Introduction

Here's the first of what I'm hoping will be many, many posts.  I'm planning this as a tutorial site for creating paper dolls using the various methods I've tried out over the years.  It's also going to be a showcase for paper dolls I've made and am currently working on.  So let's jump into the lessons!

I've decided to use one doll for all of the lessons.  We'll use the doll above to walk through the process of drawing the doll, outfits, and coloring the doll in traditional media and digital media.  I'll use others for illustrating different points or ideas, but there's just one doll for all the lessons.

Lesson One: Definitions

Body Type

There a two very broad categories that I use to describe my dolls: open body type and closed body type.  An open body doll has limbs that are spread out from the body, allowing for more flexibility in adding tabs.  A closed body doll has limbs that are closer to the body and create a white space, such as a bent arm.

Base

The base of a doll is the bottom portion, often used to attach a stand.  Sometimes I use one and sometimes I don't.  It makes for a consistent, usually geometric area to add tabs on the doll's clothing, and can help with alignment when creating outfits for the doll.  The one rule I use is that the bottom of the base must be a straight line, especially if used to attach a stand. The doll above has a base and a rectangular strip to add to the base & use as a stand.

Tabs

Take a look at the doll above again.  The outfits all have tabs in order to attach the outfits to the doll.  It's important that the tabs follow the lines of the body underneath the outfit.  We'll get into that more in the lessons about drawing outfits.

That's it for now.  Next lesson will be all about drawing a doll.