Anyway, here's what little photos I took, and some things I learnt when sanding the body.
Here he's unstrung
And you can see how dirty he is. This was probably the more obviously dirty one, but generally he was dusty in the joints. I got the body secondhand and this is the first time I saw the insides, and damn, he could use some cleaning. Haha.
You can see Jack's body is really yellow, compared to his head (which by the way, has already been colour matched to Volks NS by his previous owner, so it's not the original pinkish Dollmore resin colour). For a long time I didn't really bother about how yellow his body is relative to his face, figuring that since his head is colour matched anyway...but recently I thought I might as well give him a sand since the body itself is pretty old. And give myself something to do in the meantime. So, yes, moving on...
Putting his parts in a tub to wash. I also used a damp magic sponge to scrub him.
Parts in water.
Just after washing. He was slightly cleaner, haha, which is good. But I wanted to sand him to see if he could be lighter, so I continued. If not I could have just waited for him to dry and string him back up.
I only used 2 types of sandpaper. I don't know what grade they are, but one was much finer, and I had another which was coarser, but I stopped using that coarse one halfway, which I'll explain later. My initial idea was to do wet sanding, since that was how I modified my Ryu's nose. I had a N95 dustmask on though, because it's always good to wear a mask when sanding resin.
Started with his upper toros. Since I figured I want the neck to be much lighter than it currently is, I wanted to quickly see results (haha). And I also decided to do something about his button nipples while I was at it, since I never did modify them even though I wanted to when I just got this body. The left one (right of photo) is modified, and the right one isn't. It's not terribly obvious, at least, not when I look at these photos, but I think it looks much better in real life. I can't do it incredibly well, so there is that. (Not like the delf body, or the Granado Nuevo body. They have such nicely sculpted nipples, haha)
So after the nipple modification, I went at the torso piece with the fine sandpaper. Just did wet sanding. Which isn't a good idea, because I learnt that you can't really see the difference in colour between the sanded parts and the non-sanded parts when the resin is wet. I only realised that later when doing the arms.
But anyway, when I've not to realise that, I thought I wasn't reaching the lighter parts of the resin, so I decided to switch to the coarser grade sandpaper, and then the finer one after a once over with the coarser one. I'm still not sure what's the best way to sand with the coarse sandpaper, since it seem to still leave marks (I only noticed after the piece dried), but the finer one works best when I sanded in circular motions. Straight motions tend to gouge...as did erratic ones. Haha. I think I might have done that with the coarse sandpaper cos I was getting impatient.
Anyway, after the initial torso piece, I started to realise that I actually did sand the topmost yellower layer off with the fine sandpaper, but I didn't see it when the resin was wet. So I decided to do dry sanding for all the pieces after that.
Lesson of the day: don't experiment with a big piece like the torso. Do something simpler like the limbs (maybe the legs, since it's not that noticeable compared to the arms) because they have less grooves and are much much easier to sand. And the fine sandpaper works fine to take off the topmost layer. I realise the sanded parts aren't really that much lighter, but I didn't want to work at taking off too much so I left it as that. In the photo below you can see the sanded upper torso and sanded both arms, with the lower torso unsanded.
The arms weren't sanded as much as the upper torso, which you can see is just a tad lighter in some places, but the arms were much more even. Haha. Because I didn't use the coarser sandpaper, and did sanding dry.
In between I sanded the torso pieces, the hands and the upper legs. The photo below was right after the last sanding, which was for the lower legs and feet. They're in the water because I use the tub of water to wash off the resin dust from sanding.
The hands and feet are the most troublesome to sand, because of the grooves, and I didn't sand the whole hand evenly, to be honest. I left the fingers a bit less sanded compared to the upper part of the hand, since it needed to match the arm, but the fingers can kind of fade out (and since they were more tedious to sand as well.).
Ah yea, and you can see the many pieces of sandpaper I ended up with each time I sand. Those were jsut for the 4 pieces in the tub. I cut the sandpaper in smaller pieces to use since I found that it works easier. Also, side story, I used to think one used the WHOLE piece of sandpaper at once. Haha. Such strange ideas. Anyway, I found out from my dad at some point that you can cut it up to use. But I've not found if there's a better way to cut the sandpaper to make them easier to use to sand the hands. >_<
Yeah, and that's basically what I did to sand the whole of Jack's body. I don't have a photo but he still doesn't match his body (Hahaha, after sanding, but ah well), but it was something to do, I guess. I've been feeling rather inactive with my dolls, and besides giving them faceups, I don't really do much with them. So I thought this would be a good project.
But alas, I'm still not really doing much with them, haha. I think I like the initial genesis of the character/doll the most, and once that's done, I don't have as much drive to keep doing things with the dolls. I still play with them and buy them clothes and stuff, but I don't take photos that much, and it's just quite different from how I used to approach this hobby when I first got into it. Anyway, that's a longer post for another time, perhaps.
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