Studying the (Paper Doll) Masters - Fanny Gray

 I've been in a creative funk for a while. Getting the new office set up has helped a bit, but I'm still just not quite feeling it. It could be the time of year, it could be the chaos of parenting, or any of a zillion other things. 

And that's ok. Sometimes it comes easily, and sometimes it doesn't.  

One thing I've been doing lately is immersing myself in other people's art. I love learning about technique, both traditional and digital. I love watching an artist create something radically different than what I make. And I'm trying to get my spark back a bit, too.

This week, I watched a video by Scott Christian Sava (https://www.youtube.com/@ssavaart). He has such a terrific presentation style. I just love listening to him and watching what he makes! He gave himself a project - create 60 studies of the masters in 60 days. As I was watching it, I thought, I can do THAT! 

I'm going to riff on his idea and "Study the (Paper Doll) Masters)". I won't get to 60 but that's not the point! The point is to create a bunch and see what happens. In my head, I'm thinking 10 or 12 but I'm not sure yet. I'm open to suggestions!! 

Today, I'm sharing my study of Fanny Gray from 1854.

I wanted to start with Fanny Gray because it's an early American paper doll set. Some say it's the first American paper doll set, some disagree. I'm not wearing my Art Historian hat today so I'm not weighing in on that argument. If you want to read a terrific article about Fanny Gray, check out the "Regency Romance" issue of Paperdoll Review Magazine. 

Fanny Gray is a paper doll where you swap the head into each outfit. It's a boxed paper doll set that tells a morality story about a little girl who goes astray and finds her way back to righteousness. Very 19th century! It was created in Boston in 1854, published by Crosby, Nichols & Company. The doll itself is color lithography by Chandler, S. W. & Brother. You can really dig into color lithography here. It's essentially offset printing created by applying color to stone or metal plates and printing each color individually.   

So that's just a tiny bit about Fanny Gray. There's more, of course, but that'll be ok for now.

As for what a "study" is - it's just a fancy art word for "practice". Sometimes artists will create a study for a larger work. Or they'll create a study of another artist's work. It's not the same as copying or forgery or anything like that. A study is a tool for learning about art and applying it. That's my plan here.

 For my study, I started on paper. I was struggling with this, so I scrapped my first drawing and started over. I created a 1 inch grid on tracing paper and laid it over the Fanny Gray image in Paperdoll Review. That helped me sort out some of my proportion issues. In about an hour, I got a to a place where I thought the drawing was ok. It isn't perfect. My plan was to tweak it in Photoshop, mostly because I can. Could I keep drawing it over & over until I liked it? Totally. 

Here's my drawing along with a scan of my reference. I sketch rough and dark! I always have... I can see some obvious issues. First, my face is a little too big. Second, both arms are a little weird. To be fair, the arms on the reference are kind of odd anyway. Also, there's one foot I like and one foot that I don't.

And here are the minor adjustments that I made. I lengthened one arm, shifted the other, and made the face slightly smaller. I also duplicated the foot I liked and plopped it in place. The basket became totally skewed but that's ok. My plan is to take it into Procreate and refine it from there. 

Just as a bit of an aside - sketchbooks are meant to be messy. Not every idea that goes down on paper is perfect of precious. And that is ok. 

I took my sketch into Procreate and created linework. It's a little wonky so I'll likely work on it a little bit more before I add color. I ran out of time to color it but I'll work on that this weekend and post an update next week! 

Any paper doll masters I should put on my list? Feel free to share!