An Izannah Boy Doll

Finally, I have finished this smaller ( about 18 inch ) boy doll I have been working on for awhile.  A very sweet lady I know and have made other dolls for wanted a boy to go with her other Izannah dolls, so here he is. This doll is slighter and smaller than the stockier Izannah girls I have going on right now, but he is perfect in his size to me. This doll is the first one to be finished of the three new molds I made. I am making pictures of three other girl dolls that are being made now, and I think will be very pretty. Two of these are new molds, one is a older mold, but I think she will be nice too. In the past, I have showed the first stages of the dolls development ( past the mold making ) starting with before the gesso is even applied. It is fun to me to see their progress, so I thought I would do the same for these three girls. It always surprises me to see what the final doll will look like, because, the white serene face will change so much. You see the face and say ( I know what she will look like, but when the first coat of paint goes on, she will probably, no, make that surely, look different than you thought. the shape of the head and features determines alot, but the paint has just as big an impact.  I made a black calico doll dress  out of a  antique dress  and it is super hard on the eyes, and I had a good bit of this, so I made the boy's suit out of the same fabric, plus I used the dresses brown sleeve lining to make the shirt and bow tie. The brown color is so pretty, wish I had a bunch more. I love the dark colors, but they will just about blind you trying to see the stitches. The new molds were copied from pictures of antique dolls, and if the likeness is not exact, the resemblance is seen. I don't know how Izannah Walker got her molds made, but in a time when metal was used more and plastic didn't exist, it is probable that she got metal molds made, as I have seen pictures of other metal molds not attributed to her, but if they existed in the same time as she was making dolls, it makes sense to me that she could have had them, and that many of her dolls have the same features because they were pressed in metal. I say all this, because when you use a plaster mold, over time the molds can deepen from cleaning, and this would not happen with metal, thus the slightly different faces. Come back and see these girls develop

. It should be interesting.