Antebellum Ghost: A Monstrous Journey

 

I have three thrifted dolls with the "Nicki" face sculpt.  Here are Taneisha and Denise, above.

Since I already had two characters with the same face, I chose my third Nicki to be the Woman in White, a ghost out to get revenge on the living.  I didn't want her to have the open-lip smile, however, so my first step was to follow a tutorial by Broken Dolly TV on YouTube.  After cutting out the doll's teeth with a box cutter/craft knife and super-gluing her lips together, I cut off the majority of her hair to prepare for re-rooting.

Here she is with her hair and face-up removed, above.  I wanted to paint the entire doll white, but for starters, I painted her scalp so I could start re-rooting.  The white residue at the corners of her mouth is super glue from closing her lips. It turns out I am a messy super-gluer.  The pink is her factory lip color that I didn't get totally cleaned up.  (I have gotten better at removing face paint since making this doll a couple of years ago.)

Believe it or not, I used polyfill stuffing, the material used to fill pillows and plush animals.  I pulled it and rolled it between my palms to make tubes; a bit like wool roving, only synthetic.  I threaded each tube onto a blunt tapestry needle, then jabbed it into one of the holes in the doll's scalp.  I concentrated the new hair around the face, then braided it and arranged it to look like cornrows.  Ghostly white cornrows, that is.

I painted the doll's face and body with white acrylic.  As you can see, I had to touch up her hairline, and the paint got on the hair...it's a mess.  Every doll is a learning experience.

Her white dress is from a Mary Poppins Barbie, and was thrifted.  I removed the red waist cincher and red bows.  Because the dress material is sheer enough to show the doll's legs, I made her a pair of bloomers for underneath.  Because she's the ghost of an enslaved person, I left her barefoot.  The dress style is too modern to be accurate to the antebellum time period, but eh, close enough!  It's a doll, not an historical re-enactor.

A note about her spectral paint job:  the acrylic had to be applied in thin coats to keep it from looking thick, gloppy, and clumpy.  It turned out looking clumpy anyway, so I wasn't really happy with it.  I decided to try a different technique with future ghost dolls.

After giving her monochrome grey eyes, eyebrows, and lips, the Woman in White was ready to make her story debut in Season 3, Episode 1

Here's a close-up of the ghost's face, above, with Missouri Mosely.  Because I lack the skill to re-paint doll eyes, I found a photograph of a Barbie online and printed it out in black & white.  I cut out the eyes and glued them on the face.  I painted the eyebrows and mouth with gray acrylic paint.