Gyaru Dolls keychains

Working on this project was really interesting overall. To start, this project presented numerous setbacks for me, affecting both my timeline and management. One of the most significant setbacks I experienced was that the clay was sent to the wrong address, so I had to arrange for it to be redelivered to my house. My 3D print plan went out the window because my computer had run out of space to use the software I was planning to use. Since it was an obscure type of clay, the redelivery took much longer. I tried using regular polymer clay, but it was too hard and didn’t allow for room to sew the head to the body. Because of these setbacks, I became very busy with other classes, and I was eventually thrown into a frenzy where I had an incredible amount of work piled up, making it hard to work on the project between my free time.. In my initial sketch, I also had a much more detailed doll and plush. My initial idea to create gyaru-inspired plushes hasn’t disappeared; however, as of now, I have only managed to finish 2 out of 4. Instead of movable dolls, they became more like character keychains or charms, which I am happier about because I can use them to decorate my bags, making them much more functional for my daily life compared to my previous plan of making the dolls about 5 inches tall with movable body parts like arms, legs, and heads, similar to a doll I created last semester. I thought I would be able to sew the parts outside of the head with a sewing machine, but due to that change in size and design, I ended up having to create the dolls fully by hand, which also took much longer than I expected. It was, however, a nice way to practice my handsewing again because my preferred method of sewing had changed since I received that sewing machine as a present last semester. Another sort of setback that I had was making the actual face plates. While I finished making all four face plates, I realized the two main face plates for the dolls I managed to finish had one magnet placed opposite each other, making those plates not able to be moved and switched around. Due to this, I really considered cutting up the fabric placed on the head and fixing it, but I decided maybe this was some sort of blessing in disguise, by making me able to choose which specific faces would fit well with those styles. Besides the magnet situation, another thing that I struggled with a little was painting the faces. I thought that using acrylic paint would look best. Still, when I tested it out, it didn’t give the effect I wanted it to give, so I tried other things like pastels, watercolor pencils, markers, and then by chance, I really lucked out. I had found my gel polishes, which actually worked really well in not only achieving the brightness and shade of color I wanted but also having that disparity in matte and glossy for the facial details.