Commission Review - Spiritdoll - This Alice LE WS for Nancy S.

As you all know I'm very obsessed with faceups and commissions and I've been timing myself lately. I thought it might be interesting to some to hear about my thoughts on some of my commissions. Most likely I'll start out reviewing all of them and slowly taper off to ones I find particularly interesting as I build up my reviews since I'm sure I will paint the same sculpts again over time.

First Commission Review is This Alice from Spiritdoll. I find her particularly compelling because she's one of the huge dolls that have started appearing in the last two or three years. Dollmore and Bimong are the other doll producers that are producing made to order dolls in a 1/2 an up size. Bimong's Doll was 1/1 scale, albeit with very idealized proportions. Dollmore's Lusion Doll at 79cm is a similar size to Spiritdoll's Dolce at 75cm although the aesthetic and proportions are different.

This Alice was a limited 50 edition doll produced only in White Skin for the 2013 - Alice in Wonderland theme. As such she is quite rare and I've not seen any other This Alice since I believe there was also a limited ordering period. Very likely there are not 50 altogether so I was very happy to have been commissioned to paint her.

Her stats are a 11.5in (29cm) head circumference and 20mm eyes.

The request was for a pale freckled 12 year old girl with baby blue eyeshadow. I'm usually pretty leery about painting kids with makeup on unless the sculpt is stylized or the makeup is stylized so I was not certain at all about the blue eyeshadow on a realistically painted and sculpted kid. After a few trials where I felt she looked....slightly too precocious shall we say, I decided with Nancy's blessings to keep the blue eyeshadow to a light dusting instead of anything that looked too heavy.

Here's a look at the blue eyeshadow trial:

Trust me. In real life it looked a bit worse. However in the end I think she looks smashing!

Her preview before lashes:

and her final pics....

I had a great time with her. In terms of casting and resin quality, I did find a very obvious bubble on her bottom lip. I patched it with some epoxy clay, sanded it smooth and buffed it. I painted over it with an airbrush to match the resin and voila! Smooth perfect lips. Otherwise the resin was heavy and smooth and the casting held beautiful detail.

Time wise, this girl took a long time. I've decided to break down the timing to better help everyone understand exactly how long it takes me to do everything involved in the process. Here's a chart I made.

I didn't time myself heading to the post office to mail out this package as well as another head but it takes me about 8-9 minutes to walk to the post office, about 4-10 minutes to mail the packages depending on if I can use the APC or if I have to wait on line and another 8-9 minutes to walk back home. I also don't bother to time myself going to pick up the packages or opening and inspecting them but as usual it all adds up. For Nancy, there was a total of 47 e-mails back and forth between us. That's a fairly high number but not unusual although it's usually lower. A lot of times it depends on how friendly the client and I are and if we talk about things other than just the commission or if there is a tweak I am working on. In the end I'm unsure how to time out the e-mails so I don't think I will bother.

As you can see, it took me more than a normal work day to finish this commission. I'm not sure how long other artists take, but this is how long it takes me. I think there is a misconception out there that if someone is good at something, they're a lot faster at it. Here's the truth, you can't rush art. You can't rush painting. It's a physical thing. It takes a specific amount of time to lay down a stroke and if your work is finely detailed, that means you spend that much more time on it.

Anyway, I hope you guys like these charts. I will be putting up more of them. It would be nice if there are any other faceup artists reading this to communicate and talk about how long it takes you guys to do your faceups. I'm quite curious as I can't figure out if I'm super slow or not.