Latest Adventure in Doll Making, Part II

The Buster Keaton cloth/clay doll is coming along. I drafted the body pattern, and after much trial and error, and tweaking of proportions, sewed together a little Keatonesque figure.

I think his ankles and torso could benefit from some needle-sculpting to make them more shapely. But since I plan to dress him in his iconic costume of his early-1920s short films, it's not that important. I may change my mind; I don't know...

I decided that since this is going to be a youthful Buster, he should be poseable. (Or at least I wanted to try my hand at making a jointed cloth doll.) So I gave him some some moveable joints at the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, and wired his fingers. He has limited poseability, but he still can assume a variety of poses:

 

And here he is with some of my tools of the trade (those hemostats are indispensable!):

I carved out some eyelids on the paperclay face mask, to make his eyes look open. The mask is glued to the cloth head-back. I will be applying more clay to the head, smoothing out the gap between the mask and cloth. The ears are cloth.

Oh, and I'm not sure if it's apparent from any of the photos, but I made sure to truncate his right index finger, just like the real Buster's!

That's the end for now...

 

...more soon; there's still so much work to do.
Good night!