BA Art and Design Week 7 Brief 1 - Multiples

First Holiday!

A week off from college was the perfect time for me to get messy and experiment in customizing an entire doll body.

I want to:

1. Paint over the whole body for different skin colour
2. Paint and style hair
3. Make an outfit out of paper
4. Add a bit of bling, detail to the dress; beads and ribbons etc.

The majority of dolls I used for this project, were dolls of the same make, face and body (with the exception of different outfits and hair colour; as seen below)



When I laid this all out, I laughed because I felt a bit like Dexter.

 

 

I found the hair to be the most difficult part, luckily the dolls are cheap and I could detach her limbs and head which helped. I ended up putting the head on a pike for styling the hair; I used acrylic paint because I wanted to make sure it stuck and was brightly coloured. A downfall of the doll being cheap, was that there wasn't much hair on the dolls and it was hard to style, and or course I had to hold the hair in the style I wanted until it dried to a certain point.

 

For the twirls on the side of her head, I had to cut off longer bits of hair the doll didn't need and glue them to the side of her head separately.

 

 

 One thing I hadn't considered was that I would get red paint all over the dolls face as I painted her hair and that it would be hard to remove when dried. So when I painted white over her face, it came out quite pink, it took quite a few layers to finally clear the worst away, but I was fine with the pink hues, because I thought it looked sweet.

I thought this photo was interesting, I only took it to record how I made the doll, but I realised that the red paint on the mat and the fact that the body was headless, made the image look like a crime scene.

 

I liked the idea of creating scenes/photos that showed some kind of dark back story surrounding the doll.

I was pleased with how this doll came out and even though it took a few days, I believed that now that I had a good idea of what I was doing with the doll customizing and that next time I would be much faster.

 

 

 

 

 I started the next doll almost straightaway because I was excited.

With this next one, I started making it with the idea of being some kind of glamorous Victorian rich woman 

 

I actually sewed through a ribbons for the fold effect and I sewed all the flowers and the bow to the ribbon for her hat (I was proud of it too!), which was probably the longest process of this doll.

 

Same process as the previous doll, with the exception of the hair which was not as difficult to do this time round.

While I was taking photos, I took this one by accident, and when I saw it I realised it was really sinister looking and I thought that maybe I could actually use this in some other way. What if I could create an illustration of sorts, based on photos which portray the doll's hidden darkness?

So I was really getting into the customising process and this doll remains one of my favourites.

 

(edit: actually, now I remember, THIS, was the hardest part of this doll! That's a cotton bud parasol and its fabulous!)