainted Catty's lips with a neon blue color, thinking of the bioluminescent tone of the vampire squid. I thought it'd be a great color to make the sea half of the character come in and separate her from a classical vampire palette, and with the bold red of the eyes and cuffs and the black of her body, it worked perfectly. I also used this blue to cover the spots on her tail which were yellow beforehand, and which looked like bioluminescent dots now. I had thought of pointing the nose paint upward into a batlike triangle, but either forgot or chose not to. I stand by it; it might look too silly for the character I want her to be--a very self-serious academic ghoul. She's a little bit Wednesday in the end because the Bloodgood coat makes her look like an academy student.

Alright, here's the result. 

I'm characterizing her as someone too concerned with looking dignified and intelligent, and with being moody and outcast, but she has major blind spots in her outlook that everyone else can clearly see...and she's a little bit based on myself, too, since I admit to not being anywhere near the loosest person at the party. 

Isabrella Inkwell

Monster Parentage: I am a hybrid monster--daughter of a vampire bat and a vampire squid. An auspicious match.
Killer Style: Victorian academic formalwear that hugs my fluid form. I dress in red, indigo, and black. My boo-luminescence can take care of the neon blue by itself.
Freaky Flaw: I've never been called a beam of moonlight by anybody. Many find me gloomy, which I admit. Others find me inflexible, which I reject. The very idea; I can fit into a backpack if I please.
Favorite Activity: Writing in a cozy undersea hollow at night. I dip my pen in my glowing squid mucus, provide my own natural mood lighting, and enter a magical place.
Biggest Pet Peeve: My middle name is Vampyroteuthia. My parents fancy themselves adorable and insist on calling me "Teuthy". It is an aesthetically strong pun, but I cannot bear such a silly nickname.
Favorite School Subject: Poetry. I can explore things brutal as blood and mysterious as the deep, and refine every word to perfection.
Least Favorite School Subject: Phys dead. I find it demeaning.
Favorite Food: Seafood I can shred and drain of fluid...though the littered remants of other hunts are just as filling. 
Best Friends: Kieran Valentine, Kala Mer'ri

Her name is based on "Isabella", a very Gothic-sounding name to me, and the fact that with her webbed tentacles she visually "is an umbrella". I think she likes that connotation. "Inkwell" refers to literal wells of ink for writing moody poems or other things, while also referring to squid ink and "-well" being a common name or surname suffix.  

Here's Isabrella with the two G1 monster types she hybridizes.

I like that she still does her own thing with each species in its own context--no other MH vampire is this animalistic, and the other MH squid is a very different kind.

Here's the back of her coat, reshaped.

And here she is without the coat. Early-adolescent Lorna's shirt is the length of a crop top on this median-teen body, so I think this works best with her hair tied back to be more informal and mermaid-esque. I do like that the color balance changes a lot when the coat is off. I'd wondered if it was bad that you could barely see the top under the coat, but I like the stark difference between the two setups.

While I ultimately scrapped the wings, I did still have to cut a hole for the pegs in the back of the top.

Here's the torso and how it warped after extended heating during my stubbornness to dye it. You might be able to see that the flare on the right side (our right) of her torso above her hip joint is now higher than the left, and she's overall leaning just a bit to her right.

Fortunately, this did not affect her functionality, and there's nothing wrong with the added bit of motion to her shape now.

Here's the sitting on the tail. I think either the torso warping or the different head of hair threw off the balance a little, so it's trickier to get this to work with the doll being Isabrella.

The inside of the tentacle web is hollow, so I could probably glue a weight inside if I wanted.

Here's Isabrella reading a book.

And in darkness.

And a glamor shot.

The cover photo depicts the void of the deep sea, and I loved the framing and pose. I took it against a black velvet cape, and while I had to edit the piece to make the background fully dark, the tiny bubbles are actually practical effects--they're pieces of fuzz which were already stuck to the fabric (mine is a cat house; it's inescapable) which I arranged for effect!

I love this picture.

Maybe the head is still too feline to give "bat", but it works well enough for me, and I really like Isabrella. I was surprised by how successful the color palette turned out, and she feels like a pretty viable Monster High design to me--if we're talking about the most inclusive range of G1 tones. I like that she's moody, and the squid and vampire came together really nicely to make her nautical-weird and goth-aristocratic at the same time.

I'm frustrated that this post wasn't able to turn out as I'd envisioned, but I hope it came out well enough. Isabrella was a great opportunity to work with a very cool doll body.