Hey folks! A while ago I did my first Barbie repaint, so I've decided to talk about it.

I got into doll repainting/restoring after checking out a bunch of cool Barbies and BJDs I saw on Deviantart and decided I wanted to do one too. I actually purchased a Volks BJD once I learned there was a distributor in the US, making the price a lot lower than trying to go on Ebay or some other site. Cheaper doesn't mean cheap, so I decided before trying out on a 17 dollar doll, I'd work first on a 50 cent goodwill Barbie.

So for my first try I decided to Yuna from Final Fantasy X.

Follow up:

Why Yuna? I like her as a character and her outfit would be relatively easy to reproduce compared to a lot of other Final Fantasy characters, and I had all the materials to make her--something I don't always take into account when I start a project

First I got an old Barbie.

This one wasn't in the greatest shape, which is part of the reason I used her. I tend to be hyper anal and I don't like screwing up things in good condition, she was sorta chewed up so I didn't feel so bad about what I did next.

I washed her in dishsoap, lopped off her hair and very carefully pulled off her head. After that I took tweezers and yanked out the hair from the inside of the head and stripped all the paint off of her face.

Creepy looking, no?

This is how she ended up looking. Really bad, huh? It turns out I made a few mistakes. First, I had a really lousy paintbrush that was too big, so the lines are really out of control. Second mistake I made was to use straight black paint--so she ended up looking like a drag queen. My mom thought she was funny looking, so I gave the doll to her and started over again.

Next blog: the finished Yuna