{The Original Paper Doll Set}
First of all, I owe a big thank you to K from A Time for Paper Dolls… who was kind enough to let me post my coloered version of her lovely Cleopatra paper doll.
When I was a kid, I was totally into realistic paper dolls (Tom Tierney and Peck-Garde), but now that I am older, if not wiser, I find myself drawn to the more stylized and unusual. Larry Bassin and Kwei-Lin Lum are two of my favorite modern artists.
Perhaps I’m not a true connaisseuse, but I’ve never liked Tom Tierney’s dolls.
He’s certainly an artist, knows his anatomy very well, and is extremely accurate in detail rendition of period clothes. But it lacks something, call it poetry, maybe.
The faces of his dolls are all alike, even the children’s, they have an impersonal look and he definitely fails what I call the “Audrey Hepburn test” (very few paperdoll artists who do celebrities have been able to capture the kind of radiant grace that was most typically hers and many have done her wrong).
And then there is this _most_ irritating feature in almost all of his albums:
“don’t cut the white space behind the arm and the body”.
Now, a part from the fact that “white spaces” are ugly, it could just say “don’t cut the paperdoll at all”.
His dolls are clearly not for playing with, and what use is a paperdoll that cannot be cut and played with?
errata corrige: “the white space _between_ the arm and the body”
I’m surprised, Marie Claire. I have always liked Tierney’s work and I recall playing with them as a child with fondness. I think as I have gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate the more unusual paper doll sets more. The white spaces between the arm and body never bothered me, though each to their own.
You did a lovely job! Did you see this in color from me before I went to my new blog with mainly black and whites? We chose some similar colors. It is fun to see how someone else would color them them.
I probably did, but I don’t remember. I was trying to stick to the colors I knew were used in Egyptian jewelry, though a part of me almost made her a red head, since the actress I saw do the best Cleopatra in the Shakespeare play was a red head.