Décédé Dolls

Ive been thinking of doing customised dolls, and I've been thinking of a good name for them. Like the living dead dolls brand. After doing some vital research I thought of ladies of the night but if i was to make a male character it would suite. So it was suggested to use a translate a word into french and use that for my name. So I looked up the words death, gothic, Scary, undead, Corpse and got no names that I found interesting. So i tried using a thesaurus and used the word dead and i found the word deceased and I translated it to the french word Decede. From which I liked with put next to the word dolls, to create the name Decede Dolls.

Death = la mort
Gothic = gothique
Scary = effrayant
Undead = vampires
Corpse = cadavre
Deceased = décédé

I then started to research customised dolls to see what results I can get to inspire me and I founds these images that I liked.

 This is a 'Living Dead Doll', these dolls are sold professionally and have alot of variations and styles. I like these dolls because they are out of the ordinary and look pretty gothic. I have been into gothic art for some time and it pleases me to see a gothic range of dolls that are sold.

 This is a doll that has been customised. I like this doll because of its tacky style and also because of all the wires and masking tape make it look robotic.

 These two dolls have been created and I love the look and style of these, they have long skinny limbs which gives them a tim burton look, also the top image looks like alice from alice in wonderland.

This doll is more abstract and possibly more of the style that i want to do, because they look more original. Also I love the way its been painted and looks more mechanical.

After researching some images I came up with this initial design.

I decided to use a dead bug for a accessory because my girlfriend was working with a dead spider today and I thought it would look good, because theres a character from nightmare before xmas who also has a spider for a tie. I wanted to give him a cyborg face because I love cyborgs and the relation that humans have with machines. To reinforce this idea I decided to give a claw for one of his hands and make half of his face robotic and I knew I would have to cut off half of his hair. I made this clothes all riped off on different halfs to give him a contrasting look from both halfs. The contract between humans and machines, machine being perfect and neat and humans for being scruffy and making mistakes. I knew I will have to use foil to make the robotic effect on my doll. and I want to draw on his face to make him look gothic.

This is a cyber pony that I did last year on my art foundation course, I will use some of the same techniques to make my new doll. This was made by using a my little pony and a mobile phone and added wire.

This is the doll I started with.

I had to make a hole in his head so I put make him look robitic, to i got a hammer and attempted to make a gentle tap but it wouldn't even break. Unfortunately after a few taps nothing happened so I put abit more force into the tap and unfortunately it smashed the head into two pieces.

This is what I was left with, at first I was disappointed but I was determined to make this doll so it occurred to me I could turn this negative into a positive. So I decided to researched cybonic heads and other creatures from heads. and I found these.

This is a character out of toy story, made from a toys head and given a 'spider' body, it also has a missing eye like my head piece.

 This is a custom doll I found online that I think is relevant however I only have half a heads not the full face.

This is a alien form, from the film The Thing, I love this design as its scary which I want my dolls to be, I have watched this film in the past and this i one of my favorite moments. I want my doll head to look like this by cybonic. Because I'm going to do a head and a body, two set doll I shall call them Brain and Braun, because the head is all brain and the body is the braun. And I came up with these designs.



This is my design for brain, Which has adapted the designs of the head toy in toy story and the head creature from the thing. I will need foil, and wire and an old mobile phone in order to make this, I wants to cut half his hair off to give him a bizarre look.

 I started off by adding aluminium wire and gluing it into the head, these will be its legs, I glued alot of foil pieces to fill up the head and added a small mobile camera lens for an eye.

This is brain after filling up his body and adding the eye, I like the look of him as hes beginning to take form. So i decided to add more onto him.

To make him look more cybonic, I decided to add wires onto him. It worked very well how I felt he was lacking in design to I asked around and people made suggestions to wrap wire around his legs to give them more detail.

I wrapped wire around his legs which proved to make him look more details and creepy, I also added pincers onto him to make him seem more spider like. Then I added finishing touches, by adding blood and gelling his hair.

The finished product is this, which has a very spooky and gothic look, I does look different from my internal designs, but I feel this design looks better then my drawn design. By letting chance intervene with my product making I have ended up with a better design then I could ever think of.

Now it was time to make Braun so I drew this initial design.

So to make this design the first step I did was to cut up his clothes and smash his hand off.

In order to make his claw I will use pegs and wrap them around the arm with masking tap, his will make him took very poor put together and the pegs will add to the 'childish' effect because he is a kids toy.

This is the claw which is pink and purple so its very colourful, and should hopefully look cute to my audience.

I then decided to go off my design and add wires into his leg, because I could imagine this dead body would need alot of electricity to make the dead corpse move and come to life, therefore his limbs would need to be wired up. I also wrapped foil around to add make his look mechanical. I also did the same to his right arm.

The next step, was to edit his head, and I thought that it would be interesting to have a brain inside. So I was thinking of materials which I could sculpt a brain and it was suggested that instead of sculpting a brain I could use some thing else to achieve the same effect. I quickly thought of monkey nuts and I put them in to see what they looked like.

I think that i made the right decision and it looks very effective, I just need to paint it. I added wire into it because his whole body is full of wires so in turn his brain would need to be aswell.

This is the brain after I painted it red and added red ink to is, I looks good  because it looks bloody and juicy however its not quite the right colour. So I mixed red and white paint together and highlights the brain.

I think that highlighting the brain worked very well, bringing out the detail and making it look the right colour.

This is brain after adding red ink onto his body for blood and adding a 'tie' out of a mobile keypad to stay true to the robotic look I wanted. I really like Braun because he doesnt look very scary with out any eyes and head because I gives that illusion and you don't know what hes thinking or what hes looking at.

This is both brain and Braun together, I am very pleased with my end product. As a two piece set I feel they both complement each other and this is defiantly a doll I would like in my room at night.

Project 'Minimen'

As i have a passion for t shirts and I notices theres a brand of tiny caricatures of famous people I have decided that I like to make my own caricatures of people that I would like to see on t shirts. I have called the collection 'Minimen'.

This is an example of the designs they have based on the main characters in the film pulp fiction. From these caricatures I came up with this design.

This is my design that I made on flash, I used simple shapes like circles and edited the shape to create both the head and the body. I then decided to edit this to create a female.

This is my female design, i will use both of these as templetes to then make my minimen collection. I will do this by editing the templte to create my carictures but by sticking to the shapes of the templates.

The first Minimen I decided to do was Adolf Hitler because hes one of the most famous icons to exsist and I thoguht he would be a good choice because he isnt that detailed aswell I could do a simpler design.

I like this mini men it deffinatly looks like hitler and i noticed the best way to do this is to make sure to keep the key features of the characters I base them on.
The next character I decided to do is Rorschach because I fwatched the film watchman last night and he is a really dark and inspiring character.

I had to draw a hat ontp the template and I imported a Rorschach ink blot test and used that to create his mask. I think this miniman turne dout very well =]

T-Shirt Designs

After experiment with the silk screen process and using it to transfer designs onto t shirts i knew that I wanted to make a Batman top, because Batman is a massive iconic image and has alot of top designed based on batman and also because I don't have a batman top myself I thought it would be a good starting point to do a designed with a few colours.

I looked up some images on the web to use for my design an I found this picture.

I like this image because its very detailed and has a alot of detail and its a very dark and gloomy design. But to use this image with alot i would have to remove the shading and leave the outline.

This is the outline i made by importing the image into flash and removed the shading, I decided to only use the head and the shoulder because I there would be to much detail and I wanted to focus more on Batman head then having his whole body.

I decided to add colours but If i used black you wouldn't see the outline, so I looked up images of batman and noticed that he was original blue and grey so i decided to use that colour scheme to make my image look more retro.

This is the image after adding colour onto it, I really like this image with colour because the colour is very blocky and rough which works to my favor.
In order to use this design I had to make it in 3 layers, the outline, blue colour and grey colour but for when i photocopy them i need them to be a solid black so i can get a clear stencil.

Outline Layer

Grey Layer

Blue Layer

My next design I thought of doing was a spiderman design because he's another popular character that appears on t shirts. So i found this image on the web.

I like the look of the image because of the pose and the fact that isn't any shading in it makes it perfect for editing. I just have to add in the webbing into his costume. After importing it into flash like with the batman top I made this image.



Then from this image I broke it up into layers and turned them into black for photocopying purposes.

Outline layer with adding web design

Red Layer

Blue Layer

I returned to the Silkscreen workshop to complete my batman design, the process went very well and it turned out to be a very good result. Unfortunately when it was washed alot of the ink came out and the transfer had faded dramatically so i thought I could reprint the transfer over but that transfer had shrunk in the wash to i couldn't get a perfect fit and this was my end result.

As you can see the reprinted transfer has created a blurry effect, which artistically look pretty good but as a professional product i would consider it a failure as it wouldn't sell. But I released, backtracking through the process of the elephant design that I left it to dry over night before I washed it so i knew my mistake was that I didn't let it fully dry. So I decided to redo the print again onto another top.

This is my second attempt at making the batman design it turned out very well but from detail had been lost through the outline layer due to the ink drying up in the template. But the result has a good vintage look which I liked. To my discover when i came home the elephant top which had been through the wash again had faded once more like so.

This is when I discovered the fact that my mum hand washed the top the first time and did a normal wash the second hence why my batman top faded,wasn't because I didn't leave it to dry long enough it was because the ink comes off when you dont hand wash it. Ive decided that silk screening onto t shirts is a dead end for me, I can create good designs but they wash off, which defeats the point, I can used the silk screening process onto any other item that I don't intend to wash but for t shirt designs i will have to find another process which to make my tops.