fall doll photoshoot 2/3

I went to midtown and swatched a ton of random fabrics and bought tiny elastics of gold, navy blue, silver, etc. We're lucky to be working with really tiny dolls so most of the swatches were more than enough for me to finesse into clothes. I did actually hem my own size small happy ringers to harvest the right green and gold fabric for the little guys (lmao dedication). Both shirts were entirely hand sewn (ouch) and we bought heat transfer sheets for both light and dark shirts to print out our little designs. It took a lot of trial and error but I finally got the right size. Side note, I will be creating a happy time ringer and hopefully even a cycling jersey at this scale.

Makayla came over to help us with the shorts because this was all happening while I was sewing wigs and spraying bodies lmao. Therefore I'm lacking a lot of BTS photos of her working on these but I'll be making new ones with better materials this week! I didn't have a grey for her to use for the green/grey shorts so I... dunked a swatch of 100% cotton beige twill fabric into a bowl of water mixed with grey acrylic paint HAHA it worked for the purpose of the shoot but it made the fabric really stiff (as paint usually does). 

At this point I also had to start figuring out SHOES aka my 3D printing set-up which I haven't touched in months. I found out ofc, the night before the last day to shoot, that I only had clear resin left for my formlabs printer. Clear resin requires the UV curing process moreso than the grey resin (which cures faster and even by daylight). I haven't used the UV curing radiation box since we moved a year ago because I had lost the AC adapter during the move... so I tore my house apart for like an hour until I found it and set up. 

Also, side note, I spent about 3 hours the day before this in zBrush modeling the shoe HAHA........ I'll post the video after this post.

I used PreForm (a program to set up resin prints for FormLabs printers) to position my little bug shoes and used a measuring tape to decide on a 2.25inch length. They miraculously fit perfectly and I got to painting. I did a rough wash of majority water and black acrylic paint so that the black would run into the nooks and crannies to further show me where to paint. This was something I had to figure out on the fly because I really couldn't see anything on the clear resin model. I used my really old and busted acrylic paint (most of them were DRY) to fill in the colors. I chose to paint from light to dark because it took like 6 layers of orange to become opaque but only 1 layer of black. From there I painted with horrible posture for 4 hours straight to make it just in time for Dom to take photos.

Dom the MVP jumped onto my sewing machine for the last 30 min before shooting to make them SOCKS.... he cut white fabric strips from an old hanes tanktop and made little tubes.

when I said this was going to take over my entire life for about a week or two I wasn't lying.