A Living Dead Dolloween, Part 7: A Vintage Halloween Custom!

The Living Dead Dolloween is almost over, but I had to throw in one last short new entry before the finale.

A few months ago, when reviewing Grace of the Grave, I discussed how her bumpy, pitted, mouth-cut head sculpt was a total one-off, and speculated on potential other use cases it could have been applied to were it chosen to be repurposed. While the head sculpt had no time to be reused before the switch to ball-joint bodies shut the door on several unique sculpts in the very next series, I still thought maybe some creativity could have given it more life, and the holes and bumps made me think of a character themed around the Moon. This idea came back to me closer to Halloween as I realized I could customize a Grace into a vintage Halloween moon fit to add to the Series 32 cast. 

Read the first part here, the second part here, the third part here, the fourth part here, the fifth part here, and the sixth part here.

I've worked with the man-in-the-moon archetype multiple times before. I always loved the mystical/surreal edge of a humanoid figure with the Moon for a head, and the vintage tones tied to it are also fun. As such, I've been interested in the idea rendered as a doll. I think an Ever After High girl would have a perfect round face for a vintage moon character, too, so maybe I'll try that another time. Fortunately for this idea, a loose copy of Grace turned up on eBay in good time. Not much to say about her. Her headscarf wrap was unstitched so it was able to pull off without disassembling the doll. I didn't choose to replace my original Grace base with the second one after comparing them, even though the second Grace was probably better in terms of face paint and stance. I don't know why, but I stand by my first copies even if they're flawed. Call me sentimental.

The first step with this doll was to get the face blank. Grace's face paint wiped fine on the black, but the red was extremely stubborn and wouldn't come off, leading me to try painting over the head instead, but I gave up on that since the paint just wouldn't hold up. I ultimately had to soak her face-down in acetone to get rid of the last paint. It had started to affect the structure of the face, making a patch feel thinner and warped, and I was worried about that, but at the end of the day, the head turned out fine and returned to shape without distortion. Depending on my art direction, I could have worked with the base from there, since Grace's pale grey color is perfectly suitable for a moody silver moon. Heck, I'm not going to say no to trying that out sometime in the future. But for my purposes here with a vintage Halloween style, I wanted a bright yellow moon instead. So I decided to try dyeing the dead doll.

I've had very mixed results with dye previously. Hair tends to hold up, while vinyl can fade badly and damage a dyed doll design. With Monster High and L.O.L. O.M.G., I got inconsistent results. Monster High heads can fade, but hands and arms, which are also soft vinyl, did not. An L.O.L. O.M.G. held its dye, but the rubbery material of her legs accepted it but did not retain it for long. Hard plastic is nearly impervious to dye, though sanding its surface to be matte and rougher does seem to help...doll bodies are just difficult to sand. The unpredictability of dye on fashion dolls essentially had me swearing off the technique unless it was for hair or wigs. With LDD, however, I was far more optimistic for the simple reason that every part of a Living Dead Doll body is made from the exact same vinyl material, so whatever happened to the dye job or its longevity, it promised to be even. That meant prospects of a uniform dye job and, in the case of fading, uniform deterioration that wouldn't require spot tweaking. I like those odds. 

While Grace is from an older body style than Series 32, a swivel LDD seemed like the idea candidate for doll dyeing, since a swivel LDD is all vinyl and features no hard plastic joint pegs that could warp or loosen by the heating. 

This panned out well. One of the arms got left in the pot far too long by accident, so I used some acetone to undo a bit of the dye and even it out more. Here's the blank dyed Grace. Some dark shaded factory paint remained on her toes, which is fine and suits the tone. I didn't bother trying to remove that.

I would be less confident about the dyeing process for a ball-joint doll, because the soak could damage the plastic joint pegs or cause them to disconnect from the torso. I noticed plastic joints loosened on other dolls I dyed, so I don't know what the best practice for dyeing a ball-joint Living Dead Doll would be. I'll likely end up trying at some point, just because of the potential that using ball-joint bodies provides. On the vinyl side, at least, dyeing works smoothly since all pieces of the doll are the same material, and this could be a great way to make custom LDDs of color in lieu of Mezco providing such representation themselves. Will have to see how the yellow dye holds up over time here.

In the time since this doll was dyed (September 22), I'm not sure if there have been changes. In person, the body looks a bit muted as if the grey cast is coming through, but the doll still photographs absolutely vibrant yellow by default. The yellow color is not at all blacklight-reactive, which is unsurprising, but such an effect would have been an awesome bonus. I also considered maybe trying to cut open the doll and rig a light kit in there somehow, but I suspect the dyed vinyl isn't translucent enough for that to work even if I could rig it.

Then I had to design the face. I sketched a face design over the previous picture digitally to figure out what I wanted, and landed on this look inspired by retro cartoons. I thought it would work with the vintage theme and it interpreted the sculpt well, particularly the cut mouth which doesn't really suit the moon theme and needed to be disguised.

I think it suits the flat 2D-esque art of Series 33 and offers another fun take of transforming a LDD sculpt into a totally different aesthetic--here, the exaggerated upper lids totally shift the look of the head.

I copied this exactly onto the real doll, but it came across even tidier, and I made the slight change of counteracting the downward turn of the cut on the right side, drawing the mouth line upward to match the left side. I think this is successful. The black paint is so high-contrast that it supersedes the sculpted curve pointing the opposite direction.

The downside to this concept is that the LDD head shape is taller than it is wide, so the moon man doesn't look quite as round as I'd like. To be sure, the raised eyelids, which I liked, don't help. It was a fun stylish vintage youthful look, but I didn't know if it was providing the right energy. It also seemed a little unfinished. To solve these problems, I filled in the sclerae in white and added more wrinkles to the face for more of the eerily humanlike avuncular vibe many classic men in the moon have in artwork, and they helped to widen his face visually and make him look more circular, as well as adding some instantly-familiar energy to his archetype.

This might be my best-ever custom faceup so far, and definitely the best with zero of the original face paint involved. It's clean and symmetrical, lands its style, and the 2D cartoon effect is very effective. The face looks digitally edited on in this photo, but that's paint!

I previously worked in a retro-cartoon style with a doll faceup in my L.O.L. Tweens custom Lettie Hoops. 

Hers was modifying a factory faceup, though, while this moon's face was painted from the ground up. Lettie's base head was also far more cartoonish than this one, so I think landing the aesthetic on the LDD base was more of a long shot and an achievement.

You can see I was trying out a black suit for the moon man, and I was considering getting a hat and dress shirt to complete him this way...but I've already worked with the Halloween moon archetype on this fashion angle multiple times and I didn't want to repeat myself. So then I wondered if he could instead be in old-timey pajamas, nightcap and all. A moon being sleepy makes sense and it would provide a more interesting outfit. The full Wee Willie Winkie look hasn't been done by LDD before, either. There have been a few girls in nighties and Bedtime Sadie has a nightcap, but she's dressed in more modern footie pajamas. Purdy has one-piece pajamas and bunny slippers on her original doll, while her Resurrection has a button-down pajama dress and a nightcap hiding her exposed brain, while her Res variant has a nightie and no hat.

I ordered a set of Ken-size unofficial pajamas consisting of a shirt, a robe, and pants. I trimmed the pants down and cut the collar/lapels off the shirt and put it on the robe while adding a velcro closure to the front to replace the tie belt that it came with.

I didn't have the material to make a matching sleeping cap, and I was growing concerned that this outfit was too light and nonspecific for a vintage Halloween moon-man theme. I think the blue and white stripes pair really well with the doll, but this could be a retro moon illustration from any context and it doesn't convey "Halloween".  To fix this, I decided to dye the pajamas darker blue, with the plan to paint a star pattern in yellow on afterward. I also dyed some spare blank fabric in the same color with which to make the sleeping cap. The color was a navy blue that didn't darken or saturate the pajamas as much as I first hoped, but it would work. The stripes still came through on the pajamas quite clearly, and that adds some welcome texture and age to the look. I did a lot of soaking and wringing in warm water and detergent to get out excess dye! The cap was cut and glued, and inverted to hide the seam. I sealed the edges of the cap and the ends of the robe and shorts with black paint and painted gold stars over the pieces, covering the shorts and cap and leaving only an accent line on the left panel of the robe since I thought completely covering the outfit would be too demanding and perhaps not the best look. While him resembling a classic wizard was an inevitability and not a negative one at that, I liked the restraint on the robe patterning that helped it look more like pajamas. I glued the cap down in a floppy fold because the fabric wasn't loose enough to fall like a nightcap on its own. The hat doesn't stay on with any degree of friction or tightness, but it rests there fine for passive display. Since his head looks more moon-like when bare, it's intended to be an optional piece. Here's the result.

Here he is with the doll he was built on--warning if you haven't seen her before; Grace of the Grave is gruesome.

Grace's head and arm sculpts are distinctive, but if this custom was official, it might honestly take me a bit of time to realize they were the same doll body. I think the texture and holes add some dimension and vintage charm to the moon concept, so I'm very glad I went with this base. The design could have been replicated on a basic sculpt with paint, but the texture adds a lot.

Here's his lore.

Rip Van Twinkle

Death date: N/A

Chipboard poem:

The moon will glow while still asleep

But always wakes on Halloween

Lighting up the eerie sky

To show you every ghoulish scene

Certificate:

The world goes to bed with the man in the moon

And ghoulies go out on parade

The end of October's a grim bacchanal 

For those that all hide in the day

There's no consistent English name for the Man in the Moon that I could cite, and I wanted to give him more of a proper unique name. He kind of struck me as a Maurice, but that has no relevance to his theme, so I went on the sleepy nighttime theme and associated him with Rip Van Winkle. The story's writer, Washington Irving, is also steeped in horror Americana with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, so it works out.

I got a starry paper backdrop that suited his look.

Here's the contrast and color boosted to convey a glowing effect.

Then I put together some cotton "clouds" for him to rest on.

Then I isolated his face and boosted the contrast to create a head-moon image. I copied and pasted some of the stars to fill in the space under his head in post.

Here's how Rip looks next to the the Series 32 dolls. I think he blends in perfectly.

It's kind of funny, though, now with the two bonus/fanfic "series addition" customs I've done--my custom addition for Series 5, a swivel-doll set, was a ball-joint doll, and my custom for Series 32, a ball-joint set, is a swivel doll. Each was made as such because there was a face sculpt from across the body-style divide that I really wanted to feature, but at the cost of the doll's build not matching the dolls I designed them to join.

If I was to design a variant edition, I'd just use a grey base and swap some colors around.

The official S32 variant colors can be pretty garish and Mezco invested all their stock in random bright green, so this is how I think a variant of Rip would have plausibly been done in the actual S32 context.

I could see myself loving this coloration, even if it doesn't make much sense. The dark red and orange and green are doing something fun.

I digitally expanded the moon-face picture above to extend the backdrop with copy-pasting so I could put a composition together with the two S32 dolls under Rip Van Twinkle as the moon. The pumpkin is a lantern I painted and added the cutout vellum face using a papier-mache pumpkin base from a craft store. It was not made for the benefit of these dolls, but was a perfect prop to put with them.

I'm quite happy with this project. Rip Van Twinkle is by far my most successful custom doll faceup. It came out beautifully and has a great transformative quality on the base head. His costume has a lot of fraying threads and it was difficult to make, but it looks proper once completed. I think this doll will be a standby Halloween decoration for me for years to come.