Here they come~
Girls~
Doodles of Miss MiMi now that she is also back from getting repainted (again).
I have a few quibbles about her faceup, but nonetheless I’m really happy to have her back. Her mouth, like Jer’s, took multiple tries to get even remotely close to right. (I was literally crying after getting her first “finished” photos, because she looked like she was wearing hot pink lipstick, despite my very specifically using the default Tsugumi faceup as a color reference for what I wanted.) Redone, she looks more like V in the “salmon nigiri for a mouth” department, which is fine by me.
I’m a little worried that she looks too glamorous and makeup-y next to GiGi, who has a much cleaner and more natural/neutral faceup, but we’ll see if they work in photos together.
On her own though, she’s very cute. I’m also super biased, because I’m absolutely smitten with the Tsugumi sculpt itself, crooked mouth and all, and MiMi’s design overall (eyes, hair). As a doll, she pleases me a lot.
Bonus – a couple of quickie shots of the two little girls together.
I think my photo editing tendencies kind of mitigate the skintone difference between them; it’s a little more pronounced (and therefore more irksome) in real life. GiGi is my “normal”, with a cleaner (old skool BJD) faceup, while next to her MiMi’s head looks a bit like a pumpkin, it’s so blushed and textured and orange-y. She just doesn’t seem to quite fit in with the rest of the collection, as cute as she is. MiMi looking good when paired with GiGi is crucial.
So I don’t know…
Test drive.
I recently had MiMi repainted, and I’m still trying to decide if the new faceup is going to work out. It’s an incredibly well-done one, with fantastic linework; I love the eyebrows, the painted eyelashes, and her applied white eyelashes.
What I can’t quite get used to is how heavily she’s blushed, and I quickly found out that in person, painted “skin texture” is not for me. She seems overdone compared to the simpler, clean and stylized look of my other dolls, and I keep mistaking the “skin texture” for dust or mold and trying to brush it off.
I want to be fair to her, though, and give myself time to think about what I want to do – if I can get used to the new look or if I should start searching for a different faceup artist and try again. The best way to do that was to start photographing her and see how I felt. I’m really in love with her, but I think that’s a product of it being MiMi (the Tsugumi sculpt, her eyes/wig combo, her personality) more than anything.
So I haven’t figured out just what to do yet…