Dollieh Sanctuary

In honor of Unwind and Unwholly I will be building a doll from the ground up mismashed to look intentionally strange as if she was sewn together from different parts. Akin to the character Cam from Neal Shusterman's book Unwholly this doll will have different attributes, stitches painted on. This is to merely document the process. I still need to find a torso with jointed arms since I have a head and legs that are jointed.

Sounds cool!
*watches and waits*

I have started the project today. So far everything's going according to plan. Camelia's head was wiped of factory paint completely, painted with heterochromia eyes and umber lips. Her legs featured tattoo's of stars and a flower on either one along with a red heart and black stitches all over to represent scars. Still need a torso.

PIC UPDATES:

LEGS:







Face up:



I might re do her face up.

Today I have stripped Camelia's head of her face up (again) and filled in the cap of the lips with sculpey and redid the whites of her eyes. I won't continue anymore today until the clay has dried.

apoxie sculpt or sculpey? I don't think sculpey makes an air-dry clay, do they?

Just sculpey. I'm not sure as I know if you leave sculpey out it can dry out on it's own....I think. I'm gonna ask around and if that idea's a failure then I'll just find my exacto knives carve out the teeth area and use super glue to close the mouth for good. I used the tiniest amount I could tear off so no skin off my nose if it doesn't work.

There is only one type of sculpey that dries on its own: Model Air. If you're using just regular sculpey, technically all polymer clay will go 'hard' if left on its own at room temperature, but it won't actually 'dry out' on its own. By default, sculpey is a pretty tough material to work with and needs to be conditioned (softened and warmed up) to work with and leaving it alone will just return it to its default state.

Basically, if you're using just regular sculpey it'll never actually harden up. If it's not baked, it will eventually break apart as dry, crumbly clay.

Crap...And I can't exactly put a vinyl head in the oven. It's honestly an old as hell batch of sculpey I've had since 2001...I never was much into clay so I never used it until I remembered it so I pulled apart a tiny chunk worked it up until it was able to be molded and put it there...Guess I need to rethink my strategy.

You can boil it to harden the sculpy, but I'm not sure how well it will work with a thick piece of sculpy. Remember, you need to act quickly because sculpy and other polymer clays can actually melt some plastics; I'm not certain if that includes soft vinyl but you probably don't want to find out on your project doll.