Doll Experiment - Part 6

The black line indicates material to be removed.

Gap created when arm pose was changed.

Now that I am back from the latest road trip, and Thanksgiving is over, I am getting back into the studio.  I have been continuing my work on a doll experiment.  I had seen an article in Art Doll magazine where an artist had created a doll in papier mache' using another doll as a mold.  I thought I would give that a try and see what I could come up with.  However, I did not want to just recreate the original doll, so I set myself some challenges to make some changes to the doll.  The challenges were to add plastic eyes, change the pose of the doll, and to make the doll stand.  This blog post will be about changing the pose by attaching the arms.  Readers can scroll back to see previous posts on how the doll got to this point.  There may be a few intervening posts on various topics.  The easiest way to read all the posts would be to select the menu for posts from the past month or two at folkartbycaroljones@blogspot.com

The eyes have an initial coat of paint on them.  They are not complete.  It is pointless to finish them until all the papier mache' has been added.  However, the painted eyes do give me an idea of where the doll is looking, which helped me consider where I wanted to place the doll's hands.  I was glad to find a doll that had a head that was oriented something other than straight forward.  So many dolls have that blank open eyed, straight forward stare.   

The original doll had a porcelain head, arms, and legs.  The arms and legs were stuck out rigidly from the body.  I wanted to change the position of the arms to give some appearance of movement and to help the doll tell a story.  A doll body by itself cannot say by so much.  By introducing action, and by using props and accessories, the doll tells a story about who she is or what she is doing. In the previous post, I had blogged about how to remove the arms and cut them in order to change the pose.  Now I have to put them back together.  It was a bit of work.

After removing the arms, I had to remove some material from each piece of the arm in order to change the pose.  When the arm was moved forward and raised, part of the shoulder extended beyond the back of the doll.  With the elbow bent, some material needed to be removed from the front of the joint in order to accommodate the bend.  The bend also created a void at the elbow which needed to be filled in.  The pictures might make more sense than my explanation on this.

I had made the original straight cuts using a small saw.  The saw did not work well on the curved cuts needed to remove the material at the joints.  I had to apply pressure with the saw and it was collapsing the taped over cuts made while I was removing the doll mold from the original doll.  I switched to using a cutting wheel with my rotary cutting tool.  I removed crescent shaped sections from the joints. I inserted some balled up foil into the arm at the elbow joints to give the area some support. Then I taped the arms back together with masking tape.  The shoulder joints were taped then reinforced with strips of folded paper and more tape to fill in the void.  The body is hollow and there was no way to keep a ball of foil in place at that joint.

On the doll's left hand, I removed the thumb.  I want to change the position of the thumb so it looks as if the hand has a grasp on something.  At this point, I have not yet added the thumb back to the hand.  I am waiting until I see how large of an opening I need in order to add an accessory before replacing the thumb.  I will blog more about that when I get to the accessories.

So the arms have been taped onto the torso.  The torso seems to be carrying the weight of the arms well.  Next I will be adding more layers of papier mache' to the doll to to cover the tape and reinforce the joints.  Each coat of papier mache' must be completely dry before adding another layer.  I expect to add at least three more layers of papier mache' before the doll is completed.

Next I will be working on attaching the legs and weighting and balancing the doll.  I do not know if I will have the rest of the papier mache' completed at that point.  If I have not yet moved onto the next part of the doll I will be blogging some more road trip photos.