Marina the Mermaid

Some of you might remember that when I first introduced the seasonal fairies, I had a pale, wig-less Ariel chosen to represent summer.  However, when it came time to start pairing the fairies' wigs and outfits, I noticed that the green wig I'd chosen for Ione didn't match her dress.  However, the green wig was an uncanny match for the sea-green factory eyes of wig-less Ariel!  That wig and that doll were clearly meant to be together.

In addition, something about the ocean-like shade of the eyes and wig made me think of mermaids.  I was reminded of the dreamy, muted-color scenes at the beginning of the movie The Shape of Water. Also, the doll has the Ariel face mold, which always makes me think of The Little Mermaid.

In any case, I set the green-eyed Ariel (and her wig) aside and finished the seasonal fairies with a different doll and a different wig.  I also sent a message to Julie Kelly of Fairy Tale Blessings to ask if she would be willing to design a mermaid costume for a My Twinn doll.  To my delight, Julie said yes!

So, I'm back today to share my first (and probably only) mermaid with you!  I named her Marina, which means "from the sea:"

2001 My Twinn doll with the Ariel face. 

Marina came to me in very good shape overall.  Her most glaring deficiency was that her wig wasn't attached:

She has a very nice 2001 body with a pale skin tone and tight, non-squeaky joints.

Her cloth torso is in excellent condition--clean and with very few pulls.

I didn't really like Marina's factory makeup, though.  Her eyebrows look ok up close, but from a distance they were too blocky and generic for my taste:

In addition, her eyelashes were a mess...

...and she had a few scuffs and marks on her face:

On closer inspection I also noticed a hard, dark, puckered spot just underneath her neck seam:

But that's pretty much all I found.  I guess her neck joint is slightly stiffer than many of the dolls I've posed, but it's a pretty minor complaint.

Here's a closer look at one turquoise eye:

And here are a few of the marks on her left cheek:

I took all of those initial pictures several months ago, and then Marina sat on a shelf for three months.

Last week, I finally got Marina out of her storage spot in my doll room and brought her to the work table!

Not much had changed during those months of storage, except that her right lower eyelash apparently gave up the fight and fell all of the way off:

I removed the rest of her eyelashes and got a better look at her pretty eyes:

These eyes don't look to me like they're fading, but I've also never seen a My Twinn color quite like this before!

After a light initial cleaning, it was clear that the only real issues with Marina's face were one shiny spot on her left cheek and two orange stains on her chin:

Before I cleaned her head more throughly, I decided to investigate the cause of the hard, dark spot below her neckline:

As soon as I opened up the neck, it became clear what was causing the spot:

Whoa.

The glue intended to join the head to the armature had oozed out all over the front of the doll.  It had dripped around the neck flange and stuck to the cloth body.  The hard spot was caused by a big hunk of glue residue.  This defect must have been on the doll even when she was brand new.

As I started to clean the glue away, I noticed that it was actually adhered to the foam core of the body, too, limiting the movement of the neck joint:

I was able to clean most of this glue away, but there's still a (much softer) spot visible on the front of Marina's torso.  I also freed the foam from the neck joint, but Marina still has a stiffer neck than many dolls I've owned, so I'm not exactly sure what the issue is here.  Again--it's a very minor problem.

Despite all of the glue that was in places I didn't want it, there wasn't enough glue to actually hold the head securely in place.  I could see a lot of space between the neck and the armature, so I decided it would be best to remove the head completely and start from scratch.

Here's Marina with her head removed (and scrubbed really clean!):

I purposefully used Mr. Clean Magic Eraser on her eyebrows so that they'd fade significantly.

I also sanded her left cheek to get rid of the shiny patch:

The orange stains on her chin were stubborn, but after several scrubbings they finally disappeared.

At first, I wasn't really sure how I was going to paint Marina's face.  I don't think fantasy dolls are my specialty, so even the subtle eye makeup of the fairies was a lot for me to handle.

However, for a doll who was already slated to have a green wig, I didn't really see the point in giving her wishy-washy face makeup.

I searched online for "mermaid face paint" and found a human makeup site with a great tip: use a potato bag to stencil a scale pattern around the edges of the face!  Cool, right?  

So, I bought myself a potato bag and fitted it over Marina's head:

I covered her eyes because I originally thought I could use sprayed-on acrylics to make the scales (like an airbrush!), but the spray can I bought (called YouCan) was not precise enough for a doll head and caused too much dripping.

So, I just used my paints in the normal way, starting with a layer of green paint and then covering it with a bit of fish-scale silver:

I thought the ears looked funny with no color on them, so I painted those green and silver, too:

Was that a good idea, Emily?

I love how the sides of Marina's face turned out, but I wasn't thrilled with her forehead:

The scales weren't very distinct along the top of the head, and I'd positioned them so that they'd be almost completely covered by the wig.

After several disastrous attempts to fix the forehead paint, I decided to scrub all of the paint off and start again.

This time I wiped Marina's lips clean, too, because I didn't like how the bright pink lip color clashed with the green scales:

Clean slate.

At this stage I also sprayed a very light coat of Mr. Super Clear on Marina's bare face, mostly just to give the new paint something to grab.

Fortunately, I had half of the potato bag left:

Here we go again!

This is my second attempt:

This was definitely better along the top of the head, although I didn't get any pattern on the neck:

Still, I didn't want to risk my luck by starting over yet again, so I accepted the scales as they were and moved on.

I gave Marina very pale pink lips and some mild blush:

Next, I worked on painting in some new eyebrows.  I started with a mix of bluish-green and light grey:

But this combination was too light for the wig:

So I added in some darker green and darker grey...with a hint of silver:

Then, I was ready to reunite Marina with her body! 

After body and head were reacquainted, I glued the new wig in place and added some black eyelashes.

Unfortunately, I glued the wig way too far back on Marina's head the first time.  I guess the scales threw off my judgement somehow?  Anyway, it looked ridiculous:

I re-seated the wig, and while I had Marina back at the work table, I also added some iridescent medium to her lips and eyelashes.  In addition, I wiped away some of the green paint on her ears.  The fully-green ears looked pretty silly in photographs--especially in forward-facing shots.

Here's how she looked when I was finally done futzing around:

For some reason Marina's back seam came undone when I opened up her neck, so the last thing I had to do was re-sew that seam.  There's a slightly loose patch at the bottom, but I couldn't get this to pull any tighter:

Marina was finally ready to try on her lovely Fairy Tale Blessings mermaid gown!  

I was a little nervous at this stage.  It's wasn't clear to me that the green of the wig and the green of the eyes would coordinate with the greens and blues that Julie and I picked for the dress...but I think the result is good!

Julie knows what she's doing!

The mix of colors is exactly what I had hoped for.  My phone's camera, on the other hand, was flummoxed by all of the green and blue.  The camera tried really hard to make Marina look too yellow or too red.

I adjusted the colors in these pictures a bit, trying to get Marina to look as much like she does in real life as possible:

She's a pale girl surrounded by a lot of green.

The scale pattern on Marina's face is fairly subtle with the wig in place.  I had to pull her hair back a bit at the sides (but not too far back because of that silly pale wig cap!) to show off the scales:

The wig is long and dramatic and I adore it, but like the other Dollmore Sobazu wigs, it's hard to brush and it has the visible wig cap.

Seaweed hair!

This wig also does some slightly strange things at the top.  The center part is nice, but then there's another pseudo-part that runs perpendicular to that, pushing some of the hair down into Marina's face:

That photo, above, is a great representation of the true color of the wig, though.  It's a beautiful and strange mix of turquoise and grey.

But let's talk about the dress Julie made!  

It's clearly a mermaid dress, and yet it covers all the parts of a My Twinn body that I think should be covered:

The outfit is actually a separate skirt and top, which makes dressing and undressing really easy.

There's a beautiful lace panel along the top of the shirt, and some foamy tulle to hide the neck joint:

The skirt has a princess-like v-shape outlined in tulle at the waist, a lace flower accent, and then an explosion of fabric fins at the bottom:

The outfit is also decorated with several little metal starfish that are completely adorable:

Marina's outfit is topped with a shell-encrusted headband that looks really beautiful:

The only problem with this headband is that I suspect Julie had to use strong glue (like E6000) to get the shells to stick firmly, and that stuff smells.  My husband claims he can't smell it at all, but I can.  In fact, I left the headband sitting outside for several weeks and while it's a lot better now, I can still smell it.  So--just a fair warning in case you are sensitive to this type of smell.  I suppose the smell will continue to fade gradually over time.

I did get used to the smell as I was photographing Marina, and the headband certainly looks beautiful on her!  I can't imagine the outfit without it.

This is my favorite picture of Marina:

As much as I love close-up photographs of dolls, I have to say that Marina is a girl who benefits from a full-body shot:

It's the only way to appreciate her full mermaid nature:

While I prefer how Marina looks with her hair pulled back a little bit, I wanted to show off the unencumbered glory of the wig, too:

It's very fun to play with, but don't get fooled into thinking you'll ever tame it completely!

Since the hair frames Marina's face so nicely, I thought this would be a good time to snap her "after" shot for the GIF:

And here's the GIF itself!

She definitely looks more yellow in the after shot, but, again, that's because of some trickery with the green wig and my camera.

With the GIF portrait out of the way, I tried to get creative and pose Marina on her belly--you know, like she'd just crawled out of the ocean:

Um...

I'm not sure how successful this idea was, though.  I think it looks more like her legs were chopped off and she has to pull herself along on the ground with her arms.  Kind of like that horrifying zombie on The Walking Dead.  Shudder.

Sorry, Mina.

I decided to let her sit on the ground in the conventional way, even though it exposes her little bare feet:

Much better, though, right?

I'll probably never make another mermaid doll, but not because this wasn't a lot of fun!  I really loved playing around with a bold new face paint idea, although I'm not sure how accurate it is for a mermaid to have scales on her face (?).  It was also really fun to work with such an unconventional wig and try to match the mix of colors in Marina's eyebrows to that wig.

But Marina was a special case.  The fateful coincidence of her beautiful eyes and that green wig coming into the same room at the same time were what set her on the path to becoming a mermaid, and I can't replicate that magic.  Also, I'm reaching the end of my foray into fantasy dolls as a whole.  After the last two fairies are complete, I'll shift back to painting regular girls until I've depleted my stock of dolls.  That doesn't mean that I don't have some fun and beautiful things in store, though!

For now, here's a summary of the work that was done on Marina:

-her neck seam was opened and old glue was cleaned away from her armature and body

-her head was removed and thoroughly cleaned using Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

-a shiny area on her left cheek was sanded down

-her face paint was completely stripped away using acetone

-her bare face was sprayed with a light layer of Mr. Super Clear sealant

-a scale pattern was painted around her hairline using acrylic paints and a potato bag

-her lips, blush, and eyebrows were re-painted

-her lips were tinted with iridescent acrylic medium

-she was given new eyelashes which were subtly tinted with iridescent acrylic medium

-she was given a new Dollmore Selena Sobazu wig in dark green

-her head was re-glued to her armature using professional strength hot glue and her back seam was re-sewn

-she was dressed in a custom mermaid outfit from Fairy Tale Blessings, including top, skirt, and headband (no shoes)

Marina's biggest flaws are that her neck movement is a little stiff (not sure why), she still has a spot on her torso where the old glue was stuck, her headband has an E6000-type glue smell, the hair on the front of her wig falls a little bit strangely, her wig cap is visible (that's just the way these wigs are), and she has the random collection of minor shiny spots and small scuffs that these old dolls tend to have.

Marina is nothing if not unique, and I hope she brings a smile to somebody's face or a fantasy dream into somebody's heart.  Marina has sold.  Thank you!

I'll end by re-posting my favorite picture of this strange and lovely sea siren: