Air Dry Clay Tutorials: Creating an Art Doll, Olga style, Pt. 4 of 7: Painting

Stage 3 finished!

In this multi-part art doll demonstration, Olga Egupets shows us her techniques from start to finish, demonstrating armatures, modeling faces, body parts and props, painting, wigging and creating clothing. When making her dolls, Olga uses a variety of materials, including air dry clays such as Creative Paperclay, LaDoll, Plastiform, Efaplast etc.

This is Part 4 of 7. Please go here for Parts 1 and 2. Part 3 is here In the first 3 steps, Olga created her armature and body form, coated it with a layer of papier mache to give it bulk and gave it a smooth finish with a brushed-on top coat (finished doll at this stage is shown above). She also finished modeling the face, hands and feet using LaDoll clay.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The arms are placed in position to work on them but are NOT glued in place. It is much easier to dress doll and do the finishing touches if arms can be removed. Glue in place AFTER dressing.

Now, in Part 4, with all parts of the doll cured, sanded smooth and ready for finishing, she demonstrates her painting techniques using artist quality acrylic paints, powders made from shaving pastels and pastel pencils. Olga also creates a stool for the doll to sit on out of heavy wire (some recycled remnants) and cardboard. Finishing of stool comes later.

These videos are in Russian but are easy to follow without the narration. A "captions" feature is available for each video for those that don't speak Russian. If you want to view the captions, mute the sound and then click on (CC) for "Captions". First, click OK for Russian to get it started and then select TRANSLATE, scroll to select your language. The captions are helpful but, like all computerized translations, expect to find a number of errors.

Recapping the techniques Olga used for painting include:

Mixing a flesh tone with acrylic paints and covering entire body with a smooth coat of same color.
While the base of fleshtone dries, she selects her colors and uses a razor blade to shave some powder off of pastel chalks. She mixes a powder of pink with light beige tones to get the soft pinky-flesh she wants to brush a glow all over the face, on hands, knees, etc. Adding a slightly stronger tone for ears, end of nose, etc. A contrast with wrinkles and folds is desired.
Olga uses pastel pencils for fine line accents around eyes and eyebrows because they are easier to control than paintbrush.
Eyes are hand-painted and rouge added to cheeks with sponge.
After everything has air-dried, she coats entire doll with a matte spray varnish for protection.