Rosie’s adventures are the stuff of dreams – they creep in while she’s sleeping and leave bits of pieces of that dream world behind. But, how to create a world of dreams that a doll can move around in?
For my other dolls, I mostly choose between placing them in the real world, or fashioning something their size. But, for Rosie’s dreams, there was no real world, and I struggled with how to fashion 1/6 scale dream-like objects.
I really just happened onto the idea of placing her dreams within paintings. I had her open casement window in a bunch of shots, and I needed to put in some kind of image to represent the night world outside. Flipping through images, Van Gogh’s Starry Night popped up, in the midst of all the photographs of the night sky. And I thought, why not? It made more sense then sending her on a dream journey in a naturalistic setting.
The rest is straight photoshop. The one change I made to the dolls in photoshop was to add a “oil painting” filter to their images, so that they fit into the painting more seamlessly. That worked well for my China and Blythe dolls, but the Rosemary doll’s features are so fine that she seemed to melt with that filter, so I left it off her. If you look at the images, she’s not distorted while the other two dolls are.
I’m thinking of keeping the “dream journey through a painted world” in Rosie’s upcoming adventures – it adds a richness of the images that I can’t otherwise create. Now, I have to find an artist’s world for her “Fairy Adventure” in December.