A Schoenhut carved hair girl

This girl is Schoenhut's model 105. She has had previous work done and has arrived to improve her appearance. On first glance she has some issues of her left face and has a squinty eye.

She has areas of missing paint throughout her hair.

How many layers of paint are on this doll?

There seems to be multiple layers.

How far down is her original paint?

Painting over surfaces like this will not be successful so I like to remove the layers until I find original paint if there is any left. 

I start by taking off the top most layer of repaint and some crumbling filler. this shows she has lost some of the definition of her left eye and there are  irregularities in the wood under the eye.

Iam also finding she has had 2 thick layers of gesso applied. maybe she was one of the dolls that got sent back to the factory to be repainted?

She has wood damage around and under her left eye.

The gesso layers on the back of her head were quite damaged so they all came off. This does reveal lovely hair contours.

The right side of her face is stable and may be original so the excavation stops here.

Now to repair the wood and countours on the left and get her painted.

First she gets some wood hardener applied and then some epoxy to fix the left eye contours that have been lost.

A bit of paint helps to identify contours that need tweaking. Here I see her left eye looks a bit droopy and her left lower lid doesn't look defined enough. I don't want to recarve her whole eye area as I am just fixing the original carving. I might be able to adjust the epoxied areas and the paint.

A bit later she has had some paint applied.

And then she is done!

 

A Schoenhut boy

 

This little guy has come to get his dings repaired.

He has dings on his face that have been given a coating of something. Probably a PVA glue. It needs to get removed to fill the defects.

He has more dings on the back of his head.

On first glance, his hair looks original.

But....

.....you can see paint speckles all over. That is not a factory hair paint. That is a newer airbrush job. 

You can even see overspray paint speckles on the body.

Sure enough, the dark hair paint wipes off easily with acetone. Factory paint does not remove so easily.

A bit more work with acetone shows that this doll has had some repair work done before. The yellowish area is filler. His current dings were caused by the filler failing. This filler needs to be all removed.

Out comes the filler.

In goes some new filler and then some paint.

His face dings get filled too. Here he is starting to get the filled spots painted to blend in.

Then he gets his facial features touched up and some new hair.

A 'Dolly faced' Schoenhut

 This is Schoenhut's model #307. It is their earliest 'Dolly faced' doll. She has arrived to refine her previous overpaints.

Under her wig is evidence of an earlier thick repaint. That dark brown hair was presumably done by a previous owner to make the doll look like a boy?

Removing the top layer shows more details of that hairdo.

Her owner and I agree to leave this layer untouched at the top of her head as a testament to her history. It will be hidden under a wig.

As the repainted layers get removed I find out not much is left of her original paint. Also, she had been given bright red cheeks that has stained into the wood.

Those eyes still have some repaint on them that needs removing.

There is some original paint at the sides of her head so at least I can colour match her skin tone to it.

After some contour corrections and multiple rounds of paint/smoothing, she is starting to get some features.

As there was almost no original eye paint left, her owner has reqested she get brown eyes. So here she is starting a fresh set of eyes.

And her final look.