I had finished my Board Exams and was all eager to plunge into a nice, long vacation when the wily Corona virus decided that I would have a really, long vacation, but never get out of my house. So my plans of eating out, shopping and most importantly, regular practise at my dance class, for the upcoming programs, were all ruined. I couldn’t hope of anything more disastrous.
What else could I do, but watch all the unwatched movies, do all the planned and unplanned paintings, and read all my unread books, who were waiting to be opened by me for many months?
But then I saw videos which showed the repainting of dolls into different faces. I was impressed and wanted to try it. But I had lost interest in playing with Barbie dolls ages ago, and had packed everything into a box and had left it forgotten in my upper storage cupboards. As the days passed, I decided to try out doll repainting, and took the box out of the cupboard.
It was a complete mess. One Barbie pant had been reduced to powder, and it had spread over all the items in the box. The faces of the Barbie dolls were covered with dirt. There were many items, like a baby-doll’s pram (which had only one wheel), a doll life jacket, fairy-sized dolls and a lot more irrelevant things, which I don’t even remember owning. I guess I had left them in this way when I was 8 or 9.
I took one fairly-good looking doll which had long blond hair, decided to start repainting this one. I had fixed my reference figure as Queen Elsa from Frozen, as I had seen no other Disney Princess movie. So, I removed the crazy hairstyle I had inflicted upon this unfortunate doll when I was 8, with great difficulty though. The rubber bands had fused together, so I had to cut them out.
I started combing the hair with the tiny doll comb, when things started getting interesting. The doll’s hairs, especially few ones at the front, started getting pulled out. Finally, I got a handful of doll hair, when I finished combing. I realized that I was definitely not a great hair-stylist. Then I braided it into a plait.
Then there was the face. I removed the eyes, eyebrows and lipstick using nail polish remover. Then I painted the eyes, using Elsa’s eyes as reference, big, blue eyes with purple eye shade and thick eyelashes. Painting the eyes were far better than the lips.
I realised through this experiment that painting on miniature things is definitely not a piece of cake. Repainting the lips was a very tedious job. I painted it once, then felt dissatisfied, then removed it and repainted it. This was repeated atleast 7-8 times. Then when I got a fairly okay lips, I added some rouge to her cheeks using colour pencils. Finally, I drew the eyebrows using brown colour pencil. It looked somewhat like Elsa, but not entirely like her. Her queenly-look didn’t come out well. Anyways, it looked way better than the original face, I thought.
I also wanted to make a new dress for the doll, but unfortunately, since I can’t go shopping for dress materials and cloth right now, that desire will remain unfulfilled until Corona takes leave of its presence amidst us!
💜💜🧡🧡💞💞❣❣❤❤