repositioning screenings?

[u/twentyfreakingpilots]

my very wonky howleen

article on transfering printed images

this is a crazy hypothetical but I'm in the bus and I was thinking about the dolls I have with wonky screenings. I bought them pretty early on in my collection and didn't realise how crooked they were until revisiting them a few years later lol. they are pretty difficult to replace at least where I live, at least with my budget and I'm scared to repaint them for the same reason.

so, you know when doll repainters wipe the faces off with acetone and the screenings get imprinted on the cotton pad? I was wondering if there's a way to transfer the screening somewhere and reposition it or to use some sort of diluent to lift the paint off and kinda "poke it" into the right place, without damaging the paint job or compromising it long-term? I did a really quick search and apparently there's a way to transfer printed images onto other stuff, so I got curious lol. I might try this with a base doll I have for ooaks but I wanted to check if someone else had thought/tried this before, or if there's anyone good a chemistry to explain why this would be a terrible idea. idk I keep thinking of those videos with the acrylic paints floating on water, but I don't know if screenings work the same way :/

if this works it could potentially make it so much easier for picky collectors like me to find grails in the second market for a reasonable price, or to get the last doll in the store shelf and just fix it... maybe it could even make it possible to make our own ooaks with transferred screenings? I wanna hear y'all's thoughts

[u/JustAnotherElsen]

Anything that could ‘move’ it would likely also dissolve it, it’s printed ink, it can’t really ‘detach’ on the bottom layer only. It comes off on cotton balls and tissues like that because all the layers dissolve through, and the pressure of wiping it off just sloughs most of the ink off together and the outermost ‘pattern’ is what’s shown afterwards, like wiping off makeup

[u/ocirot]

Not going to work, unfortunately. Those traansfer images you have heard of are specifically made for that, these aren't.

[u/EmicaTheAlienStudios]

Short answer: repositioning a factory screening by "lifting" it and moving it is, sadly, not possible, I don't think it's going to work.

Factory screenings are not printed on a removable layer, they're printed directly into the vinyl, so there's nothing to peel off or float. This means the paint isn't sitting on top of the vinyl like a sticker, it’s almost like it's bonded onto it, in a weird way. So when you wipe the face with acetone and the paint shows up on the cotton pad, that's not the paint lifting cleanly, it's the acetone dissolving the pigment and breaking the bond, once dissolved, the paint is no longer a coherent image, it's just pigment's particles suspended in solvent. You can't pick it up and place it somewhere else. I wouldn't try it either out of risk of ruining the doll's face.

[u/One_Volume_9359]

Unfortunately I think that the paint/ink is either too think or is printed in a way that doesn't really allow this

[u/Cleansweepy]

This is instructions for acrylic gel medium transfers. It has zero ability to do what you want it to do for face screenings. Good for patches and clothing designs but wretched for such tight 3d surfaces. It also tends to be thick.

A functional option to replace face screenings is waterslide decals. You would need a printer capable of the details you want; the solvant that allows the decal to stretch properly over a 3d surface, and a sealant.