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 ips and ricks for  epainting
If you have any questions please feel free to write!
- Miscellaneous Supplies
- Paper plate for a palette - (wax coated) you can buy a professional palette if you like, but paper plates are cheap, and it's a LOT easier to just toss them than to try to clean the dried paint from a professional palette.
- Towel - I use old rag towels, you can use paper towels if you like, but I'm messy and they dissolve on me.
- Small cup of water to rinse your brushes in, shot glasses are ideal.
- Toothpicks with bitsy pieces of cotton wrapped around them for correcting minor mistakes
- Q-tips, cotton swabs for shading.
Here we Go!
 Step One:
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- Place one drop of each color on your palette, cover each with one drop of your medium/extender and 1/2 a drop of water and mix with your brush - rinsing thoroughly between each color.
- Using your 18/0 spotter fill in the whites of the eyes with either a cream or a light gray never white. If the face mold is vague you can use a regular #2 pencil to draw in the eyes or pull a string across to check for evenness - the corners of the eyes should line up with where the top of the ear attaches to the head....
- It should take two or three coats to get a solid color on the eyes, and each coat needs to dry *completely* before you add the next. (at least an hour between coats).
- Fill in the lips using the darkest color (if your lips are going to be red, you want a red/brown mixture, if they're going to be coral you want a pure red) think lip liner. The upper lip should extend past the edges of the bottom lip. You'll get *some* expression from the shape of the lips. Pursed, smiling, sober, sad... some face molds are easier to get expressions on than others.
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 Step Three:
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- Now for the fun part! The eye-shadow! Use your liner brush for this.
- First... line the upper lid and trace across the crease of the eye using the burnt umber and again, an almost dry brush -
- Using your spotter, fill in solid color in both corners of the eyelid, leaving the center bare and cupped.
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Step Four:
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- Using your spotter and the main color for the lips (lipstick) fill in JUST inside your original paint, leaving the edges and inner lips the original darker color.. this should take two or three coats.
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 Step Five:
 | Shading! choose a mid-range eye-shadow color, thin it *well* - use your spotter and this time you actually do want a 'drop' of paint - apply it to the inner lid and use your shading brush, just barely damp, to drag it across the eyelid. Use several transparent coats to get the depth of color you want. Don't worry about going outside the eyebrows or onto the whites, its fixable! - if you have 'excess' at the edges use a damp cotton swab and wipe it off. |
Step Six:
 | Exactly as you did with the eye-shadow. Lay a strip of medium gray along the inner eye and drag it across with the shading brush - again, multiple thin coats are much better than a single heavy one. |
Step Seven:
 | Using a medium pink and your liner brush fill in the corners of the eyes and run a line across the bottom eyelid - this one needs lots of care. You might find it easier to switch this step to number one and fill in the eye whites after you've laid down your pink. |
Step Eight:
 | The iris! Use your 18/0 spotter and fill it very full of your darkest eye color thinned to "watery" and drop the paint into the center of the eye and then push it with your round brush out into a flattened circle pay attention to the *whites* of the eyes to get the iris centered. Holding the doll upside down, in profile, looking up her nose..LOL and using a mirror is also useful. Again, you can use a pencil to draw in the iris first, or you can use the head of a dressmakers pin sanded flat, or a very small dowel. |
Step Nine:
 | Random details here as long as you're working with dark brown, line the eyes and thicken the eyebrow, again with a DRY brush and a sketching motion. |
Step Ten:
 | Back to the iris - use your yellow and the spotter and paint a C shape along the bottom of the iris |
Step Eleven:
 | Ok, now take up your liner with the darker color almost dry on the brush and make bicycle spokes through the C shape, started at the outer edge and moving in to the center. |
Step Twelve:
 | MORE spokes with a dry liner alternating light and dark (yellow & brown) until you have about what you're looking for |
Step Thirteen:
 | Pupils! - done just like the iris, but in pure black. |
Step Fourteen:
 | What a difference eyelashes make!! Also in black, use your liner with *very* little paint on the brush - as thin and feathery as you can get them. eye liner can be as thick or thin as you like. |  |
Step Fifteen:
 | Highlights in the pupil with pure white. Highlights can be dots or dashes but are *always* on the same side of both eyes. |
Step Sixteen:
 | Remember those bicycle spokes do them again, this time on the lips using the alternating light and dark lip color |
Step Seventeen:
 | Nostrils! always a good thing to have! Use your spotter with very very thin dark brown, drop paint into the hollows and blend with a cotton swap along the edges. |
Step Eighteen:
 | Blush! Wondering what those q-tips were for? VERY thin paint brushed on the apple of the cheek with the spotter and blended all the way to the hairline with a barely moist q-tip it's subtle, but important. |
Step Nineteen:
 | Last step - face shading! exactly as you did the blush again, go for subtle! If you can see the lines you need to scrub more with the q-tip! again, if you want more shadows, put on more layers! |
A word about sealers.... - buy the good stuff. Winsor and Newton make the only truly matte sealer I've ever seen. Both Liquitex and Golden make good gloss and semi-gloss sealers. Don't skimp, a cheap sealer will 'yellow' very quickly. Besides a single bottle will last almost forever!
Taa DAA!
Aren't you proud?
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