Dolls for A Cause Pink for Pam Auction Event

This week I took a small break in my series of lighting dolls to be the model. I worked alongside my friend Candace. Her name is a link to her fashion blog.

Dolls for a cause has 50 items available to bid on on their Facebook page  and the proceeds go to help a friend of Confetti Doll Design's owner named Pam. Pam has breast cancer and they are trying to raise funds for her medical expenses. You can help by bidding and getting some awesome stuff in the process.

Backgrounds, props, budgets oh my Or... get Crafty time.

If you are one of the lucky ones with a dollhouse for your dolls like me congrats. So many don't have space or the funds to have one. We lack both pretty much but we can fake it. Cardboard is your friend. Scrapbook paper is a better friend. You can make walls and floors easily with the two. I showed some in another post but if you really want cool doll props and are on a budget I am going to share my best secrets with you but let me mention one more friend,  Glue sticks. Trust me they don't wrinkle the paper like regular glue will.

My secrets:

YouTube is your friend. People show you how to do stuff and watching it is free assuming you have internet. Which if you are reading my tips I guess you are. There are a few youtubers that make great stuff for dolls. Chad Alan makes stuff for Monster High, Ever After High and Barbies and shows you how to make clothes... and some of his techniques will be able to be translated to larger dolls like me. Find him here.

My Froggy Stuff.  Started out with mostly Monster High and Barbie and now covers everything including American Girls... wooo. There is a blog and the have more than one You Tube. Find it here. Furniture , backgrounds, luggage, food oh my so many ideas.

Karen Mom of Three Blog... wow she has all boys but makes cool doll stuff. Wait so does my human mom. Well her actual kids are boys. That is awesome though. Keeping in touch with their inner child I guess... linky dinky do to find Karen's blog.

Google search: Yep Or Bing if you like that better or whichever search you use. I am a google person umm doll.. anyhow. Type in how to make a (insert item here) for an 18 inch doll. You might have to weed out things you were not looking for and it is best to ask a parent because when you google search anything can happen. We are als 1/3 scale or playscale.  (psst here you will thank me for this one) Print Mini,com is free and they have a Playscale page that fits us. woo! Accessorize time.

So make it and fake it for cool photo props on the cheap. Because we all love those little details.

Thinking outside the box

Another one of Saige's tips for better and more artistic doll photos.  Think outside the box a bit.

 

 

 

The box is a standard portrait. Pose us. Make us look like we are doing something. We look more life like that way. We look like we are fun little people.  Make us look like we are in scale to the things around us by holding the camera close to us. It puts the background out farther and makes it seem more in scale. On the beach you see beach umbrellas off in the distance but they don't look like they are actual size.  The skateboard is a mini one that came with a tshirt the human boys got. It is illegal to ride a skate board in the town we live in so the kids can't use them but I am a doll. I am above the law I will ride that skateboard if I want to. (Ok got a bit carried away but you get the point. I can stand on it and look like I am riding it. And,,, once again it was Beth not even me. Sigh. Hard being the newer doll you don't go out much.  Have to be kept pristine blah blah blah) So all these photos put us in action poses, we are not centered in the middle portrait style. No school photos in this group, Yearbook ones perhaps,but it adds life to us.


Next tip Parts of the whole.

 

No where is it written that you need the entire doll in the photo for a good photo. All of these are highlighting the accessories. I do love the headband shot. It is me. I love how my eyelashes look. You can see all the pretty details in the headband/ We have cute hands and feet and knees and elbows and well where aren't we cute, am I right/? So in thinking outside the box, think parts of the whole.  This can be achieved in the editing as well as the shooting, depending on the photo in question. These were pretty much focusing on the subject in the shot but sometimes you want to narrow it down. In editing you can crop to just part of the whole. The photographer was trying to highlight the design of the lace so there was a close shot of the whole dress but upon staring on it in the editing website the crop down to the just the lace made the difference. It is part of a collage of the outfit and it really a nice touch to show how pretty the brown designs are on the pink. I was so happy I got to model it. Candace is still not speaking to me. She will get over it eventually. The first photo is totally unedited so it is sideways. Sorry

 

So to recap this lesson Think Outside the Box, Not a school portrait but Action or Parts of the whole can really spice up your photo shoots.

Keep Practicing your art, both Photography and the kinds with paper and drawing and painting supplies.

Saige

More thoughts on lighting dolls

Well I actually came up with another tip on taking photos of dolls that was still on the subject of lighting. It is THE FLASH... no not the super hero the camera's flash.

Try to avoid it. No, really at all costs. Please... I beg of you. Flash photography when not using what a professional photographer is using never is as great as it could be. However when you are talking a point and shoot, a phone or even a digital SLR and a doll... we look dead. It takes all the contours that our faces have and makes them look flat, our coloring looks gone, the gentle blush of our cheeks isn't visible.

Wait for good natural light. It makes all the difference.

Example A: a Family portrait. Beth Andya nd Kendall were at our cousins and they all got together in a group photo. It was night time and this was taken with a flash and well they all look more like dolls on a couch than the people you know we are. 

 Example B: Beth in strong sunlight. Her eyes are so reflective. They look more lifelike and this isn't even an example of good natural lighting. This is still better than the photo above. Yes, Beth changes her hair often. Right now she is a red head and it is super curly. I think she likes to look closer to me. We look cute together now with our blue eyes and red hair.

Example C: Candace with a flash. So every now and then you forget to turn the flash off and this happens. Ugh. Well there is a reshoot of it. She is in same pose but we cropped it differently. 

Exampe D: Candace in same pose but natural light. I don't think it was the best day either but you can see her eyes look pretty not scary.  For brown eyed dolls the light is imperative,

Example E: Kendall and Andy at the beach... super cute pose but the problem with this photo is the angle the light is coming from. It doesn't light their faces. Their faces are in shadow. 

Example F: Kendall lying on the beach. Much better his face is lit nicely. I think he is a bit of a beach bum. I hope Beth doesn't get mad that I went into her photo archives and have been critiquing them. Ummm Kendall what up with the hair? Wow that is curly on the top. LOL It looks like he does when he first gets up. He is a goof. You have to live with him to understand. ( I know he is my brother but he is actually sort of cute, you know for a brother.)

Last one, is Example G: Rosemarie with her eyes looking exceptionally pretty. Glad she gave up on that lip gloss color since then. This is a really old photo of her. I do love her freckles though..

Well I hope this helps with your quest to better and more artistic photos of your dolls. Remember we like to look alive so give us a hand in our quest to look as human as possible. Now it is really late and since our humans are asleep we are going to play some cards, you know Toy Story was absolutely correct. In fact many toys were mad that the cover was blown. Anyhow UNO time with the doll siblings. 

Saige

Lights and thoughts before that

When we do photo shoots we have some walls we use that are actually cardboard trifold presentation boards. Some have been transformed into various rooms and others are plain solid colors. We have floors that are already created as well. This allows us to have a nice background for a photo. 

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Our barn set, the floor is made from scrapbook paper that looks like hay and we got scrapbook paper that was a wood floor cut it into boards and glued it all in, made fake windows by printing them out. 

It looks like I am in the an actual barn. 

These are not lit the best as it was raining that day. BOO but it allows you to get the scaled background idea. 

Other scale backgrounds we made for play and photography are a vet office...

School...

Wall with a mirror...

  And the new Confetti wall for mom's new shop Confetti Doll Designs.  All that confetti is glued individually on foam core. it fits inside the normal plain white tri fold.

You can find some great outside places that look scale for people as short as me as well... two of our favorite photos of me in real world are...

Old Train station, brick wall and sidewalk and 

 Walking the dogs with a creative focus. Because I am close and the buildings are so far away in the photo background it tricks your eye into thinking we are in scale. I am actually 1/3 scale. LOL

Now once you find a good background, you need to think about where the light is coming from when you shoot the photo. For example this is full sun in my face with the dogs. It can lead to harsh shadows so you have to be careful you are not in shadow in your photograph or it is something you can fully crop out later.  The sun is behind photographer.

Where I am against the brick wall that day was overcast. I had plenty of bright light but with a nice cloud cover to diffuse it so it eliminated the shadows.  That is the best light. I makes my eyes look bright and alive but no weird shadows on my face. The sun is behind the photographer and it was a different day and time. 

The two in the grey dress were shot inside the house and the light was coming from behind the photographer on her right. She is as far to the left as her body can be to not block her light source. 

The camera is held as level to me as possible, if at a slightly upward angle our eyes can look a bit odd so just slightly higher angle is best to make us look the most lifelike. 

So rules for a lifelike doll photo a recap:

1. Background scale 

2. Good light, Bright but not too harsh from behind photographer.

3. Angle of your photographer the sun and the camera.

Let me know if you would like in depth tutorials on background making. 

Saige

New series in art lessons... Photography

Photography is a really broad subject as art. What you are doing is using the digital camera or film (those relics do exist still but not in as much use as they were just ten years ago) to record the light as it reflects off an object. This holds true for both black and white and color photography.

However in today's world I am going to assume that for the most part, most people are using digital cameras (cell phones, tablets, what have you) Digital photography has so many aspects that we can cover. so we can have a big series on better photography.

There are some advantages to digital photography. Once you have made the initial purchase of your equipment you are not paying for film and developing to just see what you have. It also eliminates the wait time involved with film development. The cost of the chemicals needed to develop the film is also eliminated.

My mom took two different black and white photography classes and I got to see her old film canister. (we sold it last summer) It had a wire coil inside a metal canister with a black plastic lid that had a really strange bump on top. I can't imagine standing in compete darkness trying to wind the film into that coil and only touching the edges because if you touched it incorrectly you ruined the film.  So many things to go wrong.

Of course I do realize that the downfall of digital photography would be a digital memory fail of some sort. However if care is taken it is still the simpler way to photography,

We are first going to talk about taking photo's of dolls...or other inanimate objects....hey wait I am so not inanimate. Well you know short people like me.

This is a great photo mom took of my sister Beth. While you don't see her face you get the feeling she was riding along on her board and mom caught that great shadow in it as well. 

She was standing still and the breeze blew her hair giving it a feeling of motion. (lucky shot mom, lol)

What mom?

I was just told not to bust my mom's photography skills. Truthfully she does ok. 

So in next post we will talk about lighting a photograph.

Saige

I have been bad about blogging...

Sometimes, even us dolls get really bad about blogging. I can't make any excuses why I just did. I really need to give you some more great art ideas that you can do. I will do my best to work at this harder as we all need to practice. I need to work on my blogging skills that is for certain.

Here is a really cool drawing my mom did. It was sketched in pencil then the colored it with colored pencils and inked all the details in . It isn't perfect but it is one of her best attempts at a Dragon.  It was scanned then into the computer so it wouldn't get lost.  It is a good way to preserve drawings. 

So to let you know what I was up to I have spent a ton of time standing around in a dress getting my photo taken. Yeah modeling. I have been working for Confetti Doll Designs as a model alongside their main model who's blog is http://iwantcandytoo.blogspot.com/ and her name is Candace. She is fun and has an adorable younger brother named Andy. 

I also recently did a little modeling for Dolls For A Cause. 

Their next campaign begins on August 31 on Facebook and it will run through the 7 of September. The awesome ladies that run that group have explained that they have recently changed all of their ways of fundraising. While they originally were using Ebay they found that the seller fees were dipping into their total funds available to donate, and by offering smaller groupings but more of them in comparison to one large group project they were able to make their donated goods available to a wider range of people. They are earning greater amounts of money to help where needed. Then the last change they made was moving to a more personal story. We have been finding people who have illnesses and have been donating to them in the place of the large corporate conglomerates. They supported a girl fighting cancer and Pam of our upcoming campaign is a close friend of so many of the ladies that sew and donate the clothing. 

Pink for Pam event can be found at this link, and you can learn more about the Dolls for A Cause group on their facebook page.

I absolutely adore this dress. I love how pretty I look and I feel very much like I was channeling Molly Ringwold in Pretty in Pink.

Keep practicing your art and I will work hard at a new project idea for you all to do. 

Love 

Saige