Creating your own blinking doll eyes for American Girl and other 18" dolls is so much fun! Here's a quick tutorial to get you started with our exclusive Paint Your Own blank blinking doll eyes.
One of the BEST parts of our blank irises with black inset Perfect Pupils™ is that you don't have to worry about painting the pupils! Getting the pupils to be evenly sized, rounded and centered is typically the hardest part of painting blank doll eyes. With our black inset Perfect Pupils™, you can skip that part completely and get right on to painting the iris color!
If you've opted for transparent paintable Perfect Pupils™, those are really easy to work with also. Simply take an eyedropper and squeeze a teeny dot of paint into the pupil cavity, or use a toothpick to dot and swirl a little bit of paint inside the hollow pupil. The pupil cavities make it so much easier to get even, centered pupils. Allow the paint to dry completely before proceeding onward to paint the iris color.
To paint the back of the irises, the process is really quite simple. All you need to do is, well, paint the back of the irises. But here are a few more tips to help refine your technique:
- REALLY IMPORTANT: Make sure your design is very, very thinly painted on. If it's not ultra thin, the overall thickness of the iris may prevent it from fitting into the base eye properly or prevent the eye from opening/closing.
- Use acrylic paint. Any brand is fine, more expensive ones will have better flow which can be useful if you're trying to achieve teeny-tiny details.
- Thin the paint slightly with water, and/or use an acrylic flow medium. You'll want somewhat thin paint so you can glide on ultra thin, smooth layers rather than caking it on.
- Allow the paint to dry to the touch between layers.
- You can use tweezers to brace the iris so you can paint hands-free. It holds the iris still and you can flip the tweezers over to check your progress on the front of the iris.
- To add depth to the color, try using some metallic paint for a pearl effect. You can also get really creative by using glitter (powder, regular, chunky or glitter shapes), nail art decals, and other small thinner-than-paper embellishments. The eyes look so neat with a 3D effect if you layer paint and sparkles!
- After it's dry, use your fingernail to scrape any paint off the edges of the iris. If you got paint or smudges on the front of the iris, we'll remove those after the next step.
- Press the irises into the base eyes, using a tiny drop of glue (super glue works well).
- After you've inserted the irises, you can polish the front of them with a Q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol. This will remove any paint or finger smudges. Avoid getting any on the eyelid or eyelashes because it will remove paint/glue.
- When you're finished, post your creations in our VIP group and hashtag on Instagram with #infinitydolleyes to share!
