All About Doll Makers

Doll makers are an online community you may not have heard about

If the phrase "doll makers" brings to mind images of wooden toys and plastic molds, it's time for a little 21st century pop culture education. Today's doll makers are not paper cut-outs or Barbie clones. They're websites. Doll makers are webpages where "dollers" or "dollists" create cartoon dolls and pixel dolls, or, as they were originally known, dollz. These dolls can act as visual signatures or be displayed via blogs and personal websites.

How doll makers work

Doll makers have been around since the mid-1990s and the dolling community has since grown to encompass hundreds of communities, forums, doll makers, and personal websites.

Doll makers work sort of like the old paper cut-outs of bodies and clothes used in pre-computer years. Dollers can use a computer graphics program to create their own base, but many also use the free templates provided by online doll makers.

A typical base is a simple human body positioned in a pose, usually without clothes, hair, or even a face. Clothes, accessories, features, and other imagery can be hand-drawn onto the doll. An easier method is called drag-n-drop, in which a doller chooses from preset accessories, dragging each piece and dropping it onto the base, and saving the image once they're finished. Cookie-cutter doll makers offer an even simpler process of just clicking the accessory you want.

Coloring is a more complicated aspect of doll making. There are two basic options: pixel shading and tool shading. Tool shading involves the use of programs such as Adobe Photoshop.

Once dolls are complete, dollers may share them with friends and post them online. Dollers will often "adopt" or link to other dolls. As with other media, pirating doll designs is a common problem.

A selection of doll makers

There are a huge number of dolling sites that can be explored by anyone interested in the phenomenon. These are just a few examples:

ShimmeryDaze.com

Self-described as "the crystal-iest place on earth," ShimmeryDaze.com is a doll maker that features bases with such names as Arwen, Aurora, Jacquie Frost, Princess Jane (a long-legged, green, and frog-like fairy creature), and Tighty Whities  (a rare male base).

Underworld Dolls

Located at www.enchanted-lake.com, Underworld Dolls is a doller's site at which visitors can subscribe to the newsletter of the "Whispered Emotions Forum." Underworld Dolls features galleries of adopted and adoptable dolls, as well as bases. Images of past contest winners are also available.

Doll Island

At www.dollisland.com, novice dollers can use a less personalized doll generator to customize their own doll. This doll maker offers options for hair color, head, one of 155 tops or jackets, and a choice of bottoms or skirts (inexplicably, almost all the pants are bell bottoms).

Most dolls from www.dollisland.comwill obviously look fairly similar, though mine resembled Lindsay Lohan if she'd been cast in an Anne Rice-penned movie for the WB network as a colonial era vampiress and predatory bodice ripper. As of yet, however, the video game to movie craze has yet to cross over to the world of dollz.

More information on dolls