Painting doll faces in Acrylic paint

Typically, for doll faces, Mom always used something called "Tri-Chem", embroidery or even permanent markers with exceptionally fine tips. While those are all good ways of making faces (sort of a bad joke there), my method requires a steady hand and a lot of patience for paints that can be highly uncooperative. The tri-chem, markers and even embroidery are all very much valid methods of doll face making, but trichem is expensive, embroidery time consuming and could very easily leave huge holes in the fabric and permanent markers aren't near as permanent as they used to be for some brands. So what's left? Paint. As I walk you through my little process of doll face making, you'll see a series of photos to guide you. The whole point is guiding you through what I do and use. This doesn't mean you have to copy exactly what I do! The one exception is to follow the directions on the fabric medium bottle!

I use little artist cups to fix the paints because you have to mix the fabric medium with the paint, and on a palette, that can get messy. You don't have to do this, but it does help prevent the waste of good paint. Since I make small dolls, I use a small brush - usually a 0 or 00. Sometimes smaller, depending on how detailed I want to be. The most important piece for making the paint stay on the fabric is fabric medium. Not intending to sound like an ad for Americana paints, but that's the only brand I've found that has it. Acrylics can dry incredibly fast - especially if the room you're working in is warm.

One suggestion would be to use pencil to draw the face on the doll as a guide. I usually just freehand it, but for this little tutorial, I'll draw it anyway. You'll probably notice I'm using those big, expressive, over-cute anime eyes. You don't have to do that, they can be realistic, I've just found the anime eyes to be easy to paint on small faces.

Hopefully, everything's thoroughly explained here in the text of the hub, but as always, I'm happy to answer questions and encourage comments of the constructive nature.