Skelly-Dolly

So this fun Halloween doll was made a month ago for my friend's 50th birthday party. She was pretty simple to make, only a sharpie marker, a few hours, and a basic knowledge of human anatomy required.

Unfortunately, I got so excited about getting started that I didn't take any "before" pictures. She started life as a thrift store porcelain doll, with a cloth body. Here you can see her original, untouched, leg next to her new skeleton leg. She had on high heels, so I just drew the foot bones as if they went into the shoes.

The pictures of the hands came out terrible, but I think you can see that I drew in the bones on both sides. Well, actually, I didn't draw in ANY of the bones. I drew the negative space AROUND the bones and filled it in with the black marker.

Drawing on the porcelain was pretty easy because it was so smooth. I just had to be careful not to smear the ink before it dried. The hardest part was drawing on the fabric body. The fabric was soft and moved when you drew on It. But ALSO the torso, with all of it's ribs and vertebrae, was way too complicated to draw in as little time as I had to finish this. If I had started earlier I could have made an outfit or something and ignored the rib cage entirely. Oh well, it got finished, but the neat little accessories I wanted her to hold, like a camera in homage to my photography teaching friend, had to be scrapped.

So here is the finished skelly-dolly sitting in her spot in my friend's the birthday shrine to long gone youth. She was a gift to the birthday girl, so now I am keeping my eyes open for a similar candidate for my own skelly dolly to play with!