I know I neglected my blog in the last months a bit because of holiday, visitors and time consuming video projects. I’m really sorry for that but sometimes this is life.
You can’t predict what the next day will bring you and you don’t know what kind of surprises to expect the next day. I hope to have a bit more time to blog in the next weeks and I hope that I can at least write one blog post a week. Sometimes that’s a challenge but nothing about a good challenge.
Now it seems that Corona is getting back we probably have more time that we expect to have it now when we will have the next lockdown. I don’t want to predict here anything but in Austria they started another lockdown from today on.
This is not really funny anymore because the measurements don’t seem to work here vaccinated or not.
Anyway I don’t want to complain but I want to write here more than in the last weeks. I hope that’s at least a start here.
So the make up of your doll is gone? Do you have to throw her away? The answer is no. You don’t need to throw her away. You can restore her with a little bit of acrylic paint, a brush or two and a wet palette. What a wet palette is can you learn in the following video below.
I can tell you from my experience here that your Barbie doll or whatever fashion doll, or doll you have. You can save her. Just have the courage to do it.
Maybe I can help you a little with this article. When I started doing repaints I had no idea that extreme small brushes are available. At first I only looked in hardware stores like home depot for my brushes, tested some nail brushes for artificial fingernails and came to the conclusion they were not right medium for me. So far no problem. I did not spend a lot of money for them. I started to look online for extreme small brushes. I found them under the brand of DaVinci Micro. I don’t want to make any advertising and they are not the only ones I have. My work is not perfect in this stage and I plan to experiment further here with brushes from different brands, check their feeling in my fingers, their behavior when painting, getting to know them until I will find the perfect brush for me.
Problems with beautiful and equal eyelashes
My problem when I work with acrylic paint are still the eyelashes. I tried watercolor pencils but somehow mine are not sharp enough, still looking not realistic enough. Hopefully I can solve this problem with a special kind of sharpener ( which I already ordered for a test) and different brushes.
What I can’t recommend is doing repaints just when you cycled around because you hands will still shiver a bit so that painting details is not recommendable in this condition. I recommend to grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea and wait at least 30 minutes. After that it should be no problem anymore.
What I can recommend is that you try to relax even when your day was very stressful. This has an effect on your result. That’s what I can tell you from my experience.
Stories/Experiences with repaints after cyling directly
Several years ago I cycled home when I still working as a private tutor and after that I want to continue my repaint. My hands were so shaky I really had problems to paint any line. This lead me to the conclusion not do repaints directly after cycling. Like I mentioned before it is better, more relaxing when you wait for 20 or 30 minutes before you start to paint. Then this problem should be gone and it should not be a problem anymore. I only tried this once after painting but having to cycle uphill every time I have to go home I never tried it again.
I don’t know how many dolls you have at home but I saw this phenomenon among my Barbie dolls. I have a Jewel Hair Mermaid Teresa at home nrfb and for some time I observe that her lips started to bleed out even in nrfb condition.
Jewel Hair Mermaid with lips whose color started to bleed
I think I could fix it when I take her out of the box but I don’t want to do it. I heard from another collector that this could have been caused by Cadmium in the paint itself. I recommend you when you repaint dolls – avoid Cadmium in paint. No good, seems to be the material to bleed.
Liquitex acrylic color
How to solve the problem doing repaints?
In the last years the industry obviously worked on the problems of bleeding. There are for example now some red tones from Liquitex that are free of Cadmium. So when you don’t paint it on the dolls, it can’t start to bleed, right?
How to deal with little paint jars with a cap you simply can’t get open
So and when we talk about paint here at the moment I had the problem recently that I wanted to use some of my little jars filled with paint but the caps were stuck. Man, this really left some blisters on my thumb. It’s very unpleasant to have such a situation. Nevertheless I found a very easy solution in the model making corner.
It’s always good to a pair ( or two) of pipe tongs at home. They come in very handy when you have small jars with the cap problem.
I know I haven’t written a blog post for almost one month. I can calm you down my new PC has arrived in the meantime and it’s running like it should but I’m still installing add-ons and therefore there is a little delay with my videos.
Don’t worry there will be new videos in the next weeks but the installation of the add-ons lasted longer than planned. So I often sat in the evenings in front of my PC instead of any TV.
I must say I’m satisfied with my new PC but I have not used it very much since I have not cut much videos in the last weeks. I hope to change it in the next days but now that everything is running smoothly. It’s a custom design PC. I chose a shop that offers to build your own custom PC. During the assembly they realized the power supply was not compatible with the other compounds I had choosen so they asked me and they changed it to fit to the PC for free. At the end I got a better power supply than I ordered, … little error in the shop but as long as I don’t have any costs … no problem. The case of my new PC had almost one month of delivery time although we ordered it before May, 15th.
My new PC arrived at my apartment on June, 5th 2021 and I installed the whole Windows 10 stuff the same evening but the other programms I wanted to install had to wait at least a day. So I used the time after my working hours to install the needed programms one after another. It’s not a huge amount of programms but sometimes you see it just when you need it and then it’s missing.
That’s what happened several times but now everything is running and my working hours after work are hopefully more effective than in the last weeks. I have a ton of ideas what to do in the next weeks and months but this time the technique will hopefully work. I still have some add-ons that I want to install in the next days but then there will be hopefully more time again. These add-ons are very small and I hope that the amount of time that I need is not very huge.
I wasn’t able to fix the Windows update problem on my old PC until now but when you come back in a few days I hope that I can show it to you. Maybe you have the same problem?
I know I haven’t posted anything doll related in the last weeks because I had not much to tell but yesterday I finally came across some time for my latest sewing project. I did show how to do the prototyping for a JapaneseExclusive top in the last weeks but I only showed how to do the pattern itself, not how to sew the top because I wanted to cover this in another video together with the tiny Peter Pan collar and the skirt.
You can see the first part of the pattern making here
but like mentioned above it’s only the first part of a journey how to come to the full dress. I must say the first try was good so far. I still have to do small improvements here and there under the arms because the arm holes are hard to do in a perfect way when you just did your first draft.
So anyway, I would like to show you the first result here
Prototype of the Francie dress
I plan to do more prototypes in the next weeks especially one with the Peter Pan collar. So stay tunes in. The project will be continued as soon as I have two hours time for my sewing machine.
I know I haven’t posted very much about my Barbie related things in the last weeks but there’s not much to tell you at the moment. Last week I wanted to improve my Gimp skills. I work on them every now and then but not as often as I would wish to do it. So I wanted to install some Adobe brushes to my brush selection. I did import them to my brushes folder like usual. This is nothing new to me. I’ve done this often in the past but I forgot one thing. I got the latest version almost of Gimp two weeks ago. Now I work with Gimp 2.10, not 2.8. What did I do? Install the brushes under 2.8 and not 2.10. I wondered why the brushes did not work.
Today I found the mistake, I did not need any Abr viewer. It just worked. It needed no extra programms, just worked. So keep in mind to put your new brushes into the correct folder for your brushes. Then you can create great things.
In the meantime I consulted several forums to get the solution to my problem not being able to work with my lately updated Windows 10 version. Did I get answers? Yes, I did but they were not helpful. Why should I consult Nvidia for a problem with Windows 10? The latest driver is 3 years old. Sorry, I don’t get the point. Nvidia will say it’s a Windows problem. So the poor guy from India got a bad mark from me for his answer. It’s simply not helpful and it does not explain why Windows 10 forgets the driver any time I start my Windows 10. We had the problem 2 years ago too but it was fixable.
So we started to solve the problem with updating my Linux. Yes, I have more than one PC operating system on my PC. I have 3 on it and 2 of it accept the driver without problems. The next problem I had to focus was the problem to explain this. I know a bunch of people only use one operating system on their PC. The update was in general no problem. It only lasted several hours but being at work on a Wednesday and coming home and your PC got its update is a good feeling. Nevertheless we were not able to solve the DaVinci Resolve problem. I suppose my CPU is to old for making it run on my Linux desktop. My PC is from 2012. Graphic driver check, running but CPU not. Obviously the problem is that under Linux DaVinci Resolve is treated a bit like a neglected step-child. So what’s the solution to the problem? Guess what? Spending money and spending a lot of money to be more precise.
We hope to solve this stupid graphic driver problem with a new PC but not just a PC but a really high performance PC with a fast and up-to-date graphic card from Nvidia with hopefully a working driver under Windows 10. I guess it’s exactly what they industry wanted to hear but it’s sad somehow that this problem can only be solved with money and not with a quick fix.
I know this sounds weird but my last two weeks were very strange. After updating my Windows 10 on my main PC the graphic card was not able to work properly anymore. I know this sounds strange but the look is so awful now that I can’t work on my PC at the moment. The problem with NVidia and Windows 10 seems to be a real problem since the last update of Microsoft. I hope they’ll fix it to. For cutting videos this is not good but we found a solution. I now work on another PC running Windows 8. There’s no such problem with the graphic driver but I hope that we can fix the problem too. So I’m really glad that I bought an external drive for my video files. It’s small, easy and transportable.
If that would not be enough for one week I had a flat tire on my bike last week Tuesday after work with no tool to repair it immediately. So I cycled to the next bike workshop but they refused to help. I had to cycle with my flat tire through the city to the other end of it just to get my flat tire fixed. Due to the Windows thing I was late with my video and the tire even delayed my time-schedule. The good thing was that I got help immediately in the second workshop and 30 minutes later I could finally cycle home. That’s how I got an unplanned bike trip.
After working constantly on new videos I suddenly hit the 700 subscriber mark this week. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon but it really happened. I don’t really know what to say but thank you. A 700 subscriber video will follow soon. Let’s cross fingers that I can fix the PC problem soon.
I know I haven’t been posting here for the last 7 weeks. I had some time problems with my time-schedule. Doing more sewing videos needed more time to edit and cut and I underestimated this fact somehow.
It’s not that I’m not willing to learn how to do it better but this was somehow different from what I planned. You know you have sometimes great ideas and when it comes to put things into reality then there are some “minor” problems.
That’s not what you want. That’s not what I want but I had to deal with it. For one of my videos I had too much light, another one had a bad tone.
The tone problem could be solved by doing it again. The light problem could be fixed with a little help of DaVinci Resolve but I’m far from perfect. Knowing something about grouping is also very helpful. I only knew I had known it earlier. I know it’s already April and I haven’t posted any for almost two months. Please forgive me but after work I drafted for days and days to get the pattern right. It was not cooperative at the beginning.
I think there are lots possibilities for Francie because there are a lot less fashions for her than for Barbie. So if the demand is high enough the chances are good that you can get more videos about Francie. What do you think? Would you like some more Francie videos?
I just saw that I blogged nothing for about a month. The last month was a very busy one for me. I had less time to work on my projects after work due to winter weather. We got a lot of snow that caused traffic problems. I wasn’t able to use my bike for some weeks. Let’s cross our fingers that the winter will be over soon.
Coming home later caused some time problems. I was not able to blog so much as I did before. I somehow felt tired after work and my projects from January were time-consuming. For example I did a re-root and 3 days after working for approx. a hour daily on it, we got snow. We got a lot of snow. Approx. 50 cm in 26 hours. It was snowing all day long. Nice to look at but bad for the traffic.
So my project lasted longer than I wanted it to last since I did work on several videos when I did my re-root. Last year in September I found a Barbie head worth to re-root. I prefer the Vintage Barbie dolls at the moment. It’s less work because you just have to root the outer circle and it’s not full re-root. I think a full one would have lasted even longer. I already did a Ponytail Swirl Barbie in 2019 in a flamboyant red tone. This time I wanted to do a blond version. Somehow she reminded me a little bit of Marilyn Monroe while I did this. I even found a photo with a similar style. That’s how she reminded me of Marilyn.
The styling always needs a lot of time because the hair in not cooperative. After all I had 4,5 hours of film. I filmed the whole re-reroot of this Barbie but I knew I had to cut it down. Starting with 4,5 hours I managed it to come down to 1,5 hours without problems but even the 1,5 hours were way too long. I didn’t want to make a documentary. I wanted to show my viewers the makeover, the transformation. After cutting for one week I finally came to about 40 minutes. This was way more acceptable than the 1,5 hours. At the end I came down to approx. 35 minutes. Way better than before. If you want to see it, have a look below. I linked the video.
