Scary Doll How-To

Here's a Scary Doll how-to, to make the doll I showed in my Halloween Party post on Saturday. I got the idea from WiseCraft ,but their starting dolls were fashion dolls (ie Barbies), our Goodwill was fresh-outta-Barbies so we snagged this curly haired doll whose hair was a little out of hand to start with.

The first step is to spray-paint the doll with a matte white spray paint. Front and back, hair included. Do a couple of light coats. Outside of course! My son Alex helped me out with spraying so I could take an action shot. I figured if I tried to do both I'd end up spraying either myself or my camera lens somehow.

A little paint ended up on my camera body anyways as I was turning the freshly painted doll over and then picked up my camera. sigh.

We chose not to spray paint her clothing but to instead "distress" it.

She was scary looking enough already for me at this point.
But Alex thought we needed one more step, involving the application of shall we say, excess and concentrated heat.

Here she is after being ever-so-slightly singed. I think this made her even creepier, more worn out and old-looking, kind of ratty and dirty and decrepit. And by the way if you do this burning step, do it outside (very stinky since all the materials are synthetics), and have a source of dousing water at the ready.

I think she's pretty scary looking. In the original instructions they were suggesting going over the faces with black Sharpies to make more zombie looking faces, but I like this ghostly apparition vibe.

Turns out that certain teenagers are more creeped out than you would imagine by this little ol' doll, which is why I keep putting her in unexpected places. Hey, I've got to keep them on their toes somehow. And get back for all those times they put the plastic scorpion in my shoes (Rotten Little Monsters!).