PAPER ART DOLL

 

Probably, all girls play with paper dolls – first they draw and cut out the doll itself, and then they come up with different outfits for her and change their Katya or Marina for hours. I had such a doll as a child, her older sister made me, and in an ordinary school notebook in a box she arranged a house for the doll – the notebook spreads turned into rooms, cuts were made in the painted furniture, and the doll could be “seated” in a chair or “put” in front of a mirror …

However, games with dressing up and staging various stories, both fabulous and from life, are far from all that can be done with paper dolls. Especially with such a variety of them as articulated art dolls using the mixed media technique, which is very popular with American art therapists.

What is mixed media?
Literally, this is “mixed means”, and in Russian it means “everything is possible”;)

In the creation of such a doll are used:
– fantasy collage elements made of assorted paper and magazine clippings;
– assemblage elements – artificial flowers, buttons, pendants, fabric and thread details;
– finishing with anything – pencils, acrylic and watercolor paints, liners;
– scrapbooking techniques – stamping (prints with special curly stamps) and jornelling (the doll is supplemented with a meaningful word or phrase);
– any other artistic techniques suggested by your imagination or the theme of the doll.

From the foregoing, it becomes clear why such dolls are not just dolls, but art dolls, and also why it is worth finding a suitable cardboard for them – dense enough and capable of withstanding an additional load. Collage, drawing and stamping are best done before you cut out the details of the doll, because it is much more difficult to do all this on the cut out.
Such dolls are called articulated because they have movable legs, arms, head and torso, and sometimes wings, (mermaid) tail, crown and other attributes. To make the doll movable, the joints marked on the template, previously pierced with an awl, must be fastened with brads (they can be bought at art stores), or with a thread knot, but this is less aesthetically pleasing.

How can the creation of such a doll be useful?
American puppeteer Kelly Reynolds writes:

“By creating the human form, we are also recreating a part of our perfect selves. Perhaps our dolls have qualities that we are sure we never had and that we would like to have – because we have long forgotten that we always had and always have them.
The doll is a mirror of our soul and our heart. By creating a doll, we create the life of our dreams, the life we ​​would like to live. In doing so, we find that our lives are transformed and become the way we always saw them in our dreams.
Our doll represents Opportunity. She is luxurious and elegant. She is a magical child of nature. She is a young peasant woman or a modern city girl. She wears the dresses of our dreams, has the qualities we dream of, and lives the life of our dreams. She has no problems, no fears, everything is fine in her world.
Where does the dream end and paper begin? I will say this: they are intertwined, and there is no end, no beginning.
Each of us is a beautiful perfect soul and has a magical inner strength, whether you believe in it or not. And you can tell your life story through your art. Tell her – the way you want her to be – and miracles will begin!

I offer three ways to work with a paper doll.

The first is to work with the doll as a functional talismanic object. For example, creating a helper doll for a specific event. It is important here that the client does not shift all responsibility onto the created talisman – “I don’t have to do anything else, the doll will take care of everything”, but realizes that the doll does not bring anything from the outside, it only actualizes the internal content of its creator and becomes a visual anchor, reminiscent of client about his internal resources. We cannot see in the World what is not in ourselves, respectively, if this doll for us is about the courage to start a new project – she is