It's Pinocchio! I saw this doll and fell in love with it. The artist Ankie Daanen has created a bunch of beautiful dolls. She is a popular artist in all the doll art magazines. She sells a Pinocchio doll e-pattern on Etsy if you want to give it a try.
I've been working on this for the last 3 or 4 days. It goes pretty slow because I have to let the paper clay dry before moving on with the next stage. I make each piece in stages. I've been making dolls for a long time so this is not new to me and I have my own way of doing things. I like to put paper clay over wood to give it additional strength. These pieces are hollowed out to keep them lightweight and help them dry faster.
I've made polymer dolls over a wire armature but paper clay is a whole other medium to work with that has its own set of rules. First of all, I make my own paper clay from a recipe by Jonni Good of Ultimate Paper Mache . This paper clay is rock hard when it dries and very sandable. They look really rough at this stage. The mechanics aren't pretty but the pieces are really strong. I use wood glue to hold the pieces together when I join them.
I thought I would join the knees and elbows with little wooden balls to bend at the joints but I wanted the hips and shoulders to be attached with a pin straight through.
I made his little hat and it started to dry out while I was shaping it over a styrofoam egg so I just left the crackled surface because it looks a little like knitting! I didn't plan it that way but O.K.
This clay dries so hard you can whittle it into shape with an xacto knife and drill it too. You can sand it but I find that scraping it with the back of my xacto knife smooths it out pretty good and a few layers of paint sanded in-between with a piece of brown paper bag really makes it pretty.
The next step is to put it together just as soon as I get all the meat on the bones.
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