One smashed head.

 

Here is the picture I was sent.

Please can you fix this doll?

I said I would try. 

The body, clothes and a bag of head bits arrved.

Here are the head bits. A few other random bits were in the bag too.

This head was once a standard fired bisque head that had been painted over in acrylic paint.....maybe a previous repair?

Here I have cleaned the repaint off of the bit with the nose.

Bisque repairs are not my thing but I can only improve upon a head in this condition.....I hope!

After cleaning every single bit I get them pieced back together.

But, there are lots of chips and a large section at the top of the head is missing.

So, I get busy rebuilding with epoxy putty and filling with epoxy paste.

She doesn't look too pretty yet!

After many more rounds of smoothing and puttying, she is getting to look less damaged.

Then, finally, she looks like an intact doll.

A massive skull defect!

 

This doll has arrived for repairs.

She doesn't look too bad from this angle.

That is a lovely factory original dress she is wearing.

Her big problem is that a large chunk of her head is missing.

Her arms are peeling a bit.

The cloth above each arm has issues.

How do you close a massive skull defect like this?

I make a base from automotive repair mesh and epoxy it into place. Then I start rebuilding on top of the mesh.

Here we see the metal mesh installed in the head.. The grey is the epoxy paste that I used to glue it into the head. The beige is another type of epoxy paste that I am using like a spackle to cover the mesh.

I extract her voicebox from her torso to see if I can get it working again.

Her body has the typical stuffing of the era. That is excelsior or woodwool.

This is the usual problem.....the bellows fabric has dried out and is full of holes.

I remove the arms to make it easier to fill and paint them.

Here the head has had quite a bit of filling. the grey primer helps identify areas that need more sanding or filling.

After the contours meet my approval she gets painted. She now looks like this: