Zoe in Jeans

Today's doll was all made pretty much from scratch... hair, clothes, shoes, and of course the glasses. I did start with the body from the Zoe #2 die/stamp set but it took some tweaking once I found the outfit I wanted to put on her.

Every piece, including the hair was hand drawn using a light box to make each part fit.  After I got her all put together I noticed her legs looked all wrong... the bottoms looked way too fat for the thighs and hips, something you don't notice with dresses...so, I had to trim things down.

Looking Through Rose Colored Glasses

.

I wanted to hurry and get today's doll done so that I could test out an idea....  Glasses.  I saw a doll on Pinterest with glasses and I WANTED them!   No clue where she got them sooooo...

I have been on a major quest in search of glasses for my girls.  Yes, first I tried the obvious, just drawing them but I'm not so great at symestry anymore.... Heck, a straight line went out the door years ago....you'll notice there are no straight lines in any of my doodles.   I digress... guess what, there is no such thing "out there" that you can buy... No dies, no stickers, no brads.... Until now :-).  As always I had a "well der" moment... "You can make them yourself!"  So I did:

This is what they look like after I cut them out.... white then I hand color as desired.

I cut them out of white vinyl so that I can color them with any color, lense and frame.  The idea is to color each piece then layer the frame onto the lense (if you use one) then place it onto the doll before adding bangs.

If you would like some glasses that you can color yourself I will sell you 15 assorted pairs (including 15 frames/lenses) for $2.00 (FREE shipping).  These are ALL WHITE vinyl (I used alcohol pens and permanent ink pens to color mine) and are about .8" (fit the popular DIE CUT dolls ... not the stamped dolls)...click the "Buy Now" button below:

I used the doll and dress from this set:

   

I got the pad of paper from Hobby Lobby this weekend for only $4 ... it was the 6x6 version, not this oblong one.  I used the sheet of white polka dots on pink then put a black dot on every other fold of the dress to make it appear that I used two different papers.

 And the Hair (I drew the bangs in myself) from this set: 

   

The leggings and shoes are just colored directly onto the original white stamped/cut doll, no extra cutting...I do that when I'm in a hurry. What I usually do is place the clothes down onto the girl, without gluing it down, to see what needs to be colored flesh color and whatever (like the leggings). This time I had done a really bad job of cutting the foot so there was a big black line running through her foot...problem fixed by coloring the whole foot black and calling it boots. I then thought she needed some lacy socks so I just used a white pen and doodled those in.

All of the coloring was done with the Spectrum Noir pens.

Doll-A-Day

I mentioned last week that I have a new favorite thing...paper dolls.... Julie Nutting's dolls specifically.   Well, I am going to do my best to make a doll a day but I'll be honest I tend to get bored really quick so we shall see.  I plan to post them every day but I wanted to do one quick "catch-up" post to cover May 1-10 since I do have 10 made so far:

I won't be showing any end results yet because I hope to use them on customized name plates eventually so they are just hanging out loose in the meantime.  I plan to be more descriptive for future dies but not so much for the ones above.

One thing I just noticed, dolls 1-3 were all done using patterned paper but the rest were all done on white then colored and doodled on.

Today's doll:

For day 11 I have a version of "Doll With Ruffled Dress". (?? Must be before she started giving each stamp an actual girl name)... Very simple.  I just stamped her on white then colored the body parts and the orange ruffle with Spectrum Noir pens. I then stamped the dress onto a sheet from 

 

By the way, the 6x6 (or smaller) pads are the best for this kind of stuff because the patterns are the right scale.

Prima Paper Doll Play

My new favorite thing! .... THIS week :-).  Would you believe that I just recently discovered Prima dolls by Julie Nutting ?!  Truth.  But, I'm actually glad I waited until the dies for some came out because I don't really have the patience to do much fussy cutting.

So, last week I bought all three die sets currently available and this weekend I played paper dolls!  WHAT FUN!

Stamps and Dies Used: Here are the stamps that go with each set:

And, thankfully, there is a die for each piece.

   

I love having all three sets because you can mix and match some of the pieces, not all, but some....like the hair and some of the clothes.

I got tired of switching the stamps around on my acrylic blocks so I found two long blocks + one smaller block and put all the stamps on them so that now all I need to do is ink up all the stamps I want to use at once. 

I have decided that I want to make lots of dolls for a project idea I have for later on in the year so I started mass producing elements:

But back to the dolls I made this weekend... on the 1st, 2nd and 5th I used patterned paper but on the rest I just doodled on and colored with my Spectrum Noir markers... my alternative to crazy expensive Copic Markers.  I'm afraid my iPad photo didn't do the markers justice though,  the colors are not showing through like the originals.  OK, and to be honest I didn't do such a great job of coloring the hair either. I LOVE! LOVE! playing with these sets!  The only thing that I was a bit disappointed with was the fact that she uses the same two bangs in each set.  I did a little bit of extra cutting on the 2nd girl myself.  Honestly though, the ability to modify them yourself is what makes it fun.  I will definitely buy any new sets she comes up with. FUN! FUN! FUN! Markers Used: I am showing all the different sets of Spectrum Noir available...you would have to buy all sets to have all the colors...which, of course, I just had to have




They are very much like Copics except for the number of available colors and the price of course.  Thankfully I never got on the Copic bandwagon because I couldn't justify the expense in my own mind... paying between $1-$2 per marker makes more sense to me. Papers Used: I used plain white cardstock (random no name)and two different paper pads. I'm sorry but I can't find the cover to the flowers on but the paper for dolls 1 and 5 came from:

OH! and the white/black polka dot stocking were made with washi tape... I accidentally drew on her let so I need to cover the mistake up so I just covered some cardstock with the tape then cut the legs out again with the die....easy fix, happy solution.