Friday, November 6, 2015

Toddler Fashion Friday - Black and White Round 1

For the month of November, I'll be posting black & white toddler paper dolls to color.  Part of this is because I know coloring dolls are popular and part of it is to buy myself some time to work on the December paper doll.  The December doll takes a lot of time & effort and I have a love/hate relationship with it! I keep coming back to it, so clearly the "love" part wins out!

Each Friday in November, I'll post a girl and boy to color.  At the end of the month, I'll have a pdf of the complete set.  You can right-click and save each image to print & color until then.


When I design paper dolls in Illustrator, I create them in full color so going back & making them black and white takes some time. I leave the grey shading and I probably shouldn't.  I just can't have plain old lines for some reason....

You can grab other black and white sets here and here!

So next week, more of the same.  Have fun coloring!

5 comments:

  1. do you ever color and cut out your own dolls? do you have colors in mind when you draw the clothes?

    : D

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    1. I rarely cut out my dolls. I really should, though. I cut out the first round of Akinyi dolls and corrected some mistakes before making the book. It definitely helps. My nieces generally test these for me -- they love the coloring pages!

      I'm not sure if this will make sense, but I think in color & shape and not really with lines. The lines sort of happen as the colors and shapes form. I think it's a hold-over from oil painting. I had a professor who taught us a method for really understanding color. He would say over & over, "One stroke, one color." Shapes came out of color and it's just stuck with me.

      So yes, I always have colors in mind!

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    2. that's awesome, being able to apply oil paint techniques to this process ~ totally makes sense! i am terrible with color because i think in lines and despite years of painting, have never been able to break from that.

      and i love that your nieces test your dolls ~ that's awesome too!

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    3. As much as I love creating paper dolls, I always thought of them as filler projects in between my oil painting. I wanted to be a *serious* artist. Truth is, I've only finished one oil painting in 7 years (mainly because I worry about my kids near the chemicals) but I've finished hundreds of paper dolls., Maybe I'm a paper doll artist with an oil painting hobby now instead of the other way around!

      I've also found that the line between "traditional" and digital art is so much more blurred than it was once. And I like that blurring.

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  2. I think its actually harder to transform things from black and white into color and back again than people generally realize. I get a lot of requests to do sets in black and white, but often it is just not possible- usually because I had somehow lost/misplaced/never-saved the older original Photoshop files.

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