Part Two: Materials for Painting

These are the brushes I rely on most. The most important one is the 20/0 liner. It has to be a liner, and it really does need to be that small, so don't let any art stores try to talk you out of it! (I had some people tell me such a thing didn't exist, and even if it did, I couldn't want it anyway.) If you can get smaller, go for it - but a 20/0 does work. I also have here a 10/0 liner which I use sometimes for lining the eyes in the wider spots, a fine spotter which I use to help out in tight spots like tear ducts and for doing teeth, and a random round brush and a broader brush I use for miscellaneous whatever. (You don't need these, I sometimes use the big brush for glossing lips and the round brush can be helpful with the blushing stage, which I will talk about later.)

The liner is really the only brush you will be using to do eyelashes, and if you do painted brows, on the eyebrows. Its design is all about getting a very fine, delciate, long line. The spotter is the other critical one for me, since I have an open-mouth doll with teeth - the liner is not good for sneaking into small areas with paint, because it's so long. You want a shorter, stiffer brush for that.

I also keep at least two brushes - doesn't really matter what - on hand just for mixing paints.You don't want to gunk up your painting brushes.

For this stage, you should put the Winsor & Newton AWAY. Don't use it to remove mistakes, and you don't even need it to clean your brushes. It's very strong stuff and remember - it eats MSC for lunch! You don't want it near your coated head unless you plan on stripping the whole thing. I have tried removing some paint with it but not all, but it so aggressively destroys MSC that it will leave a funny ledge around the area that you will not be able to cover with MSC.

So, I use a basic random brush cleaning fluid. This one works quite well.

I keep a cup of it on hand for cleaning my brushes - with fine work, it's important to keep paint from getting clumped up on them while you're working - that 20/0 liner will become a 1/0 if you don't.

I also find it very useful for another reason - since you will be using fluid retarder (see below), the paint will not dry completely immediately, even when it appears to be mostly dry. Some of this brush cleaning fluid on a q-tip is great for removing small errors. It will NOT damage the MSC coating. (It also will not remove paint which is dry.) So it's almost a magic eraser for your painting, but not quite.

The very critical fluid retarder. Faceups are slow work; if the paint dries too fast on you, you will have mistakes you can't remove without removing the MSC as well. Read the label - you don't want to put in more of this than 25% of the paint itself. Too much, and the paint will dry WAY too slowly.
This is something else I use, which I came upon on my own so I can't completely guarantee its use. This just thins paint down and makes it flow more, and more transparent. I find that thin paint is critical to getting a fine line, and this has been very helpful to me. There are probably other thinning methods as well.

Paint tray! Ooh, obvious, right? I did originally do my painting with a plastic plate and everything ran together and it just didn't work at all. These kind of things are cheap and they will make your life easier. Easy is good.

. . . I do recommend cleaning yours before the paint dries on, cause that's just ugly. >< Sorry.

Pencils! There are two kinds here. Prismacolor colored pencils, and Derwent watercolor pencils. Both are respected brands and I do recommend them over just any old kind. Both pencils are for doing eyebrows.

Let's break eyebrows down into three methods - painting, colored pencils, and watercolor pencils. If you're painting your brows on, a colored pencil outline can be very useful. After the paint is dry (FULLY dry, give it plenty of time!) you can gently remove the pencil guidelines with the eraser (don't make them too dark or there may still be a faint mark). You can also skip the paint and just use very sharp pencil lines to do your brows. If you're uncomfortable with paintbrushes, this can be a good way to go. It's a bit easier, and you can still "erase" your work if you make a mistake. The third method is to use watercolor pencils, in the same way as the colored pencils.

Personally, after initially doing painted brows, I found that it was difficult to keep them from getting way too heavy and dark. I tried doing colored pencil brows next, and found that better, but that sometimes the pencils leave little clumps of lead which can look bad and that it has a more "crayon"-like rough look than paint. So, I switched to watercolor pencils. If used lightly they can still be removed from coated resin with the eraser, but they have a firmer lead and leave a cleaner line than the colored pencils. Since I only have two shades of brown, I also sometimes mix colored pencil lines in with the watercolor pencil. Play around, it depends on the style of brow you like, too. It's important to have a sharpener handy - get those points insanely sharp for the best result if you're drawing on your brows.

I would guess you could also draw on eyelashes if you wished.

We're going to have a funny little jog here because I actually did TWO faceups essentially back to back. This was the result of my first attempt. I was unhappy with the lips, did the blushing a bit too heavy because I was losing the light, and one brow came out too short. The brow I could fix over the whole shebang and then recoat and re-gloss the lips, but as for fixing the lips . . . I attempted to remove the lips only, but this left a "ledge" between the area I had removed and the area I had not. If you have to remove the MSC, you can give it a shot, but you're very likely committing to stripping the whole head.

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