doll research!!

so if you've been around for a while, you'll know that dom and I are a HUGE fan of dolls. He's super into 1/6 scale which is like barbie, GI Joe, etc. I actually like 1/3 scale BJD (ball jointed dolls) like volks. We've been looking for excuses to create a doll photoshoot for some time now and we finally found a good enough reason to put together an editorial using 1/6 scale dolls. Of the 1/6 scale models, Dom is obsessed with momoko dolls. They're pricy because they're part of a massive community of doll enthusiasts in japan but there are other dolls like Jenny that are like the Japanese equivalent of Barbie.

Dom found these 2 DOLPA doll books online and I just wanted to drop some awesome custom dolls that people submitted to be featured. The book also includes pattern pages if you wanted to make anything from clothes to shoes. It also features pages of step by step tutorials on how to draw doll eyes and add eyelashes, customize hair, and where to buy accessories! Both books came out in 2000 and 2001 so it's awesome to see how far the craft had already made it 20 years ago! There's even doll tattoo sets you could buy. 

We're probably going to do 2 dolls, which I'll get to in the next post. We have about 8 days left to get the editorial completely finished so we're hoping to shoot it in 5 days, giving us 3 days for post production. We'll probably do a relatively simple set and just focus on getting all the happy99 clothes as accurate as possible! Anyway if any of this interests you, I highly recommend getting into it. Doll customization is a WHOLE WORLD and even now I follow this Japanese couple (? I think they're a couple) that go so crazy. You can find their work here. Another super influential artist that constantly drives us to go harder is Shana Sadeghi-Ray. She's based here in NYC like us and she recently put together an awesome art show called Thread the Needle at Whaam gallery featuring hand-sewn animal plushies and INCREDIBLE sets. The show is still open thru Sept 19 if any NYers want to peep it out. :) There's a boatload of doll artists on instagram that do a variety of styles like fine7th , dolls_dreaming , and zenko_doll . If you wanna see something really crazy, crystalapple_xu makes 1/6 scale miniature designer bags... that are unbelievable.

Okay I'll spam the progress stuff in the next post. This is basically at the front of our brains for the next week and then we're back to regular programming HAHA being an artist means you're generally influenced by all sorts of things so I'm sure I'll find a way to bring some of this back into the 3D space.... probably.