Tuesday, March 18, 2008

The Eyes have it - Or maybe not

So I don't know if many of you check out OOAK dolls on eBay, but some artist make their own eyes for their dolls. I was experimenting this weekend to see if I could make some for my dolls. Now with that said the artists on eBay make very small eyes, around 2mm and I don't work at that small of a scale so maybe part of the trouble that I had was because I was making bigger eyes. Either way here are some pictures and explanation of how I tried to make eyes. I think I will try again... I'm sure I can figure this out.
Here I have made the eyeball with a tool that I bought a long time ago from Pat Moultin. I have used Fimo translucent clay. It has a better white color then the other translucent polymer clays.
This is a picture of all the eyes that I copied from the Internet. It is time consuming to size them to the size you need, and photo shop out any white from the flash when they took pictures of the eyes.
OK... now I have cut out the irises of the eyes and centered them on the Fimo circles. Then I put a small amount of Fimo liquid deko gel on top of the paper iris. Bake it according to the instruction on the Deko gel bottle.
Well as you can see it was not a success. Hmmm I think the oven was too hot, or maybe I need to add a bit of white fimo to the translucent so that it doesn't yellow.
Bad picture, but I tried one more time. I added a bit of white and also turned down the oven a few degrees. These are 10mm eyes and I think they look OK. I still need to experiment a bit with this, I'm not totally happy with them just yet. One last detail to get the Fimo Deko Gel to be completely clear... you need to take a heat gun and blast the eyes for just a few seconds, and they get wonderfully clear like glass eyes.
So there you have it... my first attempt and making doll eyes. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

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