This will be the LDD Roundup for July, because the next trio of dolls I want to round up will require location-specific photos taken on vacation in early August for full project completion. Quack and a standalone doll will feature this month and this is a roundup, but I'm not listing this in the series of canonical doll roundups.
What surprised me most was that Wolfgang has airbrushed body blushing of blue rings around his wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, and the sides of his torso!
The shape of this blue detail does feel a little rigid and unnatural, but it's cool to see detail that's not really visible under the clothing. I could also detect no costume stains on Wolfgang--a first!
Oh, yeah. I customized the spare S5 coffin for him. I don't expect to repeat this step unless I make more dolls as bonus characters to existing sets? Series 5's chipboards, with the flat graphic and lack of character imagery, are probably the easiest to alter at home within the style, though, so Tin might be a one-off in getting this honor.
The impetus for this work was that my Chloe's hip repair job broke and I went through another long repair job with the glue...and then I got a better idea. Sure, that body was okay again, but it's an insult to Chloe herself, so why not buy a white ball-joint LDD loose and swap Chloe's head onto a body that actually worked right and not saddle her with a weaker one? I saw there was an S32 Butcher Boop loose who would have the correct stark-white tone and functional sturdy joints, so I decided to get her as a body donor. I would just need to wipe off the blood paint on her hands. I very badly wanted Boop as her own doll too and already intended to get her for Halloween this year, so I decided this was the moment to also get a complete copy to stow away for this year's October celebrations. I'd have felt very uncomfortable getting the doll for custom parts without securing the doll proper and knowing I'd have her complete at the same time.
But before I could work with Boop and Chloe, another doll came in.
There was an incomplete Series 10 Wolfgang lying around on eBay who looked like he could be promising for parts. I had initially thought he'd be my Chloe rebody, but I realized his color was less white than hers, and he'd be from the same era of fragile joints, being a ball-joint LDD from an even earlier series. It'd have been a risk to rely on him to have a better body. So, having decided to get him anyway, I basically had carte blanche to figure out whatever I wanted with him. I could improvise completely.
Wolfgang's concept is a possessed little boy who vaguely references The Exorcist, most directly in his death date matching the film's premiere. He has cuts on his face, wild hair, and is set apart by a red-and-black knit sweater.
I never liked Wolfgang's face paint, nor did I find him very interesting, but as a loose incomplete doll, he looked like a promising base. I prefer the other LDD with a knit sweater, S14's Jasper. Hers is all black.
Here's how he came.
The shirt didn't appear to be original, nor LDD in origin. The fit isn't very tight and no LDD had a blue-striped shirt. The closest would be the black-and-white shirt worn by the Jack (of "and Jill" fame) nursery-rhyme doll.
After some looking, I identified the shirt as an old Ken piece (a pretty good source for LDD-compatible clothes). I knew it was the same because pictures of the Ken shirt had the same velcro-only-on-the-top closure in the back. The piece opens all the way down the back, but the velcro doesn't go the whole way.
Wolfgang's skin is off-white and yellowish, and his face paint features cuts, harsh eyebrows, and droopy lids, as well as blue-blushed lips. The face doesn't feel cohesive or appealing to me, though the doll did look better in-person than I'd expected.
The corduroy pants are original, as are the boots and socks. The pants are high-waisted and the boots are much softer plastic than previous LDD boots I've handled. They have a brown leather-style paint job. The socks are longer than most LDD socks I've handled before, but they're definitely shorter than Jennocide's.
What surprised me most was that Wolfgang has airbrushed body blushing of blue rings around his wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, and the sides of his torso!
There were no joint issues with Wolfgang, thank goodness. His limbs are fully mobile on their ball pegs and I don't anticipate any breaks, despite his pegs being the same potentially brittle plastic as Chloe's. I know that Bloody Mary from Series 17 has translucent pegs in a whiter color, and Eleanor from S16 before her is the same, so some point between S17 and S23 (if not S23 itself) was the debut of opaque ball joints.
I really didn't know what to do with the Wolfgang base. I got the doll bald after heating his head and popping it off, and tried wiping the face paint off conservatively, first aiming just to remove the cuts and brows and see if I could work with the factory eyes, but I wasn't sold. I pulled out my pile of doll clothes to see what fit him, and I was thinking of an icy doll thanks to the blue body blushing. One idea I've had in the back of my mind was a Living Dead Doll who donated his body to cryogenics, resurrecting from the dead by being frozen with futuristic technology. I'm kind of shocked that concept was never used officially. I had a pair of silver Shadow High shorts to suit the idea, too. But I was also entertaining using some yarn for hair, maybe a floral-themed girl doll or a rainy theme? But I eventually undid some paint attempts and went back to the idea of cryogenics, starting by building a classic-style LDD face with oval eyes. I took inspiration from Lottie with the shape of the eyebrows and white pupils, but his irises are icy blue and he has blue veins on his face and neck. The lips being blue-blushed already was perfect, and I added blue shading around his eyes that arcs up to mimic his eyebrows, which gave him a retro sci-fi camp edge I wanted. I decided to leave him bald and just wipe off the paint on the scalp, since hairlessness suited a futuristic frozen look and made him look more like a sinister rich guy who could afford such a process. He's vaguely inspired by depictions of Mr. Freeze from the 1960s Batman TV show.
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| '66 Mr. Freeze. |
I think I have the strongest love for LDDs that look like products of 1960s design, so that was something I wanted to capture a bit of. I put him back in the silver shorts, and then ordered a silver Ken coat for him to wear as a futuristic cryogenics robe. I went along the lines of dressing him like a spa patron, but in silver so it looks futuristic!
Here he is complete! I just had to trim the sleeves and hem of the coat and he's finished!
I'm not going to the trouble of mocking up death certificates and chipboards in a graphics program because I don't have an actual coffin to spare, nor optimal printing facilities were I desiring to make the chipboard real. If I had spare coffins (and space) and good printing options to make a physical board (or certificate), I'd expend the effort. For now, I'll just write down the names, poems and death dates I'd want for them.
Bedford
Chipboard:
He froze himself to walk the earth
Once science could revive him
He sat there idle, like in life
As centuries survived him
Death Certificate:
Death date: 12/15/1966
As a little millionaire
Revival had no price
So determined to return
Just waiting now on ice
Bedford's name is the same as the surname of James Bedford, the first person to be cryogenically frozen, and it works great as a rich-person stuffy first name. His death date is the same as Walt Disney's, since Walt is subject to a famous rumor that he submitted his head to cryonics to be revived someday.
Then I had to build him a cryo chamber. I got a cylindrical glass vase, but it was just slightly too short for him to fit in it standing upright. To solve this, I had to build a platform with a hole in it that he could be lowered a little bit through, squeezing in with the ankles. That worked fine anyway, since a base with buttons and wires felt appropriate to finish the prop. I used some cardboard gift boxes and cut a hole in the top for the feet, using another shorter box as the platform to brace him on, hidden underneath. I painted the box grey with silver brushing and glued craft gems and wires to it to create sci-fi mechanics. Here's the base.
I tried out my color-changing light over the vase tube to illuminate it, but I wasn't impressed. The light looked too external, and the atmosphere was lacking.
I decided to fake a frost effect by dabbing white paint inside the jar. That'd make it look more icy and it would hopefully diffuse the light inside more so I could sell the light being inside the machine. Here's the "frosted" glass in full light.
This works really really well!
I took the chamber to my kitchen for a better scene, and brought in Wizard Dedwin as the resident scientist overseeing this. I got some great atmosphere from the colored light, and a few photos adding a secondary light color were even better! My color-changing nightlight has been a huge asset for photos, and pairing it with the desk light and paper filters allows for two-color shots.
He's simple but successful. I really like him.
Then I got the loose Butcher Boop which I wanted to replace Chloe's body. I'd also ordered a loose copy of Series 29's The After to get another white LDD body because I wanted one to give to the Butcher Boop head once I realized I had an idea for it. The Boop copy's hair was tied, she didn't have her boots or mask or certificate, her apron neck strap was broken, and the waist strap broke in untying it. Because I'm reviewing her properly at a later date, I'm not sharing pictures of this loose copy. No spoilers! I'd need to replace the straps for the character the apron will go to. Butcher Boop's apron has a closed neck loop that prevents it from being removed, anyway, so I'd want to replace it regardless.
What I needed the doll for was a white body for Chloe, so I set to removing the paint from Boop's hands. This was a valiant effort that couldn't get it all out of the crevices in the fingers and it looked like the hands were starting to melt and warp from the nail-polish-remover scrubbing, so I decided The After was actually a better purchase call than I expected. He has no hand paint to worry about, so he's going to be Chloe's donor body and the Boop body can stay intact and the hands can be painted over to disguise the last remaining red. Because my idea was for the doll to be turned into a house-fire death, the hands being painted over in black could fit the theme.
I wiped off most of the Butcher Boop face paint as best I could (a few lines were stubborn), and got rid of the overdrawn shape around the eye sockets. Butcher Boop is designed to look like a regretful skull, sorry she lost her face, but I wanted this doll to look dangerous without any worry or sadness. I repainted her lips and did some black dabbing on her face to look like she's been covered in soot, and the shading resulting from paint smearing around her eyes in the wiping process was perfect, looking grimy and ashy, and with some of the irises rubbing and smearing by accident, it added some orange tones that makes it look like a dull flame glow is being cast under her eyes! I also left some smeared nose paint on so her nose looked grimy in a cute way, but made sure it wasn't as opaque as it would have started in its depiction of a skeleton nasal cavity. I wanted to be sure this doll looked like she had a nose. To cover the damage to the iris paint, I just went over that in black so it looks like her lower lids are up over the bottom of her eyes. I deliberately messed up her hair (which felt less curly than untouched factory Boop's) and cut big chunks out of it to imply more fire damage, and sooted up her hands and other spots of her body. I took a small cloth doll's white dress I had lying around and put it on her, fitting it tighter with some tactical gluing, and copied from Grace of the Grave by depicting handprints on the dress, only in sooty form. I then made a small match out of wood pieces and stuck a pin in it and bored a hole in her hand so she could hold the match as an optional accessory.
I think she's kind of terrifying, and definitely looks like a doll turned arsonist! I can see obsession and danger in her sweet downcast gaze.
I did a full photoshoot with this doll as she was, but then decided the white dress was too ghostly and felt a little generic, so I took it down to stain with oranges for more of a fiery glowy color that could still look burned and dirty, and painted the ribbon black. Here that is. I think this looks more distinct. With the white dress, she felt like a ghost girl and wouldn't be too far removed from the dusty coal children of Series 34. She stands apart more with the orange. I used a neon paint for the dress, so it reacts really well with blue light!
ArDEn
Chipboard:
Died in a fire, never learned
Some kids just want to watch the world burn
Death Certificate:
Death date: October 8, 1871
A pyromaniac since birth
This dolly burns in hell
Some match-girls die in flames, you know
She hopes you will as well
Arden's name is chosen for fire connotations--she's ardently burning about burning! Her death date is the start of the Great Chicago Fire. Her certificate poem references Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match-Girl", a tragic tale about a girl who uses her matches up and dies in the cold.
I then had to retake the photoshoot I did with the white dress. Kinda frustrating, but worth it. She's lit by real candle flame, but the one on her match is entirely digital.
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| No fire damage risk here, either--she's just in front of my computer screen for this one. |
The juxtaposition of burning and freezing between these two custom dolls was not my intention, but they make a fun contrast.
Then I worked to make The After into Chloe's new body. Here he is.
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| I should have put him in Grace of the Grave's photoshoot as a full doll. |
The After is one of the "Nameless Ones" of Series 29, depicting original characters in the veins of urban legends surrounding people who have been lost to myth and time. The After is one of the more specific characters in the series because he has a complete death date--September 7, 1949. His story also lacks the element of vagueness or multiple tellings that some other S29 dolls do.
The After was said to be a boy who ended his life in a river to escape the torment of his schizophrenia, and now haunts the dreams of living people, aiming to share the mental torture he experienced. Probably not the best portrait of mental illness, to say the least, but it's more the visual concept that flops the doll for me. The brown monkish robe is very thin, and looks similar to Menard from Series 22, and the face with the screaming and veins feels an awful lot like Vincent Vaude's, though less ugly and more ghostly. This just isn't a very interesting doll. He looks okay, but not unique.
The only other part of The After's costume beside the robe (which I had to pop his head out to remove--good thing I was doing that anyway) is an arm bandage which is glued on. I hadn't accounted for that ahead of time, but I was able to cut it down the middle and then peel it off most of the way. I used an X-Acto blade to get the rest off where the glue really fused it. I left the chunks on the shoulder as they were since those can't be seen under Chloe's dress.
The cuts to remove the lower end of the bandage left some chunks taken out, but I'll take a mildly gnawed under-wrist over a broken hip. And I can always replace the arm with another equivalent at some later date.
I know I want the LDD Scary Tales Red Riding Hood doll for one of her arms and accessories in the future, so maybe her other arm can be donated too, benefiting Chloe at that time.
Here's Chloe put back together.
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| Very glad to have her on her feet again. |
As for The After's head? Well, I figured out two perfect uses for it so it doesn't go completely to waste and doesn't require a doll body. I've already shown the head sans face as a toilet bowl in the gruesome roundup. (Doesn't make much more sense in context!) But I'm afraid the greater purpose to which I applied the head will have to be disclosed much later. Stay tuned for that.
My last project is the biggest one. It's not entirely an original character--it's a character created by LDD without a character design, personality, or dolls--the unseen coroner of the showbiz Series 5, named as Tinselton Stitches on all five coroner's reports!
It's an unusual thing for LDD to create a character without a doll, and the name was surely a throwaway gag, but the fact that the repeated use of the name implies this one coroner was on-duty from the 1920s to the 1990s was fascinating, and I thought he'd be a fun bonus addition to the cast, like a doll who would be exclusive to the variant set or else released as a throwback bonus character after the fact. He's getting the original Chloe ball-joint body and a face sculpt that didn't exist in the era of Series 5, so maybe the latter makes more sense. I won't play him as anything but a throwback doll because that allows for the later elements to not be clashing.
My concept for Tinselton was that he'd have had extensive plastic surgeries to have such a long tenure before he joined the dead himself. I also figured he probably died during his long career and continued his work thereafter, ageless the whole time. I think I'm going to end up placing him so his last S5 case while he was alive was Hollywood, the third chronological S5 death. I think Siren and Jezebel after her would have been examined by a zombie Stitches.
With the idea of plastic surgery and cosmetic undertaking being mixed together, I wanted him to have a stretched grin as a result. There is an LDD grinning sculpt which featured twice in the main line and several more times on licensed dolls. The cheapest aftermarket doll with the face sculpt is LDD Presents Annabelle (from The Conjuring), but she's tan-colored and would clash with the S5 aesthetic. LDD Presents The Crow is white-faced, but pale flesh-toned besides, so he's no good. LDD Presents' con-exclusive unmasked Harley Quinn has red and black-cast arms, plus she's expensive. None of the dolls with all-pale bodies and grins (S25 Beelzebub, S31 Bea Neath, and LDD Presents Showtime Betelgeuse) are cheap. Bea would be the best bet and her arms would likely have less issues with staining, but I want her proper in my collection and don't need her right now. The S31 project will probably be a 2025 blog event and is not going to enter any work until then. Two copies of Bea would be far too pricey, besides. LDD Presents Chucky and Tiffany have had the grin, but I'd prefer a stark white doll for the stylized old-movies look. The LDD Presents Batman Joker's unique grinning face sculpt is intriguing, but it's also quite removed from the LDD face shape. I eventually found a listing of just unmasked Harley's head on AliExpress for a small fraction of the price the full doll would fetch, so I chose that to attach to Chloe's body.
In the meantime, I did some preliminary work. I took the outfit from my spare Vincent Vaude and dyed it as black as I could get it, since I thought the structure of the outfit was good for a "celebrity coroner" reflecting classic Hollywood. (The spare Vincent doll's new form will need to be completed by a dress I order soon, so that character doesn't make it into this post.) I had to use paint to make the straps black because the plaid was still showing, and I painted the bowtie white. I painted black blood splatter onto the hands, shoes, and clothes. Tinselton probably won't be fully black-and-white because the shoes and apron are brown, but evoking the black-and-white look is good, and black blood lets him bridge the main set and variants, of which my set of five S5 dolls will ultimately mix both. With his base coloration, Tinselton looks like the variants, but the brown apron and shoes pull him out of that set's look and let him fit into the mains.
Then Harley's head arrived. It's kind of strange for me to be first obtaining this LDD sculpt as a loose part for a custom. I'll eventually have an official complete LDD with this sculpt to have it more officially represented in my collection, but for now, it's here as a custom part!
It's rooted with blonde hair in pigtails and has bangs and side locks that frame the face. The hair feels pretty nice, but I wasn't able to boil out the pigtails to flatten them and I didn't want this color for Tinselton, so I removed all of the hair with the aim of replacing it.
This face mold is in the LDD style but features an open-mouthed grin (with individually-defined teeth to look creepier). As mentioned above, LDD Presents dolls with this face sculpt far outnumber LDD original characters with it, so I wonder if the sculpt was even designed for the main line or if it was just adopted for a couple of original characters after being made for the benefit of licensed dolls? I thinks the first dolls with this face might have been Chucky and Tiffany if the face wasn't debuted in the main line (where the first doll would be Beelzebub). Harley's faceup doesn't feature anything I want to preserve for the purposes of a S5-like design, so I endeavored to wipe it all. I ran out of nail polish remover to get it quite as clean as I wanted, so I moved onto next steps.
I popped the head onto the dressed body and replaced the straps of Butcher Boop's apron with new strips of leather which are not ideal, but better than nothing. The strips are shorter than is needed for a good single knot to stay tied, so I used a velcro closure on the waist straps so it doesn't have to tie, and the neck can either tie loosely or the straps can tuck under the suspenders in back.
I then got to work on replacing the hair. I first thought I could work the rooted Harley hair into a slicked formal men's style, but the color and rooting and shape weren't cooperating. I had a doll wig lying around, but it was too boyish and bowl-cut for a snazzy mortician. I decided to give him a head of brushed yarn hair, and decided he'd have a half-combed frizzy salt-and-pepper hairstyle to look eccentric and older than he seems, but also flashy and put-together, leaning into some mad-scientist vintage charm.
Brushed yarn hair is not easy to make. It's recommended you have a wire brush and a stick to wrap hair around and create brushed lines (wefts) with that you can glue at the ends to form strips to layer over the head or wig cap, but I mostly improvised, taking some notes from a failed attempt to do the same with my first copy of G3 Abbey. What I ended up doing as my process for creating hair tufts was taking my blended black-and-grey yarn, combing out the end of it, then wetting the end and saturating it in Mod Podge glue. I then cut the yarn off, and left the string to dry, and repeated with the new end of the yarn--comb, glue, cut, dry. Once the ends were dry and sealed, I unwound the yarn and combed it out. This always sheds a ton of fiber and thins the piece, regardless of how glued the end is, but you get a stable amount of yarn per chunk after combing. I then trimmed the excess flat glued portion of the yarn.
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| Two pieces of prepared yarn--the top before trimming the glued end and combing it out. |
To glue the hair on, I learned my lesson from the Abbey disaster and had it so the flat end of the glued yarn got folded under the loose fibers--so on one side of the part, I glued the solid part to the scalp, and then swept the fibers backward over it so the full head of hair wouldn't have the squares of flat glued yarn showing and the part was formed. With Abbey, I had a horrible clumsy mess where the hair wasn't covering the flat ends at all and it looked as stuck-on as it was. I'm glad I just got a new copy and worked with what she had.
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| Green square is the flat piece glued down, and the hair is swept backward over it. |
It was tricky doing this with the perimeter hairline and the part at the same time, but I just felt it out. Of course I ran out of glue, too, so I shifted to producing pieces of hair ready to be glued before that was restocked too.
Once I restocked my supplies, I finished wiping the face. I was frustrated that I couldn't quite get out the residual pink from Harley Quinn's blush, but it was good enough. The wiping from the nail polish remover also left the face shinier than it started, which I didn't notice until all my work was done. Oops. I guess it suits the plastic-surgery idea.
I started by painting subtle light grey scars from the mouth extending out to make it look like his face was stitched into the expression, but I wasn't sure of the result. The scarring was good, but I didn't know how forced or fixed the grin felt. I probably should have made the scars turn up more dramatically, but the way they are, they remind me of the Bride of Frankenstein's jaw scars in a nice way. I then added a scar on the right side of his head. I want Tinselton to feel a little like a summation of the other S5 dolls, where he has echoes of their injuries, so this scar reflects Hollywood's massive head wound. For his eyes, I knew I wanted him to have heterochromia to suggest he replaced one of his eyes in a cosmetic procedure, and decided that would be his left. On his right, he has a brown eye with a white pupil done in a classic LDD style, while on the left, his eye is narrower and surrounded with bruising, like Hollywood's swollen right eye, and the iris is greyish. Scars reach out from both eyes in asymmetric patterns that meet on the nose, suggesting some dodgy facial pulling and sculpting to fix his expression or de-age him. At this point, Tinselton wasn't looking like my first concept of him, which was to be a brighter, more youthful-looking doll with a more clean and creepily stretched-looking plastic surgery face:
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| I didn't work off this sketch or draw it before working on the doll, but I had to draw what was in my head initially. The Harley head's vertical eye makeup being similar to this vision is a coincidence. |
The hair color and texture being so different from my first idea was probably a big factor in pushing him out of this polished LA-plastic look. It makes sense, anyway, for Tinselton to reflect a clumsier kind of surgery and an older fashion style if he was pioneering plastics decades back.
So since the look was going the way it wanted to anyway, I also added thick eyebrows broken by one of his scars and a pencil mustache. The only LDD with a mustache is Gomez Addams based on the MGM CGI movies, but I think it works for Tinselton. He's vintage-dapper in that way, and without it, the look didn't come together right. There was also room for a blood splatter by his right eye.
Here's the face. The hair is in progress and it's wild.
I'm not fully happy with my rendering here. The paint for the scars was hard to control to make it both smooth and visible, so it's a little rough, and the eyes are thicker than I wanted them to be, They look more like brushed-on paint than I'd like. But I think the composition of the face is great. It was one of those situations where I kept adding more and more but it wasn't wrong or excessive. And I think a postscript bonus character for a complete series deserves a little extra. Maybe his face doesn't look pulled or frozen by surgeries, but the face does look good. I like his expression not being harsh, and this is the right look for a gentleman doctor who became famous and rebuilt himself to maintain it. All things considered, he looks really good for all the time and reassembly he's gone through! I don't think the eye transplant fully took, but he makes it work.
Then I continued with the hair. For the right side, which I wanted neatly combed, I just filled in the opposite side at the top to complete the parting, then spread glue on the scalp and pulled the hair down to cover it, then saturated the top with glue so the "combed" side would stay intact.
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| I just pulled the one row of hair down over this glue and dabbed more in to have a permanent half-tidy comb. |
I then trimmed down the excess. On the loose side of the hair, I filled in more rows to give it more volume and evenness, and then trimmed down the hair a lot and used a quick boil to tame it a bit and make the hair feel more proportional.
With the apron, in addition to gluing on new straps, I also painted over the red bloodstains in black and glued on a black pocket for some tools-- a Playmobil blade and shears. I could have given him scissors, too, but he already looked enough like Sweeney Todd and he didn't need to be mistaken for a barber. Lastly, he got a Playmobil knife with a trimmed nail pin inserted as an accessory peg so he can hold it as a scalpel.
Here's the finished doll.
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I had to repaint the chipboard to black out the text and paint my own, which was a nightmare. It's obviously painted and not evenly opaque, but with the tiny brush and text size I needed, it was either controlled and thin or thick and illegible. Here's his chipboard.
Here he is holding the scalpel. His hands, per the Chloe body, were already pierced, but the holes being factory-made meant I needed to find a nail that fit the factory piercing properly to create the peg for the accessory. With Arden, adding an accessory hole just required a needle and a smaller pin to fit it--none of the searching for something sized right.
The poem I wrote for him is as follows:
Documenting famous deaths
In Tinsel Town made him a star
He looked undead before he died
From every plastic facial scars
I can't be bothered to work up a coroner's report mockup for him, but rest assured, he was his own coroner and reported on himself. Here's some details that would be there:
Time of death: October 2, 1970, 3:23 PM
Last known occupation: County medical examiner/coroner
Cause of death: Very advanced age (102 yrs.)
Notes: Displays several scars from cosmetic procedures to extend youth. Looks very good despite it all.
I chose to make Tinselton's death date earlier in the exact same week as Siren's so his death can be a smaller feature on the 1970s magazine cover I plan to make for her news piece. Their stories are sharing a magazine issue. I had initially thought I'd be getting Siren before Tinselton and that I'd be teasing his doll design with the design of her cover, but it still works the other way.
And another poem for the road. He wouldn't have actually had a second were he in S5, though.
Working from beyond the grave
His star, it ever rose
He can tell you honestly
How every big-shot goes
And next to the coffin.
To set his coffin apart a little and suit his unique look that belongs to neither full S5 set, I splattered the tissue with black.
Here's some looks at his hair. It's not perfect, but the look is overall good and it works. And the way I made it, it won't need any fussing beyond a bit of finger-fluffing on the loose half.
Here's the outfit.
And the pocket with the tools. The scalpel can fit in the pocket as long as the pin to put it in his hand is facing outward.
And here are the other two tools that stay in his pocket for texture.
Here's the back of the apron with the neck straps tucked into the suspenders.
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| The extra layer of leather on the waist strap is patching up a thin part underneath. |
And the velcro open on the waist.
Another detail I added to Tinselton was a scar on the side of his arm with real staples across it.
The scar was carved out and filled in with black, and I poked holes in across the scar and bent in office staples. The stapled scar is derived from Dahlia, and the placement on the arm alludes to Jezebel, whose wounds are a lot more grim. Both are up for discussion in the uncomfortable roundup I have planned. Really, the only doll not being referenced with Tinselton is Vincent, because the stitches on the face can relate to Siren. Vincent has vein theming I could reference, but that'd be the tipping point in his busy faceup where I'd be doing too much. Besides, Vincent is the only S5 doll whose wasn't mutilated or injured in his death, so he gets to be the exception.
Here's Tinselton without the apron. This makes him almost completely greyscale.
I prefer him with the apron on, of course.
And I made him a celebrity sidewalk slab. His is styled after his own coroner's reports, including the seal in the corner. Like many male graduates of medical school, his signature is nigh-illegible.
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| I ought to have pushed even harder on the footprints. Oh well. If it really bothers me after too long, I can make another take. |
Tinselton's footprints are centered so he can stand in the middle next to Hollywood while the other four S5 dolls flank them in pairs. This allows a symmetrical display, and it will stay even once I bring in GreGORY from S14, who also got a centered slab made for him. When that doll joins my collection someday, then GreGORY and Tinselton can stand on either side of Hollywood in the middle so she's in the full center.
Here's some portraits.
And here's Tinselton at the autopsies of the S5 dolls whose reviews have already featured here. For Vincent, he needed to cut some bindings with scissors.
And Hollywood arrived wrapped in a sheet, but still quite glammed with the feathers.
I was also able to take pictures of Dahlia's autopsy, but those would be spoilers and devoid of some relevant context if shared here.
Here's Tinselton's celebrity news piece. He's going to be sharing the same magazine issue as Siren, but the article is framed as a report on his death that was written before Siren died and he worked with her.. Her news piece, when I get her, will be the front cover of the same issue, and the end of this article references that Siren's death story has taken place since this piece was written in-universe.
I put a ton of work into this doll. The only elements not to be modified are the socks and the torso and legs. For this doll, I made a head of hair, painted a busy faceup, dyed a costume, painted the arms and clothing, added and modified accessories, created a slab, and customized a coffin. I put in all the love for making this doll, and I'm glad I did. For a throwaway name on five pieces of paper to capture my interest and passion to such an extent surprised me, and I didn't think I'd genuinely find the resultant doll of my version of Tinselton to turn out so good. He's genuinely interesting and appealing and layered as a design, the color palette and value balance is strong, and the doll feels a little deluxe and higher-level due to the accessories removable apron, and complex faceup.
You can tell this is a custom doll. It can't be mistaken for a factory piece...but it doesn't require that much distance to read just as nicely as one. This character design was an interesting mix of guided and improvised, such that I knew what I wanted, ended up with something really different from that, and yet got something that rings very true to me for a Series 5 Living Dead Doll--better even than my first ideas. Tinselton is also just useful to have. He provides more photo-ops for the S5 characters just by being a known character who's interacted with them all, and it's useful to have another doctor type on hand for other ideas. Dedwin as the Wizard is more fantasy sci-fi, while Tinselton is fully horror, and his vintage gentleman look suits other possible scenes and settings. He promises to be a versatile "actor" for future LDD photoshoots, and the way I've written his concept, he's able to slide into some settings from before his actual death without being out of place.
[Since he'd have been born in 1868, that year would definitely be too early, and I decided that 1905 would probably be the earliest time period I could use him in, since he'd have been 37 then and that seems like a plausible age for him to have started modifying himself. And if I decide 1905 was just when he started getting work done and I don't use him around then, that gives him enough time to reach the face he has now by the time Vincent Vaude arrived in his morgue in 1926, and allows the autopsy photo to make sense with Tin looking like he does. So maybe Tinselton's starting point for viable use in historical LDD photos would be 1920 at the earliest instead?
What? Who's overthinking? (And worldbuilding typically gives me a headache!]
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| The two doctors together. I might also seek out modern OG Dedwin for his utility in newer scenes. |
I'm just generally very proud of Dr. Tinselton Stitches. I'm just a fan artist, but it feels good to have given him a face and concept beyond a name on a document. I like what I did with the character and he's a triumph of a custom project. Bedford and Arden were fun improvisations with doll parts, but Tinselton was a project with purpose and he's certain to stay in a place of honor in my collection as a semi-canonical deluxe custom.
I'm probably not going to be doing another custom batch of LDDs for a while. I still have that one spare-Vincent-Vaude custom doll to complete, and that can get a very very short mini-post to share it once that happens, but nothing else is on the agenda right away. Two of the dolls in the uncomfortable roundup project that's finishing whenever have interesting bases I'd like to reinterpret, and there are some ideas I have in my head, but these custom projects will not be common. I did have fun with what I did, though. It's nice to re-complete a loose doll by reinventing them rather than seeing a doll who will never have all of its parts again, and I got some great results.
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