The Art of OOAK

Hi,

My name is Marta and I'm a doll artist. I know that to many people that sounds a little strange. I mean most (sane) people give up on acquiring dolls (and other toys) long before they become a teenager. However I'm a little different, I collect Fashion Dolls! (The most well known being Barbie) I'm sure there are many people wondering why a grown semi-sane person would collect dolls. Well for me it is easy. I'm a stay at home mom to five little boys. And my days are filled with cars and trucks, dinosaurs, snakes, lizards, and balls, lots and lots of balls. Football, Basketball, Baseball, wall ball, yard ball. And honestly while I love my boys, I can't take all that "boyness" 24/7. I need something that is mine, and mine alone. It doesn't include balls, blue jeans, or mud......... I want pretty dresses and fancy hair do's. I want shoes and purses that match and accentuate outfits. And mostly I want something that little boys are only mildly interested in. So I turned to dolls.

Now I'm NOT the type of collector that keeps her dolls in the box. I prefer to display my dolls in a cabinet. And often, I will swap outfits or change a hairstyle to make a doll better suit my taste. And some how, some way that led me to being one of those people, who takes a perfectly good doll and turns it into something else. I will cut all the hair off and reroot (though I will admit once Boy #4 and #5 came along my time and patience for completely rerooting a doll's head is not much.) I will remove the face paint or part of the face paint with acetone and then paint on new features. I restyle hair with boiling water, straws, pins, fine tooth combs and glue. And then I take pictures of my creations and share on at least one of the dolls boards I visit and share them with other people who share my love of dolls. 

I'm starting this blog to share the experience of making an OOAK doll. I just received a brand now doll today, that I bought for a "project". And I think (hope) it will be interesting to see how this doll is transformed from a production doll to a one of a kind work of "art".

I'll talk more about the Doll tomorrow but here is a sneak peek of the dolls I'm working on: