MandyWong!: Custom doll : Laura Jayne

Hello! So here is a second doll ordered by a friend for his girlfriend as a birthday present. A doll that I feel that's possibly the best thing I have ever made! Here she is in a silly gif that I didn't get all the right angles! But it looks kinda cool, not as good as one of my favourite crafter Nekranea though.

Weeeeee~~~

Brief
So I was given three photos from Adam, for the dress he wanted Laura Jayne to be wearing, the hair she should have and obviously a close up of what she looks like. So I made a cute pencil sketch concept to get Adam's to approve it first. The challenge for making any a doll for Laura is to be able to capture the essence of her even though I haven't met her yet at the point of designing. I have made many toys of friends before but I tend to exaggerate what stands out about them to make the toy remind me of that person more. So it is only Adam who would know if the design works or not! Luckily he was pretty happy with it, I certainly feel happy with it myself!

Hair

One of the key feature was her tidy neat fringe with the dip-dyed hair. It was perhaps one of the biggest headache I had. It required a bit more experimenting than I have time for. So in the end I went for felting two colours together instead of going through bleaching or dying any fibres. I think it worked quite well and the overall result is of 99% satisfaction for my standard! I am leaving 1% for improvement - always!!!! I think I must have done three bunches of these strands of hair of what you see in this image below or maybe I lost count! The actual fringe was about 2 layers of work and then lots of sculpting around the front to make it sort of curved in nicely.

HAIRRRR~!

Face

For every doll or toy I made, the face is always something I enjoy making the most, I guess it's like when you bring life and personality to it. I also think if everything else is good but the face is bad, it ruins the whole thing. Through studying the photos I noticed Laura has brown eyes with some golden sparkles in them. I was really insisted in searching for this pair of perfect beads that are brown with golden glitter in them. I also wanted to add this necklace she was wearing in the picture because small details really make a doll extra special. Apart from these little things, I also tried out if having giving her proper lips would work however in the end I felt a basic smile works best for her.

Some of my practicing lips.

Wasn't keen on this!

Much more sweet!

Which shades to pick hmm~!

The dress
Then there was the polka dot dress! It didn't occur to me that polka dot fabric wasn't easy to find! I think I visited about six different craft/fabric store to hunt down this lovely indian hand printed fabric. I did rush at first and purchased this cheaper version here but I felt the dots were too large for a tiny little doll. However it was good to use as a test dress.

Rubbish looking dress here

And look how happy she is with the final dress!

I just love this cute necklace I made with a gold plated chain and of course the perfect beads for her eyes!

Packaging
The fun part but easily time consuming also!

1) Get the right box.
2) Pick the correct colours to match the theme.
3) Get the right paper to print the relevant things.
4) Decision - decorate the box or not?

Although time consuming yet it is such an key stage to present the doll in the best possble way. However I seem to be always running out of time and last time I messed up one box so this time I was careful to only stick the picture on the inside just incase I change my mind about it. Haha!