This month got off to a slow start for me creatively. I went from being in a funk and not wanting to create to slowly trying to forge ahead, feeling like things weren't working. I decided to step back and reassess my process. I realized that I needed to address some technical problems and develop a better approach to making these dolls to elevate my work while also maintaining my excitement about creating them. I really love making these dolls, but my previous approach was dampening my daily motivation, so I started making some changes.

Faces & Heads

One of the longest phases of creating these dolls is sculpting and painting the face. For a while, I thought that making each face from scratch every time would be the best practice, as I liked the idea of each doll being 100% unique. However, as I work on more dolls, I’ve realized that a lot of the foundational work involved in shaping the head and blocking out features can and should be done using a mold. So, right now, I'm finalizing a small set of heads that I’ll seal and use to create plaster molds. This way, I can work from those molds, having a small range of faces and heads to create a new doll head and alter as needed for each doll.

Oh boy, I'm glad to be doing it this way! As a digital artist, I’ve regularly used the horizontal flip technique—rotating a face horizontally throughout an illustration to ensure it looks balanced. Sometimes, it looks good when viewed one way, but when flipped, the features can produce a bit of a jump scare. I definitely had one of those moments with these heads! I started taking pictures of the faces and flipping them, which helped me identify some very clear balance and symmetry issues. Now that I’m making molds, I can guarantee a balanced foundation, leading to a final piece that looks good without spending an unrealistic amount of time on the face sculpt.

Joints & Articulation

Another point of frustration has been the joints. Between concerns about the durability of the clay, functionality, and the time required to create articulated joints, I’ve really struggled to move any projects forward. In the spirit of simplifying or expediting the parts of these projects that feel disengaging, I started looking for alternatives, and I think I’ve found a solution. I found some plastic joints used in action figures and hobby models that I believe might work! So, as I move forward with a couple of dolls I’m working on, I plan to use these joints at major articulation points, such as the hips, knees, shoulders, elbows, and neck.

Materials & Tools

I’m also changing the materials I use. The biggest change will be the clay. One of my greatest frustrations with sculpting and painting has been the clay's texture. The clay I’ve been using is fibrous, which makes it difficult to paint and doesn’t allow for sculpting sharp details. After extensive research, I’ve found some promising options.

And I’m not letting the old clay go to waste! I plan to use it for some home décor projects. I’ve been collecting Tokidoki figurines for years, and most of them fit on a wood curio shelf that my grandpa helped me make. However, despite its large size, I’m starting to run out of room. The few figures that aren’t Tokidoki need a new display. The displaced figures are Zombae Forever dolls, cute little zombie girls with various themes. I have six of them, and when trying to find a way to store them, I decided that, like before, I could make my own shelves. This time, I’m using clay, and, inspired by their creepy-cute, morbid nature and the whimsical goth aesthetic of my room, I’ve decided to sculpt floating mushroom shelves for them to stand on. I also plan to create some smaller, hook-shaped mushrooms for hanging various little charms I’ve collected.

I have a collection of other little trinkets that I plan to display on shelves. These shelves will go in my dining room, where I have hung a large painting created by my grandma, along with a similarly themed southwestern art print. To complement this theme, the shelves will have an adobe-inspired design.