Category: Art Dolls

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Sometimes You Will Make Ugly Art

It’s a painful fact that sometimes, no matter how hard you try or how much time you spend working on something, what you make might suck.  That is exactly what happened to me with the art doll I was making.  I spent hours and hours on it and had such high hopes for how it would turn out.  My hand is still sore from trying to stuff it successfully.

But in the end, sometimes it just doesn’t matter how hard you work on something or how much you want it to be awesome.  Sometimes it will suck and you will have to let it go and move on.

This is a picture of my doll after I gave up adding more stuffing.  I didn’t even bother to make the arms.  At that point I knew I was done and it was over because it was ugly and not something I wanted to ever send out into the world.  Its head was too small and its body too large and nothing really worked for me. The only thing I liked about it was the little blue rabbit I sewed on its leg. That’s it.

Art Doll Fail

Sometimes we will make ugly art.

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My First Art Doll

I recently purchased an online class called Southern Sass by Kecia Deveney.  She is an amazing artist and her art dolls are incredible so I couldn’t wait to start this class.

I have to admit that I am the worst at buying classes and either never taking them at all, never finishing them or finishing them and never applying anything that I learned in class.  I shudder to think of the amount of money I’ve spent on online art classes over the years, but I wouldn’t have learned any of what I know now without some of them, so some of the money was well spent.

Anyway, back to that art dolls.  I watched some of the videos and then procrastinated and finally got started last week.  It is so fun learning something new and getting out of my comfort zone, not to mention it’s a great way to use the fabric paint I bought years ago and put a dent in my stash of fabric as well.

Here are a few pictures of my progress so far:

After I made a pattern I liked and transferred it onto muslin, I started creating the eyes, ears, mouth and nose.  This was harder than I expected and took a while, especially when it came to the hand stitching part.  I spent quite a while getting those pieces the way I wanted them, but I’m really pleased how they turned out.

I then painted the face with colors that coordinated with some of the fabrics I had picked out for the body beforehand.  I have pinned the facial features in place, but haven’t sewn them down yet.

Here I have laid out all of the fabric pieces I plan on using over the pattern.  You can’t seen the shape of the body yet because this is how you do it at first. I haven’t gotten far enough to know what happens next, but I’m excited to see what she looks like after all the fabric is sewed in place and trimmed down.  I also chose the saying I wanted to have and stamped the words out and then sewed them onto felt.  I don’t like the stamps I have so I ordered some different ones that hopefully work better with paint than these did.  I think these would be great with ink, but they weren’t the best with paint.

Well I’m going to get back to it and hope this all turns out how I hope it will.

Till next time.