Who's this girl?

I've probably had a really loose idea of how I wanted the story I'm creating to go for some time now.  I won't go into too much detail about what I have in mind for this just yet but as this is my first time writing any kind of story, I wanted to keep it semi autobiographical.   It's important for me to be able to hit the ground running when starting a project, as I often find myself so tied up by the IDEAS phase that nothing feels quite good enough to begin working on it, and I eventually feel overwhelmed and give up before the ball is rolling.

Because I have given myself only 100 days to work on this project, I was forced to fast track through that and just commit to my first idea, so I began working quite quickly on two characters to base the story around.

I don't really make female dolls as I rarely feel like I identify with female characters, so trying to make a character to represent my human body in a way that still felt comfortable was a bit of a challenge that I needed to force myself past pretty quickly before I gave up on the idea altogether.  

The general idea of the story I want to tell is the regarding the relationship I have between my body and my mind. Again, I'm still in the early stages of knowing what I truly want to say, so having some characters in front of me to work with will hopefully help me be able to work out how to express this as I develop them visually.

I always, always start with faces and build the characters around that.  The easiest way for me to bring something into the world is to make a clay head and then use that to grow the character.  It gives me a grounding to be able to base their relationship on and consider how they may interact.  I guess my methods sometimes feel wrong like I'm designing backwards, but this really helps push me out of being trapped in the realm of pure idea. 

I started creating the bodies for these dolls by creating a wire armature, then wrapping it with pipe cleaners and wool. The pipe cleaners help the wool to grab on to the armature so it doesn't slide and unravel.  I will bulk out the figures with needle felt at the next stage.  I haven't decided how I want to do her hair at this point so I will tackle that later but I'm starting to feel pretty good about how this little doll can represent myself. 

I needed the other character to be directly contrasting with her but still feel like a pair.  To be honest I'd actually already made this guy's head, which was sitting on my desk when I decided to do this project.  I felt a real connection to him but I wasn't sure how to use him, but he suddenly seemed perfect for the role, so I painted her to be the reverse of him, and repainted his nose to feel more like he belongs with her. 

The great thing about having these characters as physical objects, is that I find myself playing with them and posing them in ways to help me thing about their relationship with each other and I assume this is how I will begin to develop my story into something more solid.  Toys and role playing have always been excellent tools for my imagination and I still need to use them as an adult.  I remember playing by myself as a kid in the role of one of my imaginary idol, Skeletor's minions, so nothing about how I turned out surprises me!

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