Art Doll Swap on Rubber Stamp Chat Forum

Here's a project I did for a recent paper doll swap on Rubber Stamp Chat Forum.

The Challenge: Create a doll at least 6" tall using at least two stamped images. The doll also had to be articulated in at least 4 places.

I had never created a paper doll before so I printed off a paper doll template from The Enchanted Gallery website. It's worth perusing the paper doll section on that site anyway because there are a lot of good suggestions about how to stamp/assemble your doll. They have regular doll templates as well as mermaid templates. Since I had some clear water patterned holographic foil laying around, and some silver foil that looked like scales, I opted for the mermaid. :)

Here's how I made the lovely lady:


1. First I used my inkjet printer to print the mermaid pattern onto a cream colored card stock and then I cut out the appropriate pieces (except for the tail). The stamp I wanted to use for the face was a little too small in scale for the mermaid's body, so I cut everything down to size so it would fit more proportionately.

2. I loosely cut out the tail so it was surrounded by a little space and stamped over the entire area with my VersaMark watermark stamp pad. Then I applied Stuck on You! bonding powder and heat set the powder with my heat tool. When the bonding powder was set, I applied Stampee Foil in the Silver Mesh pattern to the area using the laminator method (watch our tutorial video here).

3. After I finished applying the foil I cut the tail out. Applying foil beyond the edge of the tail pattern and cutting it down to size after ensured that the tail would have nice clean edges. I cut the end of the tail off and rounded the edges on both pieces so I could use this as one of the points of articulation. I then set the tail pieces to the side for assembly later.

4. Using a stamp from The Enchanted Gallery I stamped the mermaid's face/hair with black StazOn ink onto the same cream colored card stock I used for the template. Then I colored the image with colored pencils and cut it out.

5. Using the same colors I did on the face, I colored the rest of the pieces of her body: the torso, upper arms and lower arms.

6. When all of the body parts were colored I stamped over all of them with my VersaMark watermark ink pad, applied foil bonding powder, set the powder with my heat gun and applied the Stampee Foil in the Clear Water pattern using the laminator method. The clear foils are really nice because they just give a holographic pattern to whatever you're stamping (such as glitter patters, water, bubbles, etc.) while still showing all of the colors underneath.

7. For her "bathing suit" I used two small pieces of a border stamp and applied Lavender foil over them. I cut the pieces out with an Xacto knife and attached them to the torso using 3D double sided tape. I should note that I molded them downward on the outside edges to make her "anatomically correct," hehe.

8. At this point, all of my pieces were ready for assembly. I just played around with the pieces until I got them where I thought they should be and then I used a thumb-tac to poke holes through the layers where I intended to put brads.

9. I attached the end of the tail, both arms and both elbows with brads so they would be movable. I used glue and tape to attach her head to her torso and her torso to her tail.

Now she's ready to be post marked and sent off to my swap buddy!

Please visit www.stampee.net for Stampee Foil and "Stuck on You!" bonding powder ordering information!

♥ Stacey