LDD Loose Ends

This is just a quick wrap-up of dolls I left in limbo. It's a good time to post these because my Damien project is being held up by a desk I ordered being caught in limbo, and I might have to get a refund if the seller doesn't respond and confirm it's being shipped soon. Theirs looked like the perfect prop for the dolls, too. Fingers crossed it works out.

Jubilee

I was thinking of building a birthday roundup for Sadie focused around her Sweet 16 doll (which would post on this very day, actually), and that was an exciting concept, but I also wondered if it would be redundant with my personal birthday roundup just before. My Jubilee's dress getting ruined and requiring a replacement, leaving her in limbo without a full photoshoot, energized me to commit to the birthday roundup for Sadie...but then, come April, Sweet 16 was too difficult to get in the moment I needed her--or at least, expensive enough with a long enough delivery time that my interest in the idea did not overcome those concerns. I think I'll keep that idea in the books for next year, because I wasn't married enough to it to pursue right now. I want the blog to have some wiggle room, some breeze and spontaneity, and in terms of planned projects, I have enough lined up as it is! Adding the Sadie deathday project now would feel a little suffocating, and committing to the copy of the doll who was available would have felt like a chore to swallow in this moment. As such, Jubilee's redemption is just going to be a bonus photoshoot in my established practice, though she'll be happy to host for Sadie next time. Sorry for getting hopes up with my overconfidence before!

Jubilee II was a loose incomplete messy copy floating on the aftermarket for around $40, vastly cheaper than any complete offering. I'd seen her and dismissed her when searching for Jubilee I, having no use for an incomplete copy in her messy state, but she became a minor godsend when I needed a new dress and I quickly committed to ordering her so Jubilee I could be fixed up.

Jubilee II has no hat or gift, her hair elastics are disintegrated, her curls are just as droopy as any Jubilee today, and she is missing one shoe, which isn't very helpful. A spare pair could be of use. Jubilee II will not be replacing I as my copy. Her hair is too messy to fix up and I'm very happy with how I has turned out with just a trim to shorten her curls to original length. Jubilee I coming sealed had the advantage of her curls being mostly untouched and still in good order. However, vitally, Jubilee II's dress is clean.

The collar did have some slight yellowing, but I'm smarter now, and a quick soak in vinegar brightened it up beautifully. Jubilee II was literally my only resort for a quick fix to the dress disaster, so had I botched this one too, I'd have no recourse. Here are some photos I staged with her.

And lastly, here's a birthday card painting in vintage style. It's not the best, but I wanted to have something.

Overall, circumstances were terribly unfair to Jubilee. I destroyed her first costume, and by the time I had her new one and was ready to have fun with her...the occasion had passed and my energy for the doll had depleted. She's still a nice character design and a fun festive piece, but she's one of those I can't keep out in the off season. She goes with my holiday dolls in storage until she's ready to celebrate again.

Zombi 2 II: Menard II

 Last year, I did a review of Series 22 zombie Living Dead Doll Menard. Then I turned him into a custom character. This is about his replacement.

I wasn't always sure I was going to replace my Menard, because I'd explored him as a grotesque curiosity with a uniquely gritty aesthetic, but I wasn't so sure I loved the doll thanks to his sculpt and paint compounding to take him far out of the cute dolly look LDD derives from.

This was very interesting, but not what I come to LDD for. I even went as far as to make him a mask, ostensibly to build him out and make his face a surprise, but, sure, it was also a little bit motivated by not adoring the doll's face as it was.

I was comfortable repainting him when I needed the head sculpt for Valentine's Monster. Even more comfortable after that project gave me a great result.

That choice to sacrifice Menard for a custom left the doll's status in my collection in limbo, leaning toward "first out". But then I saw proof positive of how varied and unregulated the mottled paint application was for this character because I found a copy of Menard that was actually cute. In a "he's so ugly I love him" way, sure. But this Menard had a higher proportion of yellow and much lighter shading around the mouth that gave him some of that childlike cartoon cuteness LDD usually has and which this sculpt was pretty distant from. I was sold. I'd never seen a Menard painted quite like it, and while getting him as my new Menard was selecting for a relatively non-representative copy of the doll, it was one I liked and could display with genuine affection. I knew I wasn't going to find another Menard I'd like more, and I did like the prospect of having him back. 

Here he is.

What's changed?

Yeah, that's not helpful. Here he is:

There's something different about this doll, isn't there? The second paint job feels more uniform, more yellow, and fills out and rounds the face more, giving it a cuter, younger look, and, honestly, making the atypical head sculpt look less removed from a typical LDD. The mouth especially looks smaller and cuter on the second doll, and his expression now looks more confused than snarling. The inside of the mouth is also darker. 

Perhaps you could say Menard I looks like an earthy corpse while Menard II looks like a kitchen sponge, but I immediately like the new one more on a personal taste level. This is a Menard worth being in my own collection. 

I think this copy is capable of expressing some innocence or wonder that brings the doll element back into the toy.

It can still play grotesque, though.

That's a really quick update, but Menard is resolved and in better standing than he was now that this is my copy!

Custom

So what was I going to do with Jubilee II? Well, I didn't want her to go to waste and I wanted to keep her around for a custom. Before I had my idea lined up, there was still something I could do. This Jubilee's hair was very snarled and fluffy at the ends, so I trimmed it shorter and combed and boiled it so it could retie into low ponytails.

I also bleached the Jubilee I dress back out because spot-dyeing it to repair the color had been utterly unsuccessful despite trying for the life of me to fix the color in. With deliberate bleaching this time, I was able to get it very light and distinctly brown, though the soak also softened the fabric and destroyed the lace trim elements, the latter of which kind of invalidated a real antique spin for the dress. I might have pursued a tea theme had the lace survived.

I decided the Jubilee base could create one of the LDD concepts I'd had in my mind for a while: a bonus addition to the superstitious Series 13 cast named Friday. She'd be a girl based on the superstition of the Friday the 13th date, and with her low ponytails, I could actually braid them instead--my idea for Friday was always that she'd be a step off Wednesday (Addams) per having a weekday name. (Wednesday's middle name is actually Friday.) As to how to illustrate her concept...well, that was harder. There's no specific thing about Friday the 13th in superstition, and a calendar visual theme would be too on-the-nose and hokey. But then I decided to reference another thing--naturally, Friday would be wearing a hockey mask a la Jason Voorhees, icon of the Friday the 13th horror series (which has practically nothing to do with its name). Mixing Wednesday and Jason was an odd idea, but I proceeded with that. My concept became a bit more solid: Friday was born on a Friday the 13th, suffered a misfortune every Friday the 13th of her life, and died on a Friday the 13th at age 13 in 1913--looking it up, that would mean a birthday of April 13, 1900 and deathdate June 13, 1913. As for how to illustrate her compounding misfortunes, she would have multiple wounds, including the face hidden by her mask.

To make her hockey mask, I tried multiple iterations with the same oven-bake clay.

For all of them, I bored the circular eyeholes with the tube cap of a marker as a cutter, and used a drill bit (a tube used to package around the bristles of a thin paintbrush on my final mask), to make the mouth holes. My first take on the mask was too large. While it was actually appropriately big, I wanted the mask to slide under her bangs without disrupting them, so it needed to be thinner and more circular and just on the front of the face. Friday is using the mask just to cover her face, not to protect herself, so it can be less practical. My second take on the mask was okay, but putting two gashes in made the piece a little flimsy and the eyeholes didn't stay clean in the transfer onto foil.

The second mask.

I had a dummy head to sculpt on, but taking the mask off and keeping the shape was difficult because the head couldn't bake in the oven and trying to get a tinfoil form of the face, putting the mask over both, and lifting the foil and mask off the head wasn't totally satisfying me in terms of getting the shape right. I eventually made a "death cast" of the dummy head, which I could sculpt off and bake with a mask on it. I took the head and pressed it into air-dry clay to make a half mold and let it set and took the head out by heating the vinyl. I then pressed some oven-bake clay in (softer than I expected, welcomely, but shimmery and metallic) and broke the air-dry clay mold to take the oven-bake form out without distorting it. It still looked perhaps a little skewed and wasn't perfectly smooth, but it looked usable.

Fortunately, my idea worked and the third mask built on the cast didn't fuse onto it in the oven. I did have to very carefully wiggle a needle between the mask and the cast to separate them, but it came off fine. 

I wiped the face paint on the doll, but didn't commit to a new faceup yet. I was thinking of the kinds of mishaps she'd have befallen, and I thought of cutting off some of her fingers and "bandaging" the spot with linen ribbon and fabric glue. I'd come up with this LDD injury concept for another character, but I thought it could suit Friday...especially when I realized if she lost those fingers and then also her whole other hand, she'd have died with thirteen digits total as another cosmic sign of her bad luck. I went to it. If this was a LDD official character, no doubt Friday would be using the shredded severed-hand arm sculpt, but the visual device of bandaging let me use a regular arm, truncated.

The fabric glue hardened and affixed the bandaging correctly, but it has a glossy look, so I then painted over with matte white paint, which corrected the finish exactly to look like plaster and gauze.

Sure, these bandages would better be depicted as soft dressings because they're not casts for re-setting bones, but it still works okay. 

I had also braided the ponytails and put Friday in socks and a pair of pointy boots. I figured they added a certain stompy quality that would suit her mask and Jason side, and she would have died old enough that she didn't need to look like a little kid.

I wasn't initially planning to use the Jubilee dress on this doll, but I think the dress and base doll have both walked far enough away from Jubilee's design that it doesn't feel repetitive.

I painted some brown stains over the green on the collar and onto the bandages where the amputations occurred, choosing brown over red and a more visceral look. I then started on the face. I chose to carve scars into the head in the form of the Roman numerals for thirteen, further marking Friday as supernaturally hounded by a curse.

Since her right cornea got some carving by accident, I decided it would be blacked out with paint. The scar and missing eye are similar to Iris, but it can be spun as homage because this is a sequel bonus fan addition for Series 13. I filled in the scars with brown and shaded around her eyes and face, and gave her a normal classic-LDD white eye with lashes, a cartoony brow, and outline to indicate a more pristine doll she would have started as. I also gave her tidy black lips in a smirk so she doesn't look too tragic or upset.

I decided on a forest green iris with a yellow pupil to bring in some forest Jason tones that suited her mask.

The mask got painted flat white with a black take on the Series 13 sulfur symbol.

Because I used a water-soluble brush pen to paint the symbol, I needed a spray sealant to set it in because brush sealant would smear and bleed the ink. I'm still looking for good fine acrylic pens. After the spray sealant dried, I used the brush matte sealant over it because the spray made it too shiny and uneven the way I applied it. I glued elastic onto the front to make it look more function-over-form and it worked with the symbol to add some black, and added some brown scuffing onto the mask and pieces of the doll.

Here's the finished doll.

I understand the injury theme of this doll can feel exploitative and insensitive, but I hope it comes across that Friday is not angry or tortured and that this is deliberately over-the-top and stylized to show somebody who encountered excess misfortune from a superstition being true in her fantasy universe. I neither wanted to convey "this is the ultimate tragedy" nor "be scared of disabled people". All of her injury is also depicted as things that happened after she was born, in the vein of accidents that can happen to literally anybody but which found her with supernatural frequency. To say she was cursed at birth is to be taken as very literal and magical, not in the sense that she had a disability at the start, which absolutely would not be appropriate with this concept. Friday was a girl who befell things any single human may possibly befall regardless of where they started, and she just befell them a lot because of the date hanging over her head. 

I'm not going to try to prop this up as good disabled representation at all. This is just one of those I invite you not to take too seriously. 

Friday

Born: Friday, April 13, 1900

Died: Friday, June 13, 1913, age 13

Each final weekday upon the thirteenth

A terrible ill would befall her

Cursed since the date was the one of her birth

And Friday was what they all called her

There was nothing to pity her for at the start

But each 13th just added a hurt

Friday herself always took it in stride

Now she's up and she's brushed off the dirt

Since I don't have my summer vacation woods and lake on hand to photograph Friday in, I found the best scenery I could around me. She looks really good in a green photo filter.

I had to get some pictures of her pointing to her date on a calendar. Turns out, the first Friday the 13th of 2025 hasn't happened yet--it's due in June. That works perfectly, since it was a June when she died.

Here's some photos with a green coat as a backdrop.

And a movie poster for her. I cut out her eyes to emphasize the XIII and drew her mask around her in a childlike scrawl, paired with the text in the same style.

Perhaps this poster reads a little more "quirky indie drama" than an exploitation-horror vibe that Friday kind of fits into, but I like this piece a lot. 

In the end, I think Friday turned out more palpably "Jason" than "Wednesday", but it was an interesting way to repurpose doll parts I was left with, and I think I found an interesting way to define a pretty abstract superstition for a doll theme. 

I'm glad to have sorted these dolls out!