She's A Doll of Clay

Big head doll with cute elf ears Recently I became inspired to create a doll with a big head and really big eyes. I have loved the doll, Blythe, since I was a young girl in the 70s. The idea of creating a Blythe replica came to me years ago, before I bought a Blythe Basaak doll a few months ago. I owned an original when I was 9. I loved her. I am unsure if she is still packed away at my parents’ house. One day I hope to find her. I really believed I would have to sculpt one of my own if I ever wanted another. So I decided to sculpt a similar doll based on the original Blythe. Her head is smaller. The lips and nose are bigger and her eyes are squarish, not round. I sculpted her out of Premier clay. Below I have pictures of my progress. I sculpted the face first on the back of a glass pan. I dried the face in my oven at 275 degrees. Afterwards, I wrapped a piece of aluminum foil in plastic wrap. I used a size close to the size of the face. I then added clay to the foil to create...

A few years ago, my husband and I, along with our 10 year old son, left Memphis, TN to move to Western Kentucky for his job.  He is a civil engineer.  He was working on the largest civil works project for the Army Corps of Engineers, which was in its last stages of building 3 locks and a damn across the Ohio River. We loved our time in Kentucky, and miss the friends we made there.  Life has lead us to South Carolina for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, because the damn opened this past September, and we were almost sent to the cold weather instead of the warm South. So we chose being close to the beach and the mountains instead of Mid-America. But this post is about our time in Kentucky. A few weeks after moving to Kentucky, I was browsing Etsy, looking at the wonderful art dolls for sale. While there, I came across the store, "Higher Delights Dolls," by Kelly Sparks Salchli.  Oh my goodness, these dolls were gorgeous!  So I decided to read ...

For the last 8 or 9 years, I’ve been obsessed with creating art dolls. It started one day when my son, who was in 8th grade at the time, came home with his science project. It was a “zebra” with camouflaged stripes painted in orange and white. I had sculpted it for him, but he had painted it. This was the last of a long line of animals and one “Spartan” warrior that I’d helped him create for school. All of them out of air dry clay made for kids. Although I had spent most of my own time in school taking Art, I had never learned to actually sculpt. When my son was little, I’d make him cute little animals in play dough, and we’d let them dry. He loved them, so I guess he thought I was able to make anything he needed. It does seem that I had made something as a child out of paper machete using a balloon as a form, but I don’t remember if it worked or what it was. Once we did wrap string dipped in sugar water around a balloon. When it dried, we popped the balloon and cut out a hole, pla...