Childs doll

When sketching out the idea for the child's doll I knew I wanted the doll to be a rag doll since plastic is a newer material and I wouldn't imagine the family would have the money to buy porceilne doll. Cloth dolls are one of the oldest toys, often homemade from old clothes and stuffed with scraps of fabric. Some examples are seen below.

This doll was more of a bear and it was more of an experimental option since it wasnt like the classic ragdolls i have seen but I did like how it looked . However it is not what I was going for so I went and made a second idea sketch using the same doll base .

This one is closer to the ones I saw in my research but  it is more stout and I gave it button eyes rather than the painted face most of the dolls I researched had as it looked less unsetteling. I gave the doll hair as I saw that some had wigs that were styled, so i put the hair into a crude ponytail as my younger sister always does this so all of her dolls hair so I though that the child who owned this may do the same.

I chose the second option as it was more of a classic ragdoll than the first which was more like a bear than a doll. I went forward and annotated a cleaned up sketch so I had more guidance going forward. 

Tonal Drawing

When putting in the tonal shadingI focused on the seams of the doll and making sure they looked indented, i made use of blending brushes here as I put down a thicker line of darker tone and then blended the edges to have a softer look and then redefined the seam again with a darker colour, this I think worked well and was one of the most succesful areas of the piece.

I shaded the hair like I would normally, blocking in chunks and then adding more texture in layers, this worked well but I do think having more fly aways and making the hair much messier as a child may be more haphazard when putting hair into a ponytail.

Colour 

After I did the tonal work I used a mix of layer overlays and gradient maps to add colour to the doll, I chose a colour similar to skin for the body as I saw many dolls tend to be as realistic as they could make them with what they had. The colour for the dress was harder to decide on but I ended up going with blue as I thought the fact the colour communicates an element of sadness and woe was fitting for the background I made for the story.

I overlayed a texture layer over the colour which meant I could make the cloth look more realistic without concerning myself with the the shape of the doll as it would translate by using a soft light layer. 

Lighting and shadows

This was the final step, here I used layers for additional  lighting and shadow and I also added in a stitching as I had left it out whilst doing the tonal work so I had a clear view of the seams without the crosse stitching covering parts of it.

I really like how the lighting turned out as it really helped to add more three dimentionality to the object without hours spent on rendering and is fairly easy to play around with so I was able to adjust it to get the right solem feeling to the lighting but I could easily change it to be joyful or scary. I think the lighting could have been more refined in the hair area to give the hair back some texture which could have been done by erasing areas for shadow.

Overall I am happy with this object outcome as it was a nice balance between the simpleness of the object and the more detailed rendering in certain areas, I also really like the way I shaded certain areas such as the doll’s body as I really tried to strike a balance between giving the item structure whilst keeping the soft and under-filled body which would make it floppy, particularly in the head area as the scrap stuffing would cause the weight to fall to the back causing the back of the head to be a bit deeper and slightly misshaped. I think the dress could have more structure to it, such as more folds which would make it look more flowing and natural as it is a bit too simple in this piece and it would be the main thing I would fix if I were to redo the piece.

revision from feedback

based on feedback I added more shadow and made the stitches larger so they were more viable. I also added a back lighting for visual interest.