Total makeover for a composition doll

This is 'Elizabeth'.

She is a family doll who has arrived for restoration.

She has many issues!

There is no useable paint left on her. One foot is broken off. Happily the foot piece was saved.

A close up of her surface.

Someone tried to spruce her up at some point with painted on features/hair and what looks to be a coat of varnish?

Elizabeth may have started life with a wig?

One clue is finding a staple under the thick black DIY hair paint.

And another clue is remnants of glue with a cloth weave imprint.

Dolls of this era were made and sold with molded painted hair as a basic model. The factory made pricier upgraded models by plunking a wig over the molded/painted hair and putting on fancier clothes.

To get Elizabeth repainted successfully, all her surfaces need to have the cracked and blistering stuff removed. You need a stable base to work up from. 

So here is one arm untouched and the other arm taken down to a stable base. The base in Elizabeth's case is her basic composition layer.

In the factory, this base of composition would have been dipped into a glue-like compound that was meant to smooth things out for paint. This compound was quite prone to cracking and blistering over the years.

You can see some big chunks of this layer at the top of this picture that were peeling off of the underlying composition.

This is progress.....really!

These are Elizabeth's eyes.

They are actually in pretty good shape. I am just going to clean them and fill in a sparse area of her eyelashes.

The eye construction is a less common sort. The visible parts are celluloid domes that are glued onto wood spheres to make eyeballs.

The other doodad in the picture is an expansion bar which holds the eye mechanism inside the head.

This is Elizabeth getting some fillers applied and fingers rebuilt.

Finally the many layers of filler/primer are done and she can head to the paint booth.

Here is Elizabeth finishing her journey through the painting process.

This is my high-tech drying rack :-D

After painting is done, her eyes get re-installed.

This is how they look inside the head.

And then, she gets reassembled.

She owns a lovely christening dress.

It is perfect for her!