Back in July (!!!! HOW WAS THIS MONTHS AGO) I did the first post for turning a Peri Perl Serpentine doll into a centaur. In this I chopped the head off a horse, and the tail off the doll, stuck them together.
Now for the conclusion!
The original doll I bought second hand looked like this:
I did a bunch more work on the body sculpt, using Das air dry clay. I built up legs, back ridges, and made the bit where the bodies meet a bit nicer. It came out a bit rough and sludgey, but I can work with that.
I underpainted the body black, then overpainted in shades of grey/white with a little warmth added by browns. I decided, like a siamese cat, the points should be darker, Like most art and craft I do, I made it up as I went along. I had no idea what this was going to look like. It’s always a mystery and and a bunch of serendipitous decisions. (If it works, if it doesn’t work, it’s a bunch of mistakes!)
I had a bunch of black and white fake fur left over from the furby. So laid out tufts on it on tacky glue, let that dry until I had tufts, which i glued all over the fetlocks. I was only going to go with black but the edges were too harsh so I snipped white fur and glued it directly to the joints. It looks great and hid the harsher black fur joins. I added white tufts on the body where I thought it looked good, too.
I over painted the faces in white and did the face-ups using the usual method of layering Mr Superclear with layers of watercolour pencil and brushing on pastel. This is the third faceup these dolls had, I kept being annoyed and angry with what I got and redid them, but I finally got to this point where they resolved into massively pretty and it just worked. I made them slightly different to each other in eye colour but they are clearly related. I gave them eyelashes from the black fur fabric, too. And gave the eyes and lips a coat of gloss, it brings them to life.
The tail and the hair of the doll i decided to unravel a bunch of yarn I had in various colours, mix it up, make curly wefts. Lots of doll makers brush out the yarn after this step so it looks like hair, I’ve never done this. I will try it at some point in the future, maybe.
Also I laid in embroidery thread and yarns of different colour, to make it look nice. My life was spent unravelling yarn for a bit, there. I laid it out into wefts and glued it, when it was dry I glued it in sections into the heads. I originally meant to give them the same hair but I ran out of the first lot of wool/fibre and had to make up a second batch with slightly different colours – really happy that happened now. It would have been really boring for them to have the same hair colour! The join around the top of the head was harsh so I glued in some fetlock fibres to soften it.
Finally it was done. I reunited the heads with the necks and voila! She’s pretty glorious. I am honestly impressed she turned out so well. The hair is a bit heavy, I should probably trim it, but I also am kind of loving the abundance.
I think the lesson I learned doing this custom is that if you have an already freaky doll, it’s harder to find something good to do with it; your options are immediately limited! But if you persevere you get there in the end!
