Custom portrait baby WIP

Did I ever mention how very much I love doing portrait babies? I've not done one for a customer in a long while (I've done some for myself) so I am delighted to have this custom portrait of Baby Laura!

Here is the real Baby Laura who is now 60 years old:

I searched hundreds of sculpts and came up with this Rieke kit by Linde Scherer.
The vinyl was a dark brown/orange and I sure was worried about getting it neutralized. Very worried! I didn't want to ruin this baby and neutralizing is not my greatest gift.

With some advice from my good friend Angie of Lil Dumplins, I am quite pleased with the neutralizing layers! I've done just a little bit of detail work on her as well:

In the process of painting, I found two tiny teeth in her gums! This is perfect as the real baby picture has teeth.

What a sweet heart!

I have coated this baby with Genesis Matte Varnish and am using LDC paints on her.

Angie suggested that I use a couple of layers of blue to start but the blue just made the vinyl darker. I tried cyan but again, it just accentuated the darkness of the vinyl. Even the color wheel says to use blue to green blue but it simply did not work. The baby in the picture is fair skinned so it was important to lighten the vinyl, not darken it.

I settled on mint green created with green and white. I applied one layer with a mop brush, followed up by a wedge and then thinned the paint and added a little more white to a lighter shade and did another layer in the same manner.

The next layer was a mixture of light flesh, yellow and white. Using a sponge cloth, I applied two layers of this, pouncing each layer with a wedge.

One thing I always forget is that on these brown/orange kits, I can't use my standard purple on the nail beds. Cyan works wonderful for prepping the nail beds. I then used a light blush color of rose and red to color the nail.

When I do the creases, I won't use my standard purply/red color~I will use shades of red so that I don't bring back that orange.

I am excited to get to work on this precious one today!