Paper Doll Templates

I didn't get a chance to post last week. There were quite a few things on my desk that I needed to wrap up and appointments, etc. Life happens! Some of what I worked on was for the upcoming ballet issue of Paperdoll Review. I wasn't sure if I'd pull something together but I did and I'm rather happy with it. Look for it soon if you're a subscriber (and if you aren't, you can check that out here). 

Part of what I want to do this year is draw more. I often find myself paralyzed by the blank page! Starting can be a challenge. I'm fine once I get going but starting...well, it's not always easy. So I decided to look through my Pinterest and how-to books for some inspiration. I love paper doll how-to books! It's a quirky little subsection of my small (but growing!) collection of paper dolls.

One of those how-to books is Pat Stall's "Paper Doll Design". I've seen this in bits and pieces online and was THRILLED to get a copy! There are loads of black & white paper doll examples as well as lessons for creating paper dolls.

I'll dive more into this book at some point but there's one page I really want to look at - the Lazy Designer's Doll.   

I love the multiple pose possibilities and the great faces! This alone is a wonderful jumping off point for anyone who wants to try drawing paper dolls. I wanted something a bit more fashion model, however, so I kept searching.

This is more what I was thinking about. I grabbed this off of Pinterest - there are loads and loads of similar illustrations for inspiration.  

At this point, I grabbed my sketchbook at started drawing. Normally, I like to work from reference but this time, I just drew straight onto the page, partly to see if I still COULD!!

First, I drew a base doll. It's not overly complicated or detailed. This took maybe ten minutes.

 

Next, I placed tracing paper over the base doll and drew a second set of arms along with two more sets of legs. The trick with legs is that one is weight-bearing and the other is not. The weight-bearing leg (in this case, the one on the left/back on the base doll) needs to be fairly straight to indicate support. The other leg can be more flexible. 

I scanned in both my base doll and my tracing paper, then assembled them in Photoshop. If you don't have a scanner, a phone camera should work but there might be a bit of distortion. You could also do all of this on tracing paper or with a light table. If you choose to work these up digitally, pretty much any program would work. I have Photoshop so I used it.

With two sets of arms and three sets of legs, I made six different poses.

If I separate out the arms, I could have even more poses! 

 

I used one sheet of paper, one sheet of tracing paper, a pencil, scanner, and Photoshop to create 12 poses in less than an hour. The actual drawing time was maybe ten or fifteen minutes! Now, instead of having blank page panic, I have 12 poses to start from! There are many more possibilities, too, with more arm and leg poses, different hand positions, faces, etc. 

From here, I'll pop these into Procreate and see what I can come up with for dolls. Check in next week to see the refined templates!