Well, I’ve managed to get a second Featured Artist: Boots of 19th Century Paper Dolls and Comic Book Chronicles. Boots is an amazing paper doll artist and one of my big inspirations when I started this little blog. Her paper dolls, either historical or faciful, are always beautifully rendered in color or black and white. There’s lots of things I admire about Boot’s work, but the one that comes to mind as most impressive to me are her wonderfully rendered male paper dolls and their fantastic wardrobes.
I interviewed Boots over Email and she was kind enough to provide a unique full color set of paper dolls from her work Psychomachia which is apparently about “a paroled sociopath, an exotic dancer who is serving as his life coach, and the not-so mentally healthy mental health facility that, unbeknownst to them, is using their relationship in a bizarre social experiment.”
Well… Now I want to read that.
An Interview with Boots of 19th Century Paper Dolls and Comic Book Chronicles
How did you get started drawing paper dolls? What is it about the paper doll medium that you find inspiring?
- Paper dolls have been a love of mine since childhood. My brothers and I were very taken by vastly populated adventure stories (such as Jason and the Argonauts), and since that was a time before merchandising really took off in terms of movie-tie-in toys, we created our own out of paper. We built immense collections of warrior skeletons and Greek gods, monsters, and play sets. We even once drew, colored, and cut out 101 dalmatians (complete with an escape van to store them in). Even after Star Wars and hardcore merchandising began, we still created our own dolls because of our desire to have an ever-expanding world.
From that time, I maintained an interest and continued to look for innovative ways to create paper dolls (jointed, felted, scrap paper, etc.). It wasn’t until the last decade or so that I returned to more conventional styles. Through it all, however, I have collected dolls with a specific focus on dolls featuring 19th century clothing (hence my initial paper doll blog). I have amassed an incredible number of paper dolls over the years (hundreds), and am always on the lookout for more.
Do you have any “rules” for designing paper dolls? What do you believe are characteristics of an excellent paper doll or a really poor one? 
- No one exercising their creative spirit should have rules. If anything, I make paper dolls to get away from rules. That said, I do try to set certain “consistency standards” (pick a style and stick with it). This is mostly to keep me from running off the rails with too much mixed media (which is not something I have ever been good at anyway).
For me, characteristics I enjoy in others’ dolls include a pleasing form, personality in the expression, and lots and lots of clothes and accessories that aren’t horrendously difficult to cut out. I am always less excited about a doll with only a few options and never excited about a doll with such delicate features or accessories that i know i could never liberate them from the paper successfully.
I’ve noticed a remarkable range of paper dolls from comics to historical, how do you choose a subject for your paper dolls? Is there a specific time period or theme that you find yourself drawn too?
- I choose my dolls based on character. My historical dolls are often characters of my own creation or characters from literature that have seized my imagination. I have an absolute passion for 19th century history between 1830 and 1900 (which is roughly the “Victorian” age, but in America is broken down into the Antebellum period, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Golden or Gilded Age).
My comic book paper dolls are all characters I loved as a teenager (and still love now). Part of my love for comic book dolls is just happy memories of that part of my childhood, which is why the initial era of focus for those is the “Bronze Age” of comics, covering the 1970s-80s.
I don’t wander out of these areas of interest much, but I lately made paper dolls of two contemporary characters who will hopefully be featured in a comic book of my own, Summer 2014.
There’s a lot of guys in your artwork. As you know, I’m really bad at drawing male paper dolls, but I have to ask about them. What draws you to male paper dolls? And do you have any tips for the “male paper doll drawing impaired” among us? (By which I mean me.)
- First of all, you’re not bad at drawing male dolls! Maybe you just don’t love them as much.
Awww… Thanks. 🙂
- For me, It’s not that I don’t love female paper dolls (I absolutely do! I love drawing them, I love their clothes, making hair styles, all of that). But perhaps the dearth of male dolls on the market is part of what drives me. Some people think male dolls and their clothes are boring, but there is always variety out there if you look for it. Just as there are 1,001 variations on “the little black dress”, I find as many variations on the black suit, for example. Enjoying nuance is perhaps one of the reasons I love male paper dolls. Big splashy design changes are great, but tracking style progressions/changes on a less cataclysmic level is strangely more compelling to me; I like the small details. And this also makes appreciating the really radical stuff stand out all the more!
Also, not to sound guy-crazy or anything, but I just like men! When I see a character who is really interesting and might be fun to dress, I go for it. And I tend to like fewer female characters out there ~ I just like the men more.As for tips: In some ways I think you can get away with more anatomically on a female doll. With male dolls they can end up being awkward if they aren’t intentionally “cartoony” and yet not proportional. So I guess one tip for doll makers and their male dolls is to work from a model or reference picture. Practice anatomy drawing! It’s a good general thing to do anyway with paper dolls since understanding anatomy is key to clothing the body well. This doesn’t mean all paper dolls should be photo-realistic, but again, learning these basics can inform your style, improve your execution, and provide stronger base bodies onto which you can then design more detailed garments.
Can you describe the process you use for drawing paper dolls?
- I scribble a lot, looking for the right pose. I often have torsos with many arms and legs in all directions before deciding how to go. I try to capture something of the character in the position (though I do use sort of generic standing poses a lot too). Once I have a pose, I use a light board to transfer it to heavy paper depending on how I want to finish it (sometimes card stock, sometimes watercolor hot press paper).
My two favorite methods of finishing are either straight inking (to be later colored with markers or colored digitally ~ which is what I do with my comic book characters), and watercolors/gouache, which is more time consuming, but delivers very nice painterly results (this is the style I typically use for characters of my own creation).Do you have any favorite paper doll artists? Who are they and why?
- I admire so many artists! Pat Stall, Tom Tierney, Brenda Sneathon-Maddox. I do go out of my way to try to find unusual dolls made by lesser-known artists as well. Some of my favorites in my own collection are one-offs or reproductions by unknown artists. But really I love any and all paper dolls ~ even the ugly ones! There is something endlessly charming and wonderful about the imagination-at-play which spawns these things.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
- Dolls, of course!
And she did. Below we have a beautiful three page printable paper doll set from Boots and be sure to check out her sites, 19th Century Paper Dolls and Comic Book Chronicles to see more of her paper dolls.
